Cary’s property-tax rate is back at 33 cents.

The Town Council voted 5-2 Friday morning to back down the tax rate only 36 hours after raising it to 37 cents.

Jennifer Robinson, for whom the decision to vote for the 37-cent rate on Wednesday was visibly difficult, asked the council to reconsider.

She cited her earlier ambivalence and the state of the economy as reasons she wanted to switch.

“I don’t think anybody feels good about it,” Robinson said.

Don Frantz and Gale Adcock also switched their votes.

Mayor Harold Weinbrecht and Julie Robison voted against setting the property-tax rate at 33 cents.

Weinbrecht said he was concerned about the impact that the lower rate would have on funding for parks and road projects.

“I think at 33 [cents] we’re cutting” some of those projects, Weinbrecht said.

The council agreed several weeks ago that 33 cents would be the “revenue neutral” tax rate. That revenue-neutral rate takes into account Wake County’s property-tax revaluation that became effective Jan. 1. The revaluation was the first since 2000.

A revenue-neutral tax rate is one that raises the same amount of money following a revaluation as before when adjusted for municipal growth. The current tax is 42 cents per $100 of valuation.

The council has agreed to limit debt service to 15 percent of expenditures. Fifteen percent is a threshold that bond-rating agencies look at when evaluating municipalities. Cary currently has the highest bond ratings from the three major agencies. The high ratings allow the town to pay lower interest on the debt it sells, which reduces the cost of using debt to finance bricks-and-mortar projects.

The decision came during a meeting in which a major concern was the scope of bricks-and-mortar projects in downtown Cary.

The total proposed capital budget for 2009 is more than $125 million Of the $90 million proposed for Cary’s nonutility capital projects for 2009, about $60 million would go toward downtown infrastructure.

Town Manager Bill Coleman told the council earlier in the week that it could stick at 33 cents for two years and fund its scheduled capital projects for 2009. The rate would go to 38 cents in 2011.

Using a 37-cent rate, the rate would stay steady until 2012 when it would rise a penny. With a 37-cent rate, the town would raise about $12 million more that could be available for capital projects.

Coleman offered the scenarios with several caveats.

Projections for years beyond 2009 are “an overall picture of a particular reality of the town’s budget including variables, all of which will change,” Coleman said.

Under either a 33- or a 37-cent rate, the town can expect “very limited” capital spending for the next four years, Coleman said.

The council will have another work session next week, when they will confirm the capital-spending plan of more than $120 million and review the proposed $166 million operating budget.

The council is scheduled to approve the entire budget package, which totals about June 26.