Apex Town Council Talks Capital Projects

The Apex Town Council talked about the upcoming budget (including citizen survey results), capital projects, a park's bond, and our work session schedule

This is the fourth and final post in a series about the meetings the Apex Town Council held the week of 2/10. Here is the first post about our regular meeting, the second post about Day 1 of the retreat, and the third post about the morning session of Day 2. This post will cover the afternoon of Day 2.

This newsletter isn’t usually this dry, I promise.

Budget Prioritization Survey Results

Key Takeaways: People want us to maintain existing roads, build new greenways, and finish downtown

We had a public budget survey open until Feb 3rd. After lunch we went over the results. We got 825 total responses. So what’d we learn?

The public ranked “Responsible Development” as a top strategic goal.

Here is a peek into goals inside Responsible Development. Existing Roads and New Greenways!

In the interest of space I’m not going to include the breakdown of goals in each category, but the 2nd focus area (from above) was A Welcoming Community. Here is the goal breakdown there.

(“Finish Downtown Already”)

This information fed into our next section, where we discussed our project prioritization.

Capital Projects Prioritization Results

Key Takeaways: Salem Streetscaping, Olive Chapel and BBQ, Center Street/Chatham sidewalks, investments in Apex Fire, and redoing the Depot Parking lot are all high priorities we all agree on

Our CIP plan contains around $600m worth of projects. What the CIP is, in practice, is a schedule of when those projects will be done, aligned to an availability of funds, grant opportunities, and other needs. Only the first year of the plan is adopted as part of the budget, the future years go through a reprioritization process every year, and the plan is adjusted, things are often added, pushed out, etc. This is that reprioritization process for 2025.

It includes input from three major areas: citizen input from the survey (discussed above), staff ranking of projects, and Council ranking of projects. The final output, which I’ll show in a second, is a a four-quadrant box categorizing the major projects. The upper left quadrant (representing the projects we all agree are highly ranked) receives the most consideration for immediate funding.

So that’s the overview. I’ll spare you the details—there are a ton of charts showing how each group ranked each project—but most importantly, I wanted to focus on two charts from the presentation. The first is a summary of all the projects we have, their types, their cost, and current schedule:

The second chart is the results from this year. I want to stress: all of these projects are high value and important to the town, and we plan on doing all of them (or they wouldn’t even be on this list!). This is a prioritization exercise. It’s also not the only factor in considering when to start a project - if grant money falls out of the sky, for example, a certain project might get started even if it’s not priority #1. We like free money.

Just look at the upper left here for a preview of what might be in the upcoming budget.

Parks Capital Project Prioritization Discussion

Key Takeaways: We’re considering a $97m Parks bond in 2027 to finish our major greenways and build a new signature park in NW Apex

Zooming in on Parks for a moment, we also got a preview of where we are headed there over the next several years after the current projects wrapped up. This led into a discussion about when we will have our next Parks Bond, how big it will be, and what projects will be included.

I want to stress that this was only a discussion as to what direction to move in, and not the “final word” on any of this. That being said, I think this is likely outcome:

Considering these projects identified as priorities:

• Finishing the remaining sections of the Reedy Branch Greenway ($7m)

• Finishing the Middle Creek Greenway ($4m)

• Finishing most of the Beaver Creek Greenway ($9m)

• Planning, constructing a new park on Wimberly Road ($100m), to serve North West Apex

I expect we’ll have a Parks and Rec bond on the ballot in 2027 for approximately $97m, with the rest of the money from savings and existing funding.

It’s too early to say what a tax increase would be associated with this bond. I hope it will be minimal, on par with or less than previous bonds. Our 2021 Transportation Bond (our most recent GO bond) had a 3 cent increase associated with it. We currently have one of the lowest tax rates in the county, just above Cary, and we currently spend as a percentage among the lowest portion of our tax collection on debt service. Our financial position is extremely strong. Any tax increase approved by the voters for this bond would be dedicated to the capital investment fund, in line with the new policies we just discussed, potentially increasing that rate from 7 cents to 8 cents or more (Holly Springs is at 12 cents).

I also believe we should begin designing and master planning these projects immediately (and next year), in order to get the projects “shovel ready” should the bond be approved.

As we saw in an earlier post, we currently have around $100m worth of borrowing capacity available (on top of currently funded projects like Tunstall and Pleasant Park) at our current capital investment rate. But we have more than $100m worth of capital needs over the next few years, for example, the space/facility needs I outlined in a previous post. All of that eats into the same $100m.

To put a bond of this size into perspective, Holly Springs just floated a $100m Parks bond in 2023 that passed easily. They are around half of our size. Cary was ready to responsibly borrow around $500m last year, which voters ultimately rejected. They are roughly double our size. Our total annual budget is around a quarter billion dollars.

To the merits of the projects: as we saw above, completing Greenways is a major priority identified by residents in their survey. Each of these greenways has a project currently wrapping up, and this would follow up with projects to finally “finish” them. And North West Apex is currently the fastest growing part of the town (it’s not particularly close), and we have a responsibility to expand and build amenities for our new residents moving in.

Whenever bonds are discussed, there is always a suggestion that we should not borrow money but instead save up and pay cash. This is neither a fair nor a fiscally responsible way to fund capital projects. It’s not fair because bonds allow repayment to be spread out over a number of years, meaning future residents who will also enjoy these amenities are contributing to their cost. It’s not fiscally responsible because our credit rating (which is AAA) is an asset, and things tend to only get more expensive - so by self funding the project in the future taxes will be higher in the short term, yet the project will start later and cost more. We should leverage ourselves in a responsible way and take advantage of our credit rating to get the most amount done from our CIP backlog as quickly as possible, while maintaining AAA.

Ok, if you read all that: congratulations and thank you. Weigh in by clicking one of these two buttons:

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Work Session Topics

Key Takeaways: We have a full schedule of work sessions for the next few months, and are considering converting a Council meeting to a work session format

We ended the day by summarizing future work session topics.

During this discussion, I proposed changing the Council schedule. Currently, we have two Council meetings and one work session per month; I propose flipping that to two work sessions and one Council meeting. The reason is, basically, I often find work sessions as “more productive” with more open and honest communication. Council meetings sometimes feel like productions, stage managed, with big lights, where we are going through a script. Just my opinion. We’ve also gotten some staff feedback on the need for more work sessions to cover more topics.

Staff said they’d investigate, gather more feedback, and bring something in June. What do you think?

That covers it — busy week. Since I’ve started writing these series of posts we’ve also had an additional work session on 2/18 which covered a Safe Routes to School update, Apex Peakway North widening discussion, and Flock cameras. I’ll post a summary of that meeting soon.

-terry