When the Rhino Times asked Guilford County Assistant Manager and de facto Budget Manager Toy Beeninga about the prospects for the passage of a bill that would throw a giant wrench in the county’s budget process at the last minute this year, he said “I think they have a very short runway.”

It turns out, however, since the passage of the bill is highly expected this week, that it may be the county that has the very short runway.

The Guilford County Board of Commissioners intended to adopt a new budget on Thursday, June 18; however, that budget and all the work that has gone into it would be based on property values in the new 2026 revaluation of all county property, and the political leaders in Raliegh seem about to make that impossible.

The bill moving quickly through the North Carolina General Assembly could force Guilford County commissioners to rethink the county budget just days before they were expected to adopt it.

Senate Bill 889, titled “Property Tax Reappraisal Moratorium,” would prevent North Carolina counties with reappraisals effective Jan. 1, 2026, from using those new property values for the 2026-2027 fiscal year.

Guilford County is one of about a dozen counties in the state expected to be covered by the bill.

The bill would require counties covered by the legislation to use the property values from their previous revaluation for the coming fiscal year. The new 2026 values would then take effect for the 2027-2028 fiscal year and future years until the county’s next reappraisal.

The bill was moving through the House on Tuesday, June 9, and county officials said they expected it to pass this week.

If it becomes law, it could upend a budget process that’s been built around Guilford County’s new 2026 property values.

Guilford County Commissioner Frankie Jones said Tuesday that, if the bill passes, county officials will have to go back and figure out what the budget can look like without the new values.

“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” Jones said. “I mean, we have to see what they end up doing.”

However, Jones said that, if the bill passes, “I think for us, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what we can do in light of the bill passing.”

The bill looks certain to pass after one more procedural vote and what looks to be a veto proof majority.  The Guilford County manager and chairman of the board of commissioners had an emergency phone conversation Tuesday night on the matter.

County Manager Victor Isler has recommended a 2026-2027 budget that lowers the county’s tax rate from the current 73.05 cents per $100 of assessed property value to 61.9 cents. However, because Guilford County’s new revaluation produced large increases in property values, the lower tax rate would still bring in far more property tax revenue than the county collected this year.

That’s the whole reason SB 889 matters.

If Guilford County can’t use the new values, commissioners would have to either cut spending from the recommended budget or raise the tax rate much more than they otherwise would have had to.

Jones said he doesn’t believe the votes are there on the Board of Commissioners for a major tax rate increase if the moratorium becomes law.

“I do not think there’s support for a significant tax rate increase if the moratorium passes,” Jones said.

Jones said that, in that case, commissioners would likely have to cut back on the budget they were prepared to consider next week.

“We’re going to have some hard work to do,” he said. “But I believe we’ll have to cut back from whatever the budget was that we were prepared to consider.”

Jones said the timing of the bill is especially difficult because the county has been working for months toward a budget adoption date that is fast approaching.

“This happened this late,” Jones said, “and I don’t know that we have collectively sat there and thought through exactly what the budget would look like.”

One option, at least mathematically, would be for the commissioners to keep the same spending plan and simply set whatever tax rate is necessary to produce the same revenue from the older property values.

Jones said he doesn’t see that happening.

“I’m not supporting that,” Jones said. “Essentially, if we did that, you’d have to significantly raise the tax rate from last year.”

Jones added that the situation is complicated by the fact that Guilford County hasn’t raised the tax rate in recent years and the commissioners had been treating the 2026 revaluation as a chance to reset the budget.

“We have not changed the tax rate since 2022,” Jones said. “Some of that is building up to this point because we knew that we were going to have a revaluation.”

He said county officials had been waiting for the revaluation year to deal with some needs and obligations that had been delayed.

“There are revenues that we need in order to cover our current obligations,” Jones said. “We were waiting for the revaluation to deal with some of that.”

Jones said the county had also been planning to use the revaluation year to reduce its reliance on the county’s savings account.

“A big part of this was reducing the reliance on fund balance,” Jones said.

