By Patty White
Siler City, NC – Property taxes are an extremely sore subject with me. And as I’ve read the discourse over the last several weeks I’ve tried really hard to stay out of the fray. The one thing that comes to mind though, as all of us property owners are arguing about how much it’s going up or not, is how hard all the real estate agents and developers in this county are laughing.
My position is this. I own 50 acres of land and a home that sits on it. My land does not ride a school bus. It does not travel the road. It does not use sewer. It doesn’t consume any county resources. It just sits there for me to enjoy and to hobby farm and to harvest from.
Why then, long after it’s paid for and I “own” it, am I to be charged more and more, year after year after year for burgeoning services I will never see a benefit from or consume? We all already pay taxes for so many things that that money is supposed to cover – gas tax, registration fees, sales tax, licenses, transaction fees, etc.
I can see paying “something” in property taxes because I do use the county recycling and waste facility and, yes, there are things like fire and sheriff coverage to be considered. Certainly, certainly I should contribute to those county services. But to have a huge tax burden on my land in the rural southwest part of the county because some fancy neighborhood is going in twenty-five miles away and “they need services” is just not right.
What I think we are missing is the defeat of the real estate transfer tax years ago. In my little world, that would have put the tax burden where it belonged; on the sale or resale of each lot or home in these new developments. Why not? What better time for anyone to be able to pay taxes than when they are releasing cash from that property? If I sold my land I’d have a release of funds. And although it would cut into my cash receipt, it would be less painful than watching both my age and property tax burden increase year after year as I get closer each day to a hoped for retirement!
Oh, but that transfer tax would cut into the real estate sales commissions and add to developers’ costs! I’m sure that crowd cried loudly enough that such a transfer tax would “stifle development” or “decrease affordability for homebuyers”. That’s when you find out money talks; because none of that burden on them compares to the regular folks who’ve worked all their lives to buy and pay for a place to live, only to find they’ll never, ever really “own” it. And then they’ll live in fear of an ever growing tax burden that those who inflicted it; couldn’t care less about.
Property taxes, the way they are applied in my opinion, are the biggest rip off, period.