- The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled against both Roanoke Rapids and Halifax County in a dispute over city funding of the county's 911 center.
- The unanimous decision arrived nearly two years after the court heard arguments from the city and county.
- Appellate judges agreed that neither Roanoke Rapids nor Halifax County had standing to pursue the case through the state's Uniform Declaratory Judgment Act.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled against both Roanoke Rapids and Halifax County in their dispute over funding for the county’s 911 center. The decision arrived nearly two years after the state’s second-highest court heard arguments in the case.
A unanimous three-judge appellate panel agreed Wednesday that neither the plaintiff city nor the defendant county had a right to settle the funding dispute through North Carolina’s Uniform Declaratory Judgment Act.
“Neither party has established standing to seek declaratory relief under the UDJA,” Judge Fred Gore wrote in an unpublished opinion. Those opinions have limited value as precedents. “Plaintiff failed to identify a cognizable legal right or show a legal injury attributable to defendant’s conduct. Likewise, defendant’s counterclaim rests on hypothetical and unsupported assertions, without reference to any statute conferring a legally enforceable right or providing a private cause of action.”
Roanoke Rapids went to court when Halifax County planned to bill the city more than $400,000 for 911 center operations in 2022-23. That was despite Roanoke Rapids’ decision to allow a funding agreement with the county to lapse in 2021.
Superior Court Judge Jeffery Foster ruled in January 2023 that Halifax County must make its 911 center available to Roanoke Rapids and take calls on the city’s behalf. But the judge also agreed with the county that Halifax was “constitutionally and statutorily barred” from bearing the center’s full costs.
Foster determined that the city must bear some costs of operating the county 911 center. The judge set a formula for calculating Roanoke Rapids’ cost: “the City’s percentage of the PSAP’s total annual call volume would be calculated and applied to the County’s actual costs for PSAP personnel for the year, rather than its budgeted costs.”
Roanoke Rapids appealed that ruling.
Gore and Judges Allegra Collins and Julee Flood overturned Foster’s ruling about the funding formula. At the same time, the panel agreed with the trial court’s ruling against Roanoke Rapids.
“The closest plaintiff comes to asserting a statutory right is its allegation that, under Chapter 143B and related administrative code provisions, defendant is required to provide dispatch services to plaintiff’s agencies at no cost,” Gore wrote. “However, plaintiff fails to identify a specific statute conferring this right or a private cause of action to enforce it. Instead, plaintiff simply asserts that the trial court must determine the parties’ rights under the UDJA. While the UDJA is remedial and to be liberally construed, it does not grant courts unlimited authority to issue advisory opinions. Plaintiff’s request seeks precisely that — an abstract declaration of what the law is, untethered to a demonstrated legal injury.”
Halifax County has not disputed its responsibility to continue providing 911 center services for Roanoke Rapids, Gore noted.
“Defendant continues to provide call taking services for plaintiff’s emergency agencies and denies any intent to deviate from its statutory duty,” the Appeals Court opinion explained. “Notably, defendant asserts there is no justiciable controversy regarding its obligation to provide such services and argues the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to issue a declaratory judgment on that issue. The real dispute concerns whether plaintiff must pay for PSAP services — not whether defendant must continue providing them.”
The county did not a find a state law compelling Roanoke Rapids to pay for 911 services at the county’s public safety answering point.
“Here, defendant cites North Carolina law that may be generally relevant to the dispute, but it fails to identify any statute that confers standing to challenge plaintiff’s refusal to contribute to PSAP costs,” Gore wrote.
“The first component of defendant’s requested declaration seeks a determination that it lacks statutory authority to fund plaintiff’s public safety agencies,” he added. “But this presents a hypothetical question — whether a course of action defendant has not taken would be unlawful. In doing so, defendant positions itself as adverse to its own potential conduct, not to plaintiff or any proper party.”
“This amounts to a request for an advisory opinion based on an abstract scenario,” Gore explained. “As this Court has explained, ‘declaratory judgments should not be made “in the air” … without definite concrete application to a particular state of facts.’”
Neither Roanoke Rapids nor Halifax County has legal standing to pursue the case, Gore wrote.
“[T]he following remains true: defendant has not (i) identified a statute that expressly imposes a financial obligation on plaintiff; (ii) cited any law guaranteeing defendant the right to reimbursement for PSAP costs; (iii) alleged that plaintiff violated such a right; or (iv) shown standing to assert a claim under any such statute,” he explained. “Like plaintiff, defendant has ‘failed to allege the infringement of a legally enforceable right sufficient to establish standing.’”
City officials had argued that a change in state law that took effect in 2010 required Halifax County to provide 911 services to the city, regardless of whether Roanoke Rapids paid any portion of the bill for public safety answering point.
“Our position is merely that if the state says, ‘Alright, you can set up a public safety answering point,’ and an entity such as the county says, ‘Alright, we’re going to set up a public safety answering point that’s going to cover this jurisdiction, and we’re going to maintain it,’ they get a couple things,” lawyer Geoffrey Davis argued for Roanoke Rapids in October 2023. “They get funding that comes in from that, but they also get the responsibility and the obligation to dispatch to … whoever is maintaining those emergency services within that area that they’re covering.”
“What’s before this court today is something that’s never been before this court before,” responded Halifax County Attorney Glynn Rollins. “That’s whether or not a local government that is operating a PSAP that also has other local governments that need access to that PSAP is required to bear the costs of operating that PSAP on its own. We contend that it’s not.”