Mecklenburg residents are all but certain to see property tax hikes in the coming years, as the county deals with rising costs and funds ambitious projects.
At a meeting Tuesday, commissioners heard that they’ll likely have to raise property taxes in order to fund the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new facilities they want to build. But commission chairman George Dunlap warned his colleagues that they’ll probably have to raise the property tax rate just to cover the county’s higher operating expenses, even if they cut back on major new building programs.
Dunlap asked County Manager Dena Diorio — who will present her recommended budget and property tax rate at a special meeting May 18 — if the scenarios county budget staff have talked about for the past few weeks account for additional money the county needs to maintain operations at its current levels.
“Did we talk about an operating cost potential tax increase?” Dunlap said.
“Not yet. You’ll see that on the 18th,” she said.
“So I wanted y’all to think about that. There could potentially be — there will be — some operating cost increase. In addition to that, we have proposed bond cost increases,” Dunlap told other commissioners.
Even without a property tax rate hike, the median homeowner would still see a $446 dollar annual tax increase. That’s because residential properties saw their values jump faster than commercial properties in this year’s countywide property revaluation.
Without higher property taxes to fund several large bonds in future years, Mecklenburg County and Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools would have to scale back their plans to build new facilities.
Those higher taxes will be needed to pay back $2.5 billion dollars in bonds for new school facilities and $750 million for county facilities that the county is looking to put before voters (The school system hopes to borrow just under $3 billion, but the county is unlikely to approve putting that much on a fall referendum). Dunlap said commissioners need to consider whether there’s enough support in the community to win passage for those bonds in a November referendum.
“It doesn’t do us any good to put a bond package out there that’s going to fail,” said Dunlap. If the county’s bond packages were to fail at the ballot box, they would have to work with CMS to identify the school system’s most immediate needs and fund them from available sources and other borrowings.
The county’s plans include a total of $1.5 billion for new county facilities on top of the $2.5 billion CMS bonds. Half of the new county facilities would be paid for with current revenue sources and half would be funded by issuing bonds.
To repay those bonds, the county would have to raise property taxes in future years. The infrastructure package that the county is considering would fund:
- $2.5 billion for new or renovated schools and CMS facilities
- $107 million for Central Piedmont Community College projects
- $146 million for Charlotte Mecklenburg Libraries
- $448 million for parks and greenways
- $809 for new courts, sheriff, jail and other county facilities.
The county would have to increase property taxes by 5 cents per $100 of valuation by 2031 in order to repay the debt. For the median house at present-day values, that would equate to $192 a year, on top of the $446-a-year increase from the revaluation.
Some county commissioners seemed ready to look for ways to trim the project list, and maybe the size of the bond package. They questioned whether they need to immediately build two community resource centers in lower-income areas to provide social services to residents, or whether one could wait. The projects have a combined price tag of $486 million dollars.
Commissioner Arthur Griffin pushed back on that idea, criticizing some of his colleagues.
“Here we are, talking about poor people as if they are like a foreign country,” said Griffin. He also said people who need social services have to travel to many different, often inconvenient, locations to access them.
“We have delayed putting services close to the recipients for well over 40 years,” he said.
