Wilmington council weighs living-wage plan as staff models tax-rate trade-offs

Wilmington’s city manager told the council at a special budget work session that a proposed living-wage package would raise lower pay bands substantially but requires tradeoffs in the property tax rate. City Manager Halt said staff modeled a 20% market adjustment with a $15,000 cap on individual increases as the baseline; alternatives considered a $12,000 cap across the board or hybrid options that treated sworn public-safety employees differently.

Halt said the proposed approach would target hard-to-fill roles — including equipment operators, traffic signal technicians and public-safety staff — and would reduce voluntary turnover while restoring pay lost to inflation in recent years. "We believe those figures are aggressive enough for those hard-to-fill positions that it will be attractive," she said.

Council members asked how different caps would affect internal pay compression. Staff responded that moving the cap from $15,000 to $12,000 would force compressed promotion increases for about 85 public-safety employees and ripple across other departments, making standard promotional increases (historically 10%) difficult to sustain without further budget increases.

To reduce the immediate property-tax impact, staff and council identified several offsets: removing funding for a facial-recognition subscription (Clearview AI, about $29,000), deferring $40,000 of next-year computer replacements, trimming surveying equipment purchases to $5,000 this year, and using a one-time fund-balance appropriation to buy so-called "mission-ready" gear for first responders. Council also asked staff to cover a newly identified shortfall in a ballistic-vest grant (about $125,621) after federal funding prioritized smaller jurisdictions.

Those adjustments reduce the proposed tax-rate increase to roughly 5.5¢ per $100 of assessed value in the package staff will present for the council’s first reading. Councilmembers said they wanted more detail on the long-term strategy for addressing compression if the lower‑cost alternative were adopted, and several members asked staff to return with examples showing how compression would be remedied over time.

Councilmember Clinton Quintana said she supports raising wages but wants the council to find ways for the increases to benefit existing Wilmington residents, not only attract outside labor. Several members also emphasized data-driven follow-up: where wage changes are intended to fill specific vacancies, staff should produce vacancy and retention estimates so the council can weigh costs against likely savings from lower turnover.

The council will consider an amended budget ordinance that reflects the items discussed at its next meeting and must take a second reading before final adoption.