PITTSBORO — It became a common theme throughout last Friday’s county legislative goals breakfast: Why don’t we have more control over our own area?
Leaders from Chatham County government and the municipalities of Pittsboro, Siler City and Goldston met with State Sen. Valerie Foushee (D-Durham) and State Rep. Robert Reives II (D-Chatham), the county’s representatives in the N.C. General Assembly, to discuss the various legislative goals and hopes each of the jurisdictions had. Others involved included representatives from the Chatham Economic Development Corporation and Chatham County Schools.
The refrain throughout several parts of the day could be summed by Reives: “When you have people making decision at the state level about local areas, they just don’t know that experience there. Government works best at your lowest levels.”
That influence of state government on local affairs, most of it negative, popped up throughout the discussion in multiple areas.
Broadband
A common frustration particularly among county officials in recent years has been the lack of quality broadband internet service throughout Chatham. County Manager Dan LaMontagne said Chatham’s government would like to see the removal of barriers put in place “that prevent counties from initiating and/or providing assistance for projects and services that would deliver broadband services to citizens.”
LaMontagne said that even the federal government now recognizes that Internet service providers have been misleading officials and consumers for years by incorrectly reporting the number of people covered. He and Assistant County Manager Bryan Thompson said it’s important to think of broadband as a “utility” like water and sewer and electricity.
“We all need to be coalescing around the issue,” said County Commission Chairman Karen Howard. “It’s completely nonpartisan, and the people that are hurting the most are the people who don’t have a voice to access the powers that do. Comprehensive coverage everywhere in the state...(is) an issue of equity.”
Reives said the legislature has “enough votes” to repeal a law that prohibits local governments from setting up their own internet systems or working with private providers to do so, but the legislature’s leadership isn’t on board. The City of Wilson already had a system like that in place before the law was passed.
“They got upset that Wilson was innovating,” Reives said. “And now they’ve stopped everybody from doing that. And the thing is that nobody in Raleigh is willing to admit that we’ve done something stupid. It’s just a frustration for me.”
Local control of planning
Another topic of discussion: how the state government has created numerous regulations and new rules that cause burdens on local governments.
“Local voters may want greater stream buffers or common sense regulation of oil and gas exploration,” the meeting’s legislative goals document stated. “Yet, state legislation has taken aim at reducing local control over these issues. Increasingly, legislation deters us from regulating high-impact or risky land uses, creates confusion between local and state agencies and adds more confusion to land use regulations.”
These types of regulations include limiting the types of projects requiring environmental impact statements, expanding the definition of “agricultural use or agrotourism” to include uses “totally unrelated to agriculture” and requiring all building inspections to be done within two business days of request.
“A lot of mandates have been put down on local governments on this topic,” LaMontagne said. “We’ve been prevented from enacting legislation and changing rules. These are things that the local voters should have a say in how this community handles those issues here in their home.”
Property tax base
Another change in recent years, according to Thompson, is a growing number of exceptions and exclusions to property tax levies, which he said “shift(s) the tax burden to an increasingly shrinking number of individuals.”
For example, the state government put in place a “builders’ inventory exemption.” This means the property value of a project in progress only takes into account what’s been completed — a change that reduced Chatham’s tax base by more than $27 million in assessed value in 2018.
“In places like Chatham County and other areas where you have rampant residential development, we can’t get revenue from that improvement immediately,” Thompson said. “The burden on schools and (the Chatham) Council on Aging, it needs to be served, and sometimes they’re major capital expenses and we can’t collect revenue to help offset that cost.”
School calendar
A final lengthy portion of the discussion is flexibility for public school calendars, a regular request from Chatham County Schools and the Chatham County Board of Education. Public schools are not allowed to begin their school year until the Monday closest to August 26. That late start, Superintendent Derrick Jordan said at the meeting, means students’ high school classes don’t align time-wise with community college classes they may be taking.
The reasoning given for the late start date in recent years is a push from coastal communities who don’t want to give up the vacation time, but Mark Hall, the provost for Central Carolina Community College in Chatham, called that reasoning “asininery.”
“This is one of those topics I get really passionate about,” Hall said. “It blows my mind that decisions about education seems to be about some slight economic benefit to some counties. Having grown up on the coast, it’s not real. It’s not legitimate.”
Many pieces of legislation have been proposed in recent years providing flexibility and exceptions for individual counties — Reives sponsored such a bill last year for Chatham, Lee and Harnett counties — but little headway has been made.
“Even if it is an economic boon for areas, I hear loudly and clearly from the folks in Chatham County that they desire to have the flexibility,” Jordan said. “If it’s decided that in Chatham County what we’ve been doing works, I’m fine with that. But what I’ve been hearing so far is that it doesn’t work.”
What to do
Both Reives and Foushee stressed that it was important for local officials to not only continue to have the discussion internally but reach out to elected leaders in other counties. Foushee specifically referened her frustration with legislators who used to be county or city leaders and their actions when in state government.
“It’s amazing how you can be a county commissioner and take a position at the state level and forget about the issues you had to resolve as a commissioner or a council person,” she said, “totally forget how local government operates, or to get to a point where it doesn’t matter how local government operates because you didn’t like it when you were there.”
Reives said the issue with certain topics has become “loyalty to the leadership in Raleigh.” Republicans have held the leadership positions in both chambers of the General Assembly in recent years, but Reives, the Deputy Democratic Leader in the House, said this emphasis on loyalty happens to both parties.
“We’ve gotten to a point now on both sides where there gets to be this loyalty to a person who’s in place,” he said. “For me, it’s kind of like church. I go to church to worship God. I don’t go to church to worship the person who’s telling me about it. You can appreciate your leadership, but you shouldn’t be so loyal to them that you forget what’s important.”
Wrapping up the meeting, Howard said she was “extraordinarily grateful” for the work and cooperation done with Chatham’s legislators.
“Not every community has the kind of access to their representatives that we have,” she said. “I’m grateful for all of you being co-conspirators in making Chatham County a great place to live. We’re all working for the same people in the same place and have the same goals for them.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.