The quarter-cent sales tax option has been put on the ballot a half dozen times before in Guilford County and it has failed every time; and it’s likely to fail this time – as it should.

Yes, the county commissioners have pledged to use that money to pay school salaries and, yes, most people will not notice the increase in the cost of their daily purchases, and yes, one big benefit is that much of it – supporters say 40 percent, but that number is questionable – will be paid by people who live outside the county.

It is also true that the teachers, teachers’ assistants and many others in Guilford County Schools are underpaid, and the school system’s “classified” workers – such as cafeteria workers, bus drivers and janitors – are woefully underpaid.

The quarter-cent sales tax hike has been approved by voters in 46 counties across North Carolina – nearly half of the counties in the state – so why don’t voters in Guilford County ever approve it?

Here’s why: Because it will provide the Guilford County Board of Commissioners with another $25 million or so annually to spend.

 The board will spend that money on teacher pay and other salaries, just as they’ve promised, but having that money available for that purpose will not “save” the county $25 million – because the current Board of Commissioners, with a 7-2 Democratic majority, will just find something else to spend that “freed-up” money on.

Guilford County Schools isn’t just funded by Guilford County. It is funded by federal and state government as well.  And, in recent years, ever since the Democrats took control of the Board of Commissioners, the board, in conjunction with Guilford County Manager Mike Halford, has been very, very generous when it comes to increasing the amount of money the county gives to the schools for operating expenses – which includes money used for salaries.

(Not to mention that the county has taken on $2 billion in debt in recent years to build new schools.)

 Currently, nearly half of Guilford County’s budget each year goes to funding education and paying off debt from school bonds.  A very small part of that education funding goes to Guilford Technical Community College, but the point is that the county (read: county taxpayers) is already giving to the schools until it hurts.

The commissioners always say that money is tight, but, in reality, they always seem to find money for projects that they want to fund. They found $300,000 to fund a Minority and Women-Business Enterprise study and then used that study to justify nearly tripling the number of positions in the MWBE Department overnight.

 Not that many years ago, the county’s public relations needs were handled by the Clerk to the Board. Former County Manager Marty Lawing practically begged the Republican-led board year after year for one lone public relations employee position and the Republican board turned him down time and again.

That all changed when the Democrats took control of the board four years ago: The Guilford County Public Relations Department now has five employees and a budget of over a million dollars.

 In the most recent budget, the commissioners handed out a total of $1.7 million to a long list of non-profits that included many recipients who were selected because one or more of the commissioners had friendships with those running the organization.

In the last four years, since the Democrats took over control of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, the board has increased the county’s budget by roughly $200 million – more than four times greater than the previous Republican-led Board of Commissioners did in the eight years controlling the board from 2012 to 2020.

In the eight years of Republican rule under leaders like Commissioners Jeff Phillips, Hank Henning, Alan Branson, Justin Conrad and Alan Perdue, the county budget increased by a total of $48 million, while, in half that time – just four years – the Democrats on the board have more than quadrupled that amount of an increase in spending.

Also, in past years, when the county’s Tax Department revalued all the property in the county, the Republican commissioners lowered the tax rate to keep the county “revenue neutral” – that is, though housing prices went up, property tax bills remained the same.

Contrast that with what happened in 2022.

During that year – the most recent countywide property revaluation – the Democrat-led board didn’t adjust the tax rate to compensate for the higher property values.  The board kept the tax rate the same – which equaled a 14-cent tax increase per $100 of assessed property value. That’s the largest tax increase this century by far and almost certainly the greatest tax increase in the history of Guilford County.

They did not cut the tax rate by even a dime a person – they kept all that money and now, each year, they spend every bit of it and more by taking on new debt.

That revaluation with no drop in the tax rate now brings in about $92 million extra each year in revenue, but every year they spend every penny of it.

Sure, the board would like to have another $25 million a year, but with the spending habits like this board has, it should be obvious why they can’t have nice things.

The county and the schools should pay the school system employees much better than they do, but that money should come from cuts in unneeded county spending, and cuts in unneeded school spending, by petitioning the federal government for more school funds, by asking the state government to better fund the schools – or by seeking other options, such as redrawing district lines in a way that makes sense so you don’t have one school overcrowded near another one that has tons of unused space, or by cutting out the positions of some school administrators when those positions become vacant.

I haven’t looked into the most recent numbers but here is a fact that the Rhino Times reported in 2018: “Over the last decade, the Guilford County School system has added twice as many employees as it has students.”

  That is, for every student added in that decade, the system added two new positions.

Maybe, in the future, the schools should just hire one new employee every time the number of students in the system goes up by one.

The salaries of front-line school workers should be increased; however, voting to raise taxes even more on yourself and giving the current Board of Commissioners another $25 million a year isn’t the way to do it.

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