Cary council uses quadratic voting to rank budget priorities; community safety tops the list

Council members at the Town of Cary’s Feb. 20–21 staff retreat completed a facilitated prioritization exercise that used quadratic voting — a credit‑based method designed to capture intensity of preference — to rank ten draft budget priorities.

The retreat’s early sessions were devoted to defining the priorities and their likely budget impacts. Staff presented draft definitions ranging from “affordability” and “community safety” to “operational efficiency” and “new capital investment,” and invited edits. The facilitator told the room the goal was to surface qualitative priorities for staff to translate into budget development; staff cautioned that specific capital projects would be addressed separately in March work sessions.

After a practice run with an ice‑cream ballot, council members used 100 voice credits each to allocate weighted votes across the ten priorities. Staff aggregated results and reported that community safety ranked first in the group, followed by new capital investment and high‑performing staff; affordability, maintaining service levels and maintaining infrastructure clustered in the middle. Fiscal responsibility scored lower in the ranking, a pattern several members said reflects its role as a cross‑cutting assumption rather than a standalone program.

Members and staff discussed how some priorities overlap — for example, crosswalks and traffic signals were described as both safety and capital items — and whether terms such as “service excellence” should be reframed as “service expansion” to make budget impacts clearer. Several council members said they favored a rate‑smoothing approach to avoid sharp single‑year tax increases while simultaneously funding core services and critical capital maintenance.

Interim Town Manager Russ Overton and staff said they will bring the prioritized definitions and voting results back to the council as part of the March–June budget process. Staff plans to incorporate the council’s preferences when preparing the manager’s recommended budget and to run the same prioritization with boards and commissions to compare public input with council views.

The retreat did not produce any formal votes or ordinance actions; it was a planning exercise to guide staff work on the upcoming budget.