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Frequently Asked Questions
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What is the City of Charlotte's total budget? The FY2012 & FY2013 budget for both operating and capital totals $1.67 billion in FY2012 and $1.71 billion in FY2013.
What is Charlotte's total General Fund budget? The General Fund Budget for the City of Charlotte is $529.8 million in FY2012 and $539.7 million in FY2013.
What is Charlotte's current tax rate? The current tax rate for FY2012 is 43.70 cents per $100 assessed valuation.
Balanced Scorecard? What is it? How does it relate to the budget? Can it be applied to other organizations and how? The Balanced Scorecard helps translate an organization's mission, vision and strategy into tangible objectives. It focuses on four critical success indicators: serve the customer, manage resources, run the business and develop employees. The City of Charlotte uses the Balanced Scorecard as its performance management system.
What are "financial partners?" Who are the City's financial partners? Financial Partners (or outside agencies) are community agencies or organizations with whom the City of Charlotte contracts to provide specific services. These partnerships extend the City's capacity to address strategic priorities and concerns of the community. These diverse partnerships include:
- Partnerships due to special legislation,
- Partnerships that support City Council's five strategic focus areas,
- Partnerships that contribute to important community activities
What is the "CIP"? The CIP or Capital Investment Plan is a 5-year financial plan which matches the City's projected financial resources dedicated to capital spending with the City's highest priority capital needs. See Capital Budget.
How is the CIP developed? The CIP is a separate budget from the Operating Budget, but the CIP and Operating budgets combined equal the total City budget. The CIP follows a development track that is parallel to the development of the Operating Budget. A rough outline of the development process is as follows:
- City Council holds an annual retreat to determine priorities.
- The City determines the status of both the Operating and Capital Budgets.
- Key businesses (departments) and other agencies identify funding needs.
- Revenue projections are finalized for future years.
- Needs are matched with resources using City Council's Strategic Focus Areas and approved community plans as guides.
- The Capital Budget is developed and presented to City Council over several months beginning in February with final approval in June (new fiscal year begins on July 1).
What revenue sources are used to finance CIP? General Government capital projects are funded through a variety of sources:
- General Obligation Bonds are used to finance long-term and large capital projects.
- For FY2012, 1.20¢ of the property tax rate is dedicated to Pay-As-You-Go capital projects. 6.50¢ of the property tax rate is dedicated to the Municipal Debt Service Fund. Capital Reserve or funding surpluses above 16% in the General Fund are transferred to the CIP.
- One-time (non-recurring) revenues are dedicated to capital projects
- Asset Management property sales are dedicated to capital projects
- Grant funding (from the State and Federal governments)
- Fund balance and revolving loan repayments
How are high priority capital needs determined? Most capital projects are based on community plans, such as the Airport Master Plan, Two-Year Water and Sewer System Evaluations, long-range Transportation Plans, District Plans and the long-range Generalized Land Use Plan. Other capital projects are on-going programs to maintain the City's infrastructure.
What are General Obligation Bonds? General Obligation (GO) Bonds are debt instruments much like a house mortgage. The City identifies a major project (e.g. a fire station) or several similar projects (e.g. seven road intersections) and determines that to complete the projects in a timely manner a debt issuance is needed. (The City does not maintain large amounts of cash to finance these larger capital projects.)
What are Enterprise Capital Programs? Enterprise capital programs are self-sustaining funds which are exclusively financed from revenues generated by the operation. For instance, the water and sewer capital program is exclusively financed by user fees. This is also the case with the Airport, Storm Water, and Charlotte Area Transit (CATS) capital programs. These enterprise operations do not receive any property tax support.
What is included in City's overhead? How does the City use the overhead allocation? The purpose of the Cost Allocation Plan (CAP) is to distribute or allocate the support business units cost as general and administrative overhead to the service Key Business Units (KBU - i.e., departments). The allocation is made in a two step process. First, the support costs are allocated to all business units--both support and service. Then, the allocations received by the support business units in the first allocation are reallocated to the service KBUs. The cost allocation plan provides general and administrative overhead information, which is used to calculate the fully allocated costs of City services. Primarily, the fully allocated costs are used for preparing competitive bids and benchmarking services, determining the cost of General Fund services provided to Enterprise Funds and calculating user fees and charges for services.
Where can I get a copy of City of Charlotte budget? Copies of the budget books are available for viewing in the five regional public libraries and the area University libraries. Many of our most requested publications are available through our website.
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