Cary Town Council members unanimously approved a $214 million budget, a 26 percent decrease from the year's previous budget.

The town maintained the lowest tax rate in Wake County, at $0.33 per $100 of property valuation.

"In this budget, we don't have a lot of new projects," Councilwoman Jennifer Robinson said. "But we do prioritize is maintaining the high quality of the projects that we do have already."

Council members approved a severe, 62 percent reduction in the $47.5 million capital improvements budget

This year the town is currently holding 22 positions open and out of the 27 requested positions, only one new position is expected to be added to the payroll.

"We're going to keep our levels of service up there," Mayor Harold Weinbrecht said, "but we're still going to be very conservative in this budget."

The town's $166.6 million operating budget increased by a little over two percent, largely because of vehicle replacements that were delayed last year due to the economy.

"We believe going forward that we will need to make those replacements this year," Town Manager Ben Shivar said earlier this year.

Council members are scheduled to consider postponing even more capital improvements like the downtown streetscape project.

"It's more an eye towards the debt service that we're looking at taking on in future years," Shivar said. "I've told council as we go along, I'm afraid that even next year, even if the economy starts improving, next year we may have a difficult time with our budget."