The Wilmington City Council held a special budget work session on May 19, 2026, from 8:30 a.m. to approximately 12:30 p.m. (with a lunch break) at the Skyline Center. The session focused on reviewing prior questions and answers from the March work session, discussing the proposed FY27 budget including a 5.75-cent property tax increase, the living wage implementation, and capital improvement projects. No votes were taken; the session was for discussion and direction.
We'll bring this City Council special meeting for budget work session Friday, May 15th at 8 30 a.m. at the beautiful Skyline Center to order. At this time, I'm going to take a roll call. Mayor Pro Tem, are you here? Oh, yeah. Council Member Join, are you here? Councilmember Andrews, are you here? Councilmember Lau, are you here? Councilmember Santa Guido, are you here? Here. Councilmember Clinton Quintana, are you here? But you're here. And the chair is here. Everybody's here and accounted for. So at this time, I'm going to turn it over to our city manager, Ms. Becky Hog, Ms. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem members of Council. Appreciate everybody's time on this Friday morning to talk about the FY27 budget. Before we dive into those details, I do have a couple of introductions that I want to point out some folks in the room who you have not had the opportunity to meet yet. When I call your name, if you wouldn't mind just uh standing and waving, um, but our new um director of safety and risk management, Jason Eves. I saw him walk in a minute ago. Uh Jason comes to us from Brunswick County prior, um, so just across the river. Um he's been with us for a little while now, already doing a great job. Heather Cashwell is our uh director of recycling and trash services, solid waste services. Um has a great background. Uh, we put out the press release not too long ago, um, but she has been the head of SolidWay Services for other municipalities, and she comes to us most recently from the state of North Carolina DEQ. Um, and then uh you have not uh seen the announcement yet, but she was here uh meeting with staff and getting to know folks. So Robin Slade is our uh director of um uh property and um asset maintenance, and um she is going to be starting on June 1st. Um, and she comes to us from CMS where she was over 18,000 employees that that you supervise there. So um uh so as big as that department is, it is um actually a very scaled down version of uh what she uh was used to previously. So um uh fantastic new folks that we have added to the rest of our wonderful staff as we move the organization forward. So uh we have a lot of information that we want to review with you today to um to make sure that the information that has been emailed out is understood, that there's no additional questions on it. Um of course we want you to stop us along the way and ask questions or ask for clarification, and then further on in the morning, we have um just some open time for discussion to hear from you all about what else is on your mind and what other questions we can gather answers for you and uh continue the discussion at our next work session. So, with that, uh we want to get started by reviewing some of the prior questions and answers that were submitted that uh were actually uh posed in our last time together back in March, um, but want to again just review those, get them into the record, and um make sure that we don't have any questions. Um so we'll wait and get that pulled up. So if we can actually start with the one that I believe is dated um uh dated the May 12th would be the first one. Yes, that one, thank you. Okay, um, so the the first uh was a request to just provide job descriptions for the new positions that were created as part of the reorganization. I believe there's a hundred and thirty pages of job descriptions uh that were submitted to you, so um feel free to peruse those at your leisure. If you have any questions about those positions, let us know. We also um wanted to provide the current and proposed living wage pay rates by position that included title title, current pay, and adjusted pay, along with an overview of the pay compression challenges facing the city. Um you um look at the pay compression. Um part of the reason why we are looking to move the entire uh pay scale is uh because um if you were to stop at a certain point, then um the positions that are um kind of towards the top of that stopping point would then potentially be getting increases that are higher than people who are already higher up the pay scale. And a lot of times um that is uh right at the line of demarcation between a supervisor and somebody that they are supervising. And so if you give a bigger raise to the person lower down the scale, and we we ran these scenarios and watched it happen, it would actually pop those lower ranking employees above their supervisors, or it would bring their pay so close that essentially there's there's no financial acknowledgement or incentive to be taking on those additional responsibilities, the additional jobs of management and asking them to do that work. At the same time, we are proposing right now a cap of no more than $15,000, regardless of your pay, because we didn't want to apply these same principles to people who are higher up the pay scale, even though it is a much smaller percentage of our staff. If you were to apply a 19 or 20% across the board increase, you start applying that to large pay amounts, and that becomes kind of an exponentially large pay increase that we didn't feel was necessary or appropriate, and we felt that it would send the wrong message about what we're trying to accomplish here, which is really about driving the dollars down the pay scale to the lowest paid members of staff. So we can certainly get into more detail, but if we could scroll to the end, I just want to show because we did some color coding just to help illustrate if we could go to that appendix.