ASHEBORO – The Randolph County Board of Commissioners adopted the fiscal year 2025-26 budget at a June 16 meeting.
The budget is balanced at approximately $202.3 million, a roughly 5.4% increase from the prior year’s total.
“This board and the staff have done an excellent job at presenting a budget that we can live with, that we can pay for and maintain most of, if not all of, our services,” board chairman Darrell Frye said. “It may not be everything you asked for, but we didn’t take anything away and that’s what we’ve always done.”
Frye said the county did not cut any of the departmental budgets this year in a time where many surrounding counties and municipalities are seeing significant cuts to services.
“In this county, you can know what you have and you can know that it’s not going to be taken away,” Frye said. “We always go forward. That’s been the philosophy of this board. We don’t spend money we don’t have and we don’t go into a lot of debt until we’ve paid most of the debt we have off. We’ve maintained a pretty steady tax rate and we’ll continue to be committed to that as we go forward.”
“This budget includes every dollar of property tax that we think we can reasonably expect to receive,” Frye said. “We have used every dollar of projected sales tax revenue that is available to this county. The last two years, the sales tax revenue has been trending down. We have used all of the landfill money that, since its inception, we have used for strategic planning items in Randolph County. All of those revenues are included in this budget.”
Highlights include a 3% cost of living adjustment for employees, a 2% retention adjustment for sheriff’s department employees, nearly $60 million for public safety, $42 million for education and $39 million for human services.
“This budget is aimed at doing all of those things for this county and nothing is more important than the employees that deliver the services to the citizens of this county,” Frye said. “We are always, first and foremost, sensitive to that.”
He said the budget also includes $91.8 million for salaries and benefits, which accounts for 45.4% of the budget.
“It has a salary increase and for the first time, it has a longevity pay increase for the employees of this county in addition to the additional positions that we’re adding,” Frye said. “We’re very sensitive to the needs of our employees and we’ll continue to be.”
In addition, the property tax rate will also remain the same at $0.50 per $100 valuation, which is the same rate across the last two years.
Additional tax rate changes include a $0.01 supplemental school tax rate increase for the Archdale-Trinity attendance area to fund SRO officers for all five elementary schools and various fire tax district rate increases for Climax, East Side, Level Cross, Randleman and West Side.
“There are some things I’d love to have been done a little differently in the budget, but overall, I think it’s a pretty good budget,” council member David Allen said. “This is the best I think we can do going forward.”
The Randolph County Board of Commissioners will next meet July 7.
