Update: The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Local Government Budgets for FY21

In a previous blog post, The COVID-19 Crisis and How North Carolina Local Governments are Budgeting for It, I laid out the results of a survey that the NCLM and the NCLGBA had conducted to counties and municipalities across the state in April.  In this week’s blog post I am going to provide an overview of an updated survey that was send out in May.  This survey had fewer respondents, but also provides more up-to-date information about the strategies and plans that local governments in North Carolina have, with another full months of information and better understanding of how COVID-19 is impacting their jurisdiction. First of all, this survey was closed May 15th and had 73 complete or mostly complete responses.  4 were from counties and 69 were from municipalities.  Largely, the survey is the same as the one from April, with one notable difference, questions were added about interim budgets, pushing back the date of the budget adoption, and planning on possibly adjusting the budget with a budget amendment later in the fiscal year. Let’s start there then.  45 respondents said that they are not planning on adjusting when the budget was adopted.  So, if they normally adopt the