The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), who served for 24 years between 1977-2001, was an entertaining politician with a wide variety of interests. While often known and cited for his foreign policy expertise – he was a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations – Moynihan was also a long-time member of the Senate Budget Committee.
We’ve been reminded recently of one of Moynihan’s most prescient quotes, often applicable in both foreign policy and budget spheres, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
We’ve been surprised and amused of late by the revisionist budget history claimed by county manager Heidi York, who told county commissioners recently that their predecessors had “cut” taxes in 2023 when the county last underwent a property revaluation.
For having done so, York went on to blame that “tax cut” for what she considers to be the lack of revenues that the county now has in 2026 – and she has used it as part of her justification for recommending (another) property tax increase this year.
During her four years at the helm (she arrived in July 2022), York is recommending her fourth consecutive property tax rate increase out of the four budgets she has presented.
York’s misrepresentation of 2023 facts appears to be intentional, and, quite unfortunately, her deceitful characterization has subsequently been echoed by other county officials and elected officials who should know better – if only they relied on their own memory or the actual facts from that budget year.
First a word about revaluations, in general, and the concept of “revenue-neutral” tax rates which are sometimes considered in their aftermath.
North Carolina law requires all counties to revalue property at least every eight years. Alamance County had followed this minimum cycle for decades, until commissioners decided after the revaluation in 2017 to adopt a more expedited schedule, moving the county toward a four-year timeframe for revaluation. (The first installment on that transition was the 2023 revaluation, which occurred six years after the one in 2017, the last of the eight-year cycle.) The interval has continued to shrink since 2023. Thus, property owners face the prospect of another revaluation next year of their acreage, homes, and business properties next year.
The theory behind the shorter reval cycle was that property owners would avoid the potentially jarring jumps and dips in tax values that can occur over eight years. Meanwhile, the county won’t have to wait as long to reap the benefits of increased property values.
One commendable requirement that the General Assembly has added to the revaluation process is that after properties are revalued countywide, finance folks are required to come up with a post-revaluation tax rate that would raise the same amount of money from the new tax values as the pre-revaluation tax rate would have under the old one.
Now, it should be remembered that these calculations are made on a cumulative, or countywide basis (or in the case of municipalities, based on the values within each jurisdiction) – not based on individual situations. So, in round numbers for instance, if property values across the county go up 10 percent, for instance, the complicated calculations that generate the new revenue rate will ensure that an individual whose home value also goes up 10 percent pays roughly the same amount as he did before the mass reappraisal. That new computation is known as the “revenue-neutral” tax rate.
The revenue-neutral rate presupposes that the county should collect approximately the same total amount of property tax revenue before and after a revaluation of property values.
Again, the underlying concept is that the general public should be able to see and compare the pre-revaluation tax rate with the post-revaluation one.
As a practical matter, few people are going to be right at the average, and the ones most likely to speak up in opposition are those whose tax bill is more than it was the previous year.
There is no requirement that the county must adopt the revenue- neutral post-revaluation tax rate, but state law does require it to be calculated and publicly announced, for comparison purposes.
The sheer duplicity of York’s presentation to the commissioners was her contention that the tax rate had been cut 22 cents – without giving any context to its relationship to the revenue-neutral equivalent. This is simply not a complete, or honest, rendition of the tax rate.
Overall, property taxes went up in 2023, not down, as York falsely portrays. In fact, property taxes were scheduled to go up by more than $1 million, based on the slightly higher than revenue-neutral rate adopted by the commissioners that year. And it appears that actual property tax revenues ended up being even higher.
To follow Moynihan’s adage, York is entitled to her opinion that the 21.8-cent tax rate cut that year was too steep – although she herself had proposed a 20-cent cut. But to claim as fact, as York has, that the previous 65 cents rate and the post-reval rate of 43.2 cents decided in 2023 were comparable, is misleading, even deceptive and, quite frankly, dishonest.
In real numbers, Alamance County’s tax rate prior to revaluation was 65 cents per $100 valuation. Property values went up almost 80 percent in the 2023 revaluation (compared to 2017, the previous revaluation year, when values had been largely stagnant). And county officials estimated that the revenue-neutral tax rate for the 2023-2024 budget year would be 42.59 cents per $100.
York originally proposed a tax rate of 45.43 cents per $100 valuation, which was 2.84-cents higher than the revenue-neutral level her own government had estimated was needed to bring in the same amount of revenue.
The commissioners, most of whom had publicly and repeatedly vowed to adopt the revenue-neutral rate, instead established the new tax rate at 43.2 cents, about 2.23 cents lower than York’s proposal, but still .61 cents, or 1.43 percent, higher than the revenue-neutral mark.
Yes, the tax rate was cut almost 22 cents (21.8 cents, to be precise), but there was no reduction in the overall, countywide property tax burden.
York’s revisionist memory has even gone so far as to criticize this newspaper’s publisher for the newspaper’s consistent advocacy in 2023 for the commissioners to adopt a revenue-neutral property tax rate.
York told our reporter recently, “I remember that [Alamance News publisher] Tom Boney kept saying I was deaf, blind, and stupid because I wouldn’t give them a revenue-neutral tax rate.”
We believed then, and believe generically, that government agencies should adopt revenue neutral post-revaluation tax rates rather than using the revaluation process as a way to goose or squeeze taxpayers into paying higher property taxes.
We commented on this editorial page in 2023 that York had sat through repeated budget meetings with commissioners – who are, ostensibly, her bosses – that spring budget season where they had uttered time and again their supposed commitment to and desire for a revenue-neutral tax rate.
We did say in one editorial that she appeared to have a hearing impairment inasmuch as she had ignored their repeated statements when she presented her budget with a big tax rate hike, well above the revenue- neutral mark.
We’re not sure where her memory of our calling her “blind” comes from, but we’re quite certain we never called her “stupid,” to quote her current version of our 2023 opposition to higher property taxes.
We’ve disagreed often with the county manager’s priorities for spending, and her historic preference for higher taxes rather than spending cuts, but we’ve never characterized her as “stupid.”
Indeed, quite to the contrary, we recognize that she has cunningly called the commissioners’ collective bluff – proposing and getting a supposedly conservative, all-Republican board to enact tax increases in 2023 (+.61 cents, 1.43 percent, above revenue neutral), 2024 (3.66 cents, or 8.47 percent increase), and 2025 (when the by then mostly-Republican board adopted a 2.5-cent increase, 5.3 percent, even higher than the 1.59-cent, 3.4 percent, increase York had proposed) – despite their repeated, supposed commitment to fiscal conservatism.
So taxpayers are not imaging it when they say their property taxes keep going up. Commissioners have imposed a cumulative hike of almost 16 percent since revaluation in 2023.
And York’s up to the same tricks this year. Whether she’s successful at lulling the commissioners into agreeing to her 2.25-cent tax rate increase (another 4.6 percent hike in one year, which, if adopted, would bring the four-year total to 21.27 percent higher than revenue-neutral level from 2023) for next year’s (2026-2027) budget remains to be seen.
