It's budget time for Orange County and its municipalities. As our various managers and elected officials wrestle with very difficult numbers, they have been quite upfront with the citizens that times are tough.

The county commissioners went so far as to ask the voters just last week for their opinions about how to bridge the gap between the cost of services and the way we pay for them. We came back pretty clearly on that one -- "look somewhere else besides our homes."

Now they can. Buckhorn Village, a mixed-use development proposed for the Buckhorn Road area just off Interstate 85/40 in northern Orange County, would add about $3 million a year to our county budget through a combination of property taxes on the buildings and sales taxes from the businesses that occupy them. And it would do that without requiring any of us to contribute unless we want to.

The owners and tenants of Buckhorn Village would pay the property tax. People who want the goods sold at Buckhorn Village would pay sales tax on their purchases, sales tax that many of us currently donate to our neighbors every time we shop in nearby Durham, Alamance or Wake counties. In fact, Buckhorn Village might even be a net importer of sales tax into our community.

More than 15 years ago, we made a decision in our community to steer commercial development to specific areas of our county, areas that were served by major transportation corridors, centrally located and had the ability to support large scale commercial development. The Buckhorn Development District is considered by the N.C. Department of Commerce as one of the best ones in the region for commercial development. A recent agreement negotiated by the Orange County Board of Commissioners to extend water and sewer to this district means that it is now a viable location for development, a conclusion borne out by the fact that we now have a development proposal on the table.

There are some people in our community who question this development. That's reasonable. It's important that it be a high-quality, attractive development that enhances the gateway into our county and serves county residents as well as visitors. It's important that it provide open space for community gatherings. We should expect this project to maximize its ability to be served by mass transit and to exist on a dense footprint.

But some of the other arguments are puzzling. For example, some are concerned about how this development encourages the use of cars. There are two problems with this argument. First, the majority of likely shoppers at Buckhorn Village will be people who are already in cars -- 86,000 of them, in fact -- driving by that location everyday while commuting to and from other destinations. Buckhorn Village will simply capture cars -- and dollars -- that are driving through our county. It also will give northern Orange County residents shopping options closer to home.

Second, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year promoting tourism in Orange County. We view tourism as smart economic development -- people visit, spend money and leave. We even encourage our own local residents to tour and shop Orange County by planning farm and art gallery tours. Almost every person, whether local resident or out-of-town tourist, uses a car to participate in these activities. How are the cars visiting Buckhorn Village more harmful than these?

Others are concerned about the type of job creation from this project. Yet Orange County's unemployment rate is consistently the lowest in this state. Last month it was less than 4 percent. Job creation, while an important component in our long-term, overall economic development strategy, is not this county's highest and most pressing need right now. What we need is a more diversified tax base. We need more property and sales tax coming in without adding children into our already crowded schools.

So now we are faced with an opportunity. We have a project on the table. It's proposed for an area where we have said for years we want economic development. It specifically addresses "retail leakage" -- our new buzzword for the fact that the majority of Orange County citizens go outside Orange County to buy stuff like computers, underwear and fishing gear. It's being done by developers with some local accountability, people who will have to show their faces in Orange County long after the construction crane leaves. It's on a transportation corridor that is already designed to move lots of people through the area and that provides a ready-made customer base. It puts property on the tax rolls that doesn't also put children in the public schools. It puts almost $3 million a year into the county coffers without a land-transfer tax.

Finally, we are getting what 20 years of our collaborative, comprehensive planning has pointed us toward. Please join us in encouraging the Orange County Board of Commissioners to approve this project.