He added, “There’s things that have been needed, but that we’ve been like, alright, hold on to revaluation, and then we can reset it then. And so now that’s not going to happen.”

Jones described a revaluation year as something of a budget reset for a county.

“Whenever you have a revaluation, it’s almost like the opportunity for a reset,” Jones told the Rhino Times. “Without the revaluation, there’s not an opportunity for a reset. There’s just not.”

He said Guilford County would remain stuck with older values while many other large counties have more recent valuations.

“We’re still dealing with 2022 valuations,” Jones said, adding that other major counties are dealing with 2024 or 2025 values.

He added that that creates a disadvantage for Guilford County.

“The real thing about the moratorium that could be challenging for us is that, as you look at the other large counties and municipalities, they have more recent valuations and their budget is based upon that,” he said.

The bill also wouldn’t affect just Guilford County government.

He pointed out that cities and towns in the county use the county’s tax values as well.

“It impacts not just the city of Greensboro, but Pleasant Garden, Summerfield, every incorporated area,” Jones said. “And it impacts the fire districts as well, because the fire districts use those same values when they’re setting the fire district tax rate.”

He also said the late timing may make it difficult for the county to adopt a budget on the schedule that had been expected.

“We’re sitting here, it’s June the 9th, and we were projected to vote on this budget on the 18th,” Jones said. “I don’t know that we would have a budget prepared to review and the necessary due diligence by next Thursday.”

He also said that one interesting thing to note is that the only reason Guilford County conducted a revaluation in 2026 is because the numbers arrived at in 2022 were too low compared to actual property sales, and the county was forced by the state to do the revaluation a year earlier than scheduled.

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston also said Tuesday that the bill could force commissioners to make some hard decisions.

Alston said that, if the county kept the tax rate the same and couldn’t use the new values, there wouldn’t be enough additional money to fund many of the items in Isler’s recommended budget.

“If we don’t raise the tax rate, then we get another $13 million and that money has to be spread out all across the county,” Alston said.

That would be the additional revenue from tax base growth without the revaluation.

Alston added that would mean no raises, no new money for schools, no additional money for the Sheriff’s Department and no funds for some other county priorities.

“There’ll be no raises, no additional funds going to schools, no funds going to the other municipalities,” the chairman said. “The Sheriff’s Department would not be able to retain employees. Social Services, we won’t be able to hire new employees. It’s going to be a bad situation as far as our services.”

Alston said the county could avoid those cuts only by raising the tax rate significantly.

“Unless we go with a large tax increase, that’s basically what it’s going to be,” Alston said.

He added that he wasn’t trying to frighten anyone.

“I don’t want to use scare tactics,” Alston said. “I’m telling the truth. It’s a fact that, if we don’t raise taxes and we keep things the same, then the services are going to have to decrease.”

Alston said he wasn’t ready Tuesday to say exactly what the board should do if the bill becomes law.

 “I’ve got to hear from my staff and my fellow colleagues and also the community,” he said.

Alston added that the county may need more time to get public feedback and review options from staff.

“We’ve never been faced with this before,” the chairman said. “For me to say this is what we’re going to do without talking to my fellow commissioners and listening to the community and listening to our options by the staff – I can’t do that.”

He also said the budget vote could be delayed if commissioners need more time.  By law, the county is required to adopt a new budget by July 1 each year.

“If we don’t think that we’re going to be ready to vote on the budget next week, we can always postpone it and possibly get more feedback if we have to,” Alston said.

The bill is separate from the constitutional amendment that will go before voters in November asking whether the state constitution should require limits on property tax increases by local governments.

That constitutional amendment wouldn’t affect Guilford County’s current budget process.  But SB 889 very well could.

The whole debate shows to what extent county leaders and others rely on revaluations to provide hidden tax increases, but they very, very much don’t like the ones that are obvious.  The new law likely coming out of Raleigh can almost be seen as a transparency act – because many of the same commissioners who didn’t have a problem seeing people’s property tax bills go up due to higher property value assessments, do have a big problem when it means that they have to vote in public for a major tax rate hike to fund the same desires.

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