Commissioners to counter the municipalities’ counter offer on sales tax

ROCKINGHAM — Richmond County leadership have now drafted a counter offer to the municipalities’ counter offer on the sales tax issue, which followed from the county’s initial proposal submitted on May 24 and involved the sharing an unknown amount of sales tax revenue between the six municipalities for the 2021-2022 fiscal year.

The Board of Commissioners met with their legal counsel in a closed session meeting Thursday morning. Asked after the meeting if the commissioners would hold another special meeting prior to their next monthly meeting to vote on any action related to the sales tax issue, County Manager Bryan Land said only that there would be a “counter back to the municipalities.”

County Attorney Bill Webb is expected to send out a public statement on the matter, but has not done so as of Thursday afternoon. Webb left the meeting early to work on this statement, and declined to comment on the discussions outside of the forthcoming statement.

The details of the proposal and counter offers have not been made public. Representatives from all six municipalities met on Thursday, June 10, to discuss their response, and they submitted their counter offer Tuesday morning, signed by the city managers of Rockingham and Hamlet, Monty Crump and Matt Christian, respectively.

Based on interviews with four municipal representatives from four different municipalities, all of those present at the meeting were in agreement on the nature of the municipalities’ counter offer to the county.

The proposal and counter offers are the result of months of discussions to stave off litigation by Rockingham and Hamlet against the county in which the cities allege that the county breached a 2015 contract signed between them and the county. This contract stated that neither city would be asked to pay to support the new 9-1-1 Center, and the cities argue that the commissioners violated this agreement by changing to ad valorem, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales tax revenue being taken from Rockingham and Hamlet annually — and large chunks taken from the other municipalities — and being redirected to the county, based on several public statements by Land explaining that the county needed this money to make up for the lack of contribution by these cities to support the new Center.

Chairman Jeff Smart told the Daily Journal at the county’s recent budget work session that the goal is to have a solution to the sales tax issue approved by the relevant parties before June 30.