By Mark Stinson
Siler City, NC – It’s been clear for some time that new developments do not in any way pay their own way. We have to shoulder the burden for them to even exist. Sure, the developers finance construction, but that’s it.
They don’t pay for new schools, medical facilities, fire, or infrastructure and those employees who support it all. Somehow it’s been established that we should all pay part of that and that is wrong! The reality is the more people you put in an area the more everyone has to pay. It’s always unfair to those who were here first; who didn’t want to live in the crowd. It’s not my development. I don’t live there. I don’t get any of the benefits of the new homes. I don’t get to utilize anything from a new development, so why is it my responsibility to help it exist?
Clearly something from the time this country was founded to now, something has gone radically wrong with how the founding fathers wanted governance to be limited and everyone to be free and taxed less because we are not. We are chained to a big wasteful governance that tries to spread the wealth by spreading the expense and it’s not working for us anymore.
My thoughts are that new developments need to be taxed at a higher rate or there needs to be an ongoing high density yearly impact tax applied to them for them to pay their own way. These developments are like towns in many ways and towns collect taxes on top of county taxes. Why not do the same with developments?
Any high density populated development should be treated like a town and taxed in a similar way to pay its own way so it doesn’t lay the burden on others who don’t live in it. It is not my responsibility to send my money across the county to pay for schools, law enforcement and everything that goes with it when I can’t even get a fire hydrant with county water line up to code here. I vent a lot online like many of us do but that’s it; we vent our frustrations.
The local powers that be don’t need to worry about us peace loving citizens who are fed up. They need to worry about those who the tax burden has gone too far, too much and is affecting their quality of life that suffer in silence while looking at ways to make each and every person responsible for taxing them out of their homes suffer. I am afraid if the tax rate doesn’t drop down into the lower 50 cents per hundred we may see a breaking point where those who can’t take it anymore will have had enough. We literally have our money extorted by the county to pay for things many of us never get any benefit from .
I would love to see the county budget explained in clear English to all of us. I would like to see it dissected down to where every dime goes and why. Sure they post it online but its not clearly explained. You just see numbers and where it goes with how much but no explanation as to what that money is really spent on.
I would like to see some significant tax relief for those of us who have lived here all our lives who may just be taxed out of our family homes. The tax relief recently passed is useless for many. It’s just nice fancy paperwork with tax relief written on it to make politicians look good and get a few votes from folks to dumb to realize it really doesn’t help. I really would like to see how the money is spent.
I am hearing they want a 41 percent increase in spending. Our incomes have not gone up 41%. They assume we can pay more. No, that’s not it. They don’t care that we can’t pay more. They have the power to extort the money from us and if we don’t pay they simply take our property. We no longer have a county governance for the people, we have a county mob that extorts our money so developers can get rich .
You can’t lay all the blame on the county commissioners. They didn’t create the problem but they could fix it and should if they really are public servants as they are supposed to be responsible to all of the voters of this county. Not just one corner of it. We all need to vote better and all of us need to do it every time a poll opens.
Governance needs to work for us, not the other way around.
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