It’s a GOP priority
Little did Digby know when she asked me to join her in August 2014 that I’d be writing from one of the nation’s premier hotbeds of Republican mischief. After their 2010 REDMAP victories, the GOP had gerrymandered the hell out of North Carolina. They had passed their 2013 Voter Identification Verification Act (found in 2016 “to discriminate against African American voters” with “almost surgical precision”). But they had yet to pass their infamous 2016 “bathroom bill.” Republicans in late 2016 had yet to strip incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s “control over state and county elections boards and its powerful university system.” Republicans had yet to redraw congressional districts multiple times in response to Democrats’ court challenges, or to contest a 2024 state Supreme Court election they’d lost with six months of recounts, court battles, and an attempt to throw out tens of thousands of ballots.
But here we are. And they are at it again. As David Pepper warned, schemes cooked up in these “laboratories of autocracy” may eventually find their way to where you live.
Remember the GOP’s alleged commitment to the notion that “government closest to the people is the one that governs best”? That was then. The GOP still mouths it. They just don’t believe it. This comes via Carolina Forward:
A major issue brewing in our state legislature today is over what to do about property taxes in North Carolina.
Pretty much since forever, property taxes have always been decided on the local, county level. Local elected officials – each county’s Board of Commissioners – sets its own property tax rate based on whatever it is their local voters want and need.
But now, that might change. The leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are now considering whether to take away local counties’ ability to set their own property taxes based on local needs, and lock them into a formula – set and controlled, of course, by the state legislature.
For almost 150 years, voters in North Carolina have decided their own local property tax rates through local elections. Don’t like your property taxes? Go elect some different county commissioners. People do it all the time. After all, it just makes sense that the people of Polk, Cabarrus, Clay, Wake, Bladen or Gates counties choose different tax rates, since the counties are all very different themselves. Local elected officials, who are closest to their voters, are usually the best-informed about their needs.
But the leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are no fans of local control. Many of them seem to be of the mind that they – not the local voters most affected – should decide the matter. Through some combination of levy limits and/or assessment caps, state lawmakers may soon end North Carolina’s 150-year tradition of local control over property taxation.
Here’s something for everyone to consider, though: it’s easy for our centralized state government to take power away from local counties. It’s very hard to give it back, and it doesn’t often happen.
Power flows from the pursestrings. When counties’ ability to raise revenue is limited, they’ll become more reliant on the state legislature. More and more counties will need to pay for lobbyists to prowl the halls of our legislature; county commissioners will need to spend more time in Raleigh pleading their cases.
Local elections matter. Tomorrow, they may just matter a little less.
I wrote here in 2017:
GOP-led legislatures are implementing changes to governance and revenue streams, strategically starving cities of revenue, leaving city leaders with no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut services and piss off voters. It’s happening in North Carolina and elsewhere [dead link is corrected]:
After a couple of cycles, Republicans will be running candidates who blame North Carolina cities’ financial woes on “mismanagement and waste” by Democrats, and counting on voters to forget by then who precipitated the crisis in the first place. They’ll succeed if we don’t remind voters at every opportunity that it’s their strategy. It is deliberate.
About that N.C. Supreme Court election mentioned above. The court’s GOP majority may have picked up the delay, delay, delay gambit from the sitting president (WRAL):
The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the multibillion-dollar plan to improve North Carolina’s public schools in a ruling that ended the long-running lawsuit known as Leandro.
Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina was initially filed in 1994 and accuses the state of not providing an adequate education to the state’s more than 1 million students. The lawsuit has sought to shore up education in the state and improve outcomes for the state’s students.
Parties had come to an agreement on a plan in 2021 that would have drastically increased funding by more than $5 billion — funding for things such as special education, teacher pay, counselors, social workers and school nurses. It also included many policy changes, on things such as school improvement.
The court threw out that plan Thursday in a 4-3 decision. The ruling invalidates the last decade’s worth of actions in the case. But instead of remanding the lawsuit for further action on the claims of the original five school boards that sued — Cumberland, Hoke, Halifax, Vance and Robeson — the court dismissed the case entirely without giving parties the ability to re-file. Justices in the majority tossed the case in part because they contended that today’s education system has changed too much in the past 20 years and that the lack of any current students as plaintiffs means no plaintiffs have their rights at issue.
Of the 50 states, North Carolina ranks second-to-last in cost-adjusted, per-pupil funding.
Did I mention that North Carolina is nine months into its budget year and the GOP-controlled state legislature has yet to pass a budget? Or that it has not had a new budget since 2023? Even in the wake of Hurricane Helene?
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.
(h/t NK)