Commissioner Billy Yow (right) makes a point as fellow commissioner Bruce Davis listens.Guilford County Manager Brenda Jones Fox is proposing that the county maintain a flat debt service level in FY 2011, at $77.0 million. Over the next two years, the county’s debt service payments will make a “dramatic jump” to almost $100 million in FY 2012 and then just below $120 million in 2013, before gradually tapering off.
The county is going to have to tackle its debt to pay for its new jail and new schools. Guilford County voters approved a $412.3 million school bond and $114.6 million bond to build the new Guilford County Detention Center in May 2008. The bad news for the county is that tax revenues are expected to decrease by 1.4 percent next year, Fox said.
“When citizens voted for this debt, they voted to pay for it,” Democratic Commissioner Kirk Perkins said during a briefing yesteday. “That looks like a cliff we’re getting ready to ride off.”
Perkins asked Fox what to articulate her plan for when the county’s debt service payments jump by $40 million.
“The following year, maybe luck will be with us, and we can do some restructuring,” Fox replied.
The uncertain outlook prompted Perkins to utter the dreaded “T” word.
“Nobody likes taxes, but majority rules and the majority voted for this jail that’s $100 million, and these schools,” he said.
Chairman Skip Alston, a Democrat, was having none of it.
“Let me say this: The easiest way to solve that is to raise taxes,” he said. “If we were to kinda put a little elbow grease to it, put some brain power and think outside the box, there are other ways we can resolve that debt…. The sales taxes were down about $8 million this year. Hopefully, people will start spending. To say ‘raise taxes’ just because we’re looking at a $40 million [increase] next year I think is irresponsible…. ‘We should raise taxes about 10 cents’ – that’s the easy way out. That’s the way we’ve been doing it in the past. The same people we’re asking for that 10 cents are the same people who lost their jobs or had their homes foreclosed upon.”
Among both Democratic and Republican members of the commission, however, a consensus is emerging that a tax increase might be necessary, if not next year, then possibly the one after that.
“Every year we say, ‘Maybe we can avoid a tax increase,’” Democrat John Parks said. “There may be a situation where future boards, this is what they might have to contend with. It’s not a bright picture.”
Republican Billy Yow agreed: “When the time comes, there’s gonna be a tax increase. There’s nothing any of us can do about it. And people knows that day’s a-comin’. But it doesn’t have to be today.”
Perkins and Democrat Paul Gibson suggested two possible alternatives to increasing the property tax: respectively, a moratorium on issuing new bonds for schools and a quarter-cent sales tax.
Following the manager’s bleak debt service report, a delegation from Guilford County Schools asked the county commission to approve an allocation of $16.8 million to cover critical maintenance needs, and submitted a list of projects, including repairing the roof at Western Guilford High School, for the commission's review.
“Anytime we know that we introduce moisture into our classroom environment, subsequently we have an indoor air quality issue; it turns into mold and mildew,” Maintenance Director Gerald Greeson said.
“Every time it rains they don’t have to send in work orders," Greeson said, of Western Guilford High School. "Our staff, we mobilize to Western Guilford…. When we mobilized to Western Guilford for this last rain on Monday morning, we had a media center that had a leaking roof. We had to put buckets out. We had a large trash bin. A media center, as you know, is not a gymnasium. Inside, you’ve got books, you’ve got computers.”
Guilford County Schools is constrained from spending bond money on maintenance because it’s already been pledged for new construction projects. Alston said the choice before the commissioners is to decide whether to apply the $16.8 million towards paying down the bond debt – saving county taxpayers about $5 million – or allow the school system to spend it on maintenance.
Fox said the county currently does not have the money requested for maintenance, so “effectively it would be a tax increase.”
Even so, commissioners couldn’t bring themselves to say no to the schools. Among those who pledged support for the maintenance funds were Parks and Yow, along with Republicans Mike Winstead and Linda Shaw, the latter of whom has a grandson who attends Western Guilford High School.
No comments:
Post a Comment