The property tax revaluation for 2020 is well underway, with a public hearing set for 6:30 p.m. Monday during the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners meeting. The new values could mean discounts for some and higher taxes for others when it comes down to setting the tax rate at a revenue-neutral number.
When tax assessor Eddie Allen presented the schedule of values to the court board at the Oct. 7 meeting, Commissioners Dan Eichenbaum and C.B. McKinnon reminded everyone that they are philosophically against property taxes.
“I believe it is a tax on your freedom,” Eichenbaum said, as he has many times both in council chambers as well as his online blog, Dr. Dan’s Freedom Forum.
“If the government can take your private property by regulation, taxation or outright confiscation through eminent domain abuse, is it really yours or are they just letting you use it as long as you are an obedient servant?” Eichenbaum wrote on his blog in 2014. “To our nation’s founders, the totality of your private property consisted of your land, your home, your possessions, the work of your hands, the ideas of your mind and your life itself.”
McKinnon echoed the sentiment. “If the state would allow us,” he said, “we would switch to sales tax.”
It would take something like that from the N.C. General Assembly to change the way taxes are collected. State statutes require a certain amount of the county’s sales tax revenue to be used for school capital only, according to Cherokee County finance officer Candy Anderson.
If those state requirements remained, the county’s sales tax rate would likely need to be doubled to around 14 percent to keep overall tax revenue the same, Anderson said last week. If they lessened some of the requirements on school capital purchases, the rate could drop to 12-13 percent.
That would flatten out the amount that everyone contributes to the county, regardless of property ownership or financial status. This would likely be a hardship for those battling the poverty line, while allowing those with money some breaks along with the chance to spend more and increase the county’s kitty.
One benefit of this move, McKinnon said, is promoting business growth here because of the lack of property taxes. If that happened and it added jobs to where more people had money to spend to fuel that consumption, it could theoretically be a success.
Stafford, Texas, abolished property taxes and increased sales tax to offset it, leading to stories about what a bright new approach this was. Even there, they still charge a county tax and school tax, which would change the equation significantly.
Another problem for Cherokee County is that we are uniquely positioned for this to be a disaster due to our proximity to two other states, Georgia and Tennessee. The figures of the sales tax doubling is based on 2019 sales figures, so if sales dropped, the rate would have to increase even more to offset the county’s revenue losses.
There is no question that Cherokee County residents who can easily reach stores in north Georgia would likely turn there if local prices became burdensome with a 14 percent sales tax rate. That could plummet sales and disrupt the entire premise from the ground up.
At the end of the day, it would be difficult to see a sales-tax-only plan working in Cherokee County. So we may have to keep paying those property taxes for a while to keep the government running smoothly.
– Editor Matthew Osborne
OUR VIEW: Property taxes tough to abolish
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