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The damage that Republican majorities in the North Carolina legislature have inflicted on the state’s core public structures and services over the last decade-plus is hard to overstate. One need only glance at our threadbare, dispirited and, in many instances, crumbling public schools to see this destructive handiwork in action.
As veteran business and public education leader Paul Fulton noted recently in a scathing op-ed, “North Carolina ranks 48th in the country in per-student spending, falling nearly $5,000 below the national average, and 49th in funding effort, or the amount of spending on public education as a percentage of the state’s economy.”
Of course, the chief source of this disastrous trend is no mystery. The falloff stems directly from the ongoing series of regressive state income tax cuts that Republican legislators have bestowed on wealthy individuals and profitable corporations (many of them located out-of-state).
Together, these massive cuts have contributed to a situation in which state revenues and public investments as a share of total state income have plummeted. In 2024 for instance, the state General Fund budget was around 21% lower by this measure than it was in 2009. In previous years, the gap exceeded 30%. All told, North Carolina has disinvested in government to the tune of tens of billions of dollars over past decade-and-a-half — a time during which the state’s population (and the accompanying demand for services) has been growing rapidly.
The massive tax and spending cuts included in the megabill signed into law by President Trump earlier this month will only worsen this situation.
As noted, the real-world impacts of this trend are not hard to find. From our overworked and underpaid public school teachers, mental health facility workers, and public safety officers to the scores of inadequate infrastructure projects that were overwhelmed by recent flooding disasters, the lack of resources to meet basic societal needs is painfully evident.
But there’s another big, negative and less immediately obvious impact: the effect on local governments and the property taxes on which they rely.
Thanks to fast rising home prices, there’s a growing need to update and raise property tax exemptions for seniors and other homeowners on fixed incomes, so they’re not forced out of their homes.
As NC Newsline’s Greg Childress has reported on multiple occasions in recent years, this is a big problem for aging homeowners – especially those in gentrifying neighborhoods who purchased their homes as young people and who now confront property tax valuations of five or six times the original purchase price.
At a June legislative hearing, Mary Bethel, chairwoman of the North Carolina Coalition on Aging, said property taxes have replaced transportation as the top concern seniors face.
“We constantly hear from people [who] have been in their homes for decades, who basically cannot afford their property taxes,” Bethel said. “This is happening not only in large metropolitan areas like Wake County where you’ve got a lot of big homes that are expensive, going up in neighborhoods that have lower income homes, but it’s also happening in smaller counties too where the property tax base is their primary source of revenue, so it’s a big issue.”
As Childress has also reported, however, this reality often leaves local governments stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Most county and city officials understand that the core services they provide – schools, law enforcement, public safety, sanitation, human services – are absolutely necessary in order for their communities to remain healthy.
Unfortunately, because of plummeting income tax revenues, both the state and federal government have become much less able than in the past to do their part in funding services and/or aiding counties and cities in filling revenue holes.
This is one of the main reasons, for instance, that Mecklenburg County commissioners were forced to raise property taxes by 1% earlier this month.
And it’s also one of the reasons that the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners was forced, reluctantly, to oppose bills in the state legislature during the 2025 session that would have raised property tax exemptions for people on fixed incomes.
As association executive director Kevin Leonard wrote in a letter to lawmakers back in March, this conundrum is one that’s proving especially burdensome to counties damaged last year by Hurricane Helene.
“These counties already face reduced property tax revenue for FY 2025-26 and beyond because real property that was damaged and not repaired or replaced as of January 1, 2025, will be excluded from the tax base for the upcoming year,” Leonard said.
This is, in short, a classic story of irresponsible buck passing. By slashing income taxes, state and federal lawmakers have unjustly shifted responsibility for funding core public services further onto local governments and ultimately, when those governments have nowhere else to turn, onto people of modest means like senior homeowners. One can only hope that the impacted taxpayers are paying sufficient attention so that they’ll know where to direct their ire.
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