Highlands Mayor Pat Taylor pulled no punches when he started his monthly “Coffee with the Mayor” presentation on Friday at Hudson Library.
The Town of Highlands needs are outpacing its revenue.
Taylor highlighted several big-ticket projects on the horizon and went in-depth regarding how the town is going to pay for their completion.
“In the 11 years that I’ve been mayor we haven’t had a property tax increase, but that is going to have to change in the next year or two,” Taylor said. “When you look at our needs, and the numbers are in the tens of millions, we are going to have to pay for those items and a property tax increase is really the only way to do that.”
Taylor noted that the town’s current property tax rate is of 10.2 cents per $100 of value is among the lowest in the state.
“When we talk to folks in the Local Government Commission, and we talk to our auditors, they always say the same thing – our tax rate is too low to meet our needs,” Taylor said. “We have several projects in the works being funded in part by grant money from the state, but we have additional needs we are 100 percent on the hook for.”
Among the big tickets items the town is going to foot the bill for in the 2024-25 budget is a replacement of the town’s main sewer line at a cost of $1.4 million.
“We had a break in the sewer line in the spring and it led to sewage spilling into the watershed,” Taylor said. “We met with an engineering firm and had them study our whole system to see if it was an isolated weak spot, or a system-wide problem. Unfortunately, it’s a system-wide problem. The sewer lines that were put in place in the early 90’s were state of the art at the time, but now they are obsolete.”
Taylor added that the project can not wait and thus the town will be moving forward despite the price tag.
“Honestly, this is one of the rare projects where I’m glad we didn’t get a grant to pay for it,” Taylor said. “The grant process can take months, or even years, and to be quite frank we just don’t have that kind of time in this case.”
Among the other big ticket items Taylor pointed out in his presentation, improvements to the water treatment plant were at the top of the list.
“We received some state funds to replace the preclarifier tank and add a filter line at the water plant, and the town will be paying the balance on those projects,” Taylor said. “We have to be able to make clean water, and the preclarifier tank wasn’t an optional upgrade. It was a must-have. Same with the filter line, we operate two lines right now, and we can live for a short time on one line but if you ask our public works director as demand increases we are going to need a third filter line for redundancy.”
Upgrades to the electrical grid, road paving projects, adding sidewalks, improving recreational facilities, and replacing town-owned vehicles were all part of Taylor’s presentation.
“We were hoping to get a grant to add sidewalks down NC106, but we didn’t, so that project is currently stalled,” Taylor said. “We are also looking at adding a sidewalk on Chestnut Street and how we can pay for that. Obviously, that would be a lot less expensive as a whole than the NC106 project.”
Taylor added that the need for sidewalks on NC106 and Franklin Road has not diminished, but those projects’ price tag has made them hard to get funded at the state level.