In just one year Richmond County has seen the reserve drop from $13 million to $9 million in part because of the new courthouse. If the proposed 2009-10 budget is adopted it will drawn down the reserve fund to $6.2 million a year from now.
In historical terms, it’s been far worse. The revenue picture was so bad when Haynes was hired the county faced a takeover by the state. North Carolina requires a county hold back at least 8 percent of its annual budget in case of emergency. Before Haynes was hired, the county wasn’t doing that. With a budget its size, Richmond County needs $3.6 million in the bank. So even if the county board decides next month to once more to dip into the well to balance the budget, Richmond County is still not as bad off as it was in 1996 when Haynes was hired. But clearly you can’t keep spending more than you take in and expect to do it forever unless something changes.
“You need to be careful in using the fund balance, because we are not sure what is going to happen with the economy,” Haynes told his board earlier this week.
Not all the news is grim. This month Big Rock Sports held a ceremony to open its $12 million distribution plant. A week before, Progress Energy broke ground on a powerplant project that will add $500 million to the local tax rolls. Those are positive signs for the future, but they don’t help the situation right this minute. The Progress Energy plant probably won’t hit the tax rolls in full until 2012, or three years from now.
The money to keep Richmond County government operating comes from a variety of sources. Property taxes is just one of them, but it’s the only one that commissioners can control. They can’t control if people decide to buy big ticket items, they can only collect a share of the sales taxes when they do. Hopefully the economy will quickly rebound and Richmond County is poised for growth. But nobody has a crystal ball that will guarantee an economic upturn.
“By pushing away the inevitable, we could end up with the same conditions the county was in 1996,” warned Board Chairman Kenneth Robinette in a meeting this week.
It’s appropriate that reserve funds be used during times of economic downtown. That’s why we keep rainy day funds. But just the debt service on the new courthouse will amount to $2 million a year. The county doesn’t have enough reserves to pay that for long.
Haynes is warning us that we need to be careful. We hope the county board is listening.
$4,125,000 per year, now we could leverage(borrow on) this anticipated income and pay cash for the new court house and thereby avoid interest on the building and nothing would change about our current tax situation and the yearly income from the new taxes on Progress would not find its way into the General fund which in itself is a dangerous thing if you look at past uses of general funds.
Not being noted for thinking outside the box or being resistant to raising the tax costs on homeowners but openly rejoicing when a new appraisal ups the proerty taxes in total cost but keeps the rate at the decieving same rate in an attempt to hide the actual increase.
I know the commissioners have a tough job but they asked for it and were elected to represent all citizens interst for the citizens but sometimes I think they forget how they got there, we the citizens sent you there because we thought you would think of us first and yes you should have resisted Judge Beales "order to build" a new courthouse, after all, if he had done his job and put more people in prison the courthouse would have been vacant instead of crowded, I salute Mr. Robinette for being the only commissioner who was not bullied by Judge Beale.
Nuff said,
Louis B. Long
Instead, they cave in and then build a complete boondoggle that this county can't afford. The tax rate will sky rocket in the next 5 years, and if they put an engineer in charge of the county, it will be 3 years.