Only one council member’s concerns about a downtown project kept approval of Cary’s budget from being unanimous.

The Cary Town Council voted 6-1 on Thursday to approve the $290 million spending package. It becomes effective July 1.

Erv Portman voted against because he could not support $35 million for the streetscapes project. The project will overhaul public infrastructure downtown and provide a concrete kickoff for the implementation of the Town Center Area Plan, approved in 2001.

Though calling it “a great budget,” Portman said, “I’m simply questioning the scope of the $35 million.”

Portman said by spending so much on streetscapes, there would be little debt capacity for other infrastructure projects.

The council has agreed to limit debt service to 15 percent of expenditures, the level at which debt service is expected to hover for the next few years. 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.

Don Frantz said that the council had deferred several other bricks-an-mortar projects and that the budget ended up as a compromise for everyone.

“You’re gettng the whole downtown for $35 million,” Frantz said. “To me that’s not such a bad deal.”

The vote came after seven weeks of public deliberation on the budget, including six work sessions that immersed the council and most of the town’s senior staff.

Julie Robison pointed out that staff worked until nearly the last minute to find $3 million in cuts to the operating budget to respond to a request that Portman made.

“I really think you owe it to us and the staff to vote yes on the budget,” Robison told Portman.

After some wavering during the work sesions, the council set the property-tax rate at 33 cents. Early on the group had agreed 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.

Jack Smith said he was pleased that the council had stuck to the 15 percent debt cap.

“It forces us all to realize that we can’t keep extending the credit card,” Smith said.