Leaders of the local Alamance County Rescue Unit have been making the rounds lately, trying to persuade local municipalities to jump on their bandwagon to create support for encouraging the county’s commissioners to establish a special new tax to support the Rescue Unit.
The Rescue Unit has decided that, rather than rely on the annual generosity of Alamance County’s commissioners, they want a special new tax at a rate of one-quarter of one percent, explicitly designated for their group’s use.
So far, both Burlington’s city council and Elon’s town council have dutifully voted to support such a move.
(Of course, we note that, to the best of our knowledge, neither has given its own jurisdiction’s tax dollars to the Rescue Unit’s cause.)
But, the Rescue Unit spokesmen rarely mention the gigantic increase in funding this new little tax would generate.
The group currently gets about $125,000 annually from Alamance County taxpayers.
But a quarter-cent on the property tax rate would net the group about $687,500, based on the current value of the county’s property levy. One of the group’s spokesmen put the figure at $660,000 to Elon’s town council earlier this month. In either case, the revenues generated from the new tax represent more than five times what the group has been getting from Alamance County.
Now, a word about the Rescue Unit. It is a fine organization. It does good work. There are about 70 volunteers, according to the group’s leader, who use a fleet of specialized vehicles to answer roughly 1,000 calls for service each year. These calls include swift water rescues, search and recovery, and agricultural or industrial accidents – things that, in many cases, are beyond the capabilities of EMS and other area government agencies.
It is organized as a 501(c)(3) organization, i.e., a charitable non-profit. And we’re sure it is difficult to raise sufficient money through fundraisers or other activities.
But we don’t consider it to be in the spirit of a “non-profit” to lobby to get a huge chuck of their funding from the county’s taxpayers.
And here’s our broader concern and objection. We don’t think taxpayers should be required to contribute to any local non-profit organization. Yet, the county’s budget seems to have no shortage of these types of taxpayer largesse.
The Alamance Arts Council and Alamance Historical Museum are two other worthy, local organizations that also get county tax dollars. Like the Rescue Unit, they are supposed to be non-profits.
We don’t think the county’s taxpayers should be forced to finance any part of their operations, or any other non-profit, either.
We imagine that some of these older, “legacy” groups got included in the county’s budget decades ago during years when the county was “flush” with cash. (We’re not sure there ever were such years, but we suspect that was at least part of the initial justification.)
But the county isn’t so flush with tax revenues any more – at least not to the extent that it can divert hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to these or any other of several non-profit groups that are now regularly included in the county budget.
To her credit, county manager Heidi York has tried to get the commissioners to remove such expenditures from the county’s budget. But the commissioners seem always to prefer pandering to these special groups rather than to taxpayers as a whole. For instance, when York proposed to remove the Rescue Unit altogether in the 2024-2025 budget, the commissioners added it back in.
Which is apparently what led the Rescue Unit to come up with its ploy for a special tax scheme.
But taxpayers simply cannot afford this largesse any longer.
And taxpayers certainly cannot afford an explosive expansion in spending for the group such as is being proposed by the Rescue Unit.
