RALEIGH – At about this time every year, some elected officials and political activists in my home county of Mecklenburg get mad at me. Their peers in Catawba County, where my twin brother now makes his home, also get perturbed.
It’s not my fault – really. Nor is it my intent. It’s just the way things look by the numbers, by which I mean the statistics showing variances in cost of government across North Carolina’s localities. The By the Numbers report, published since 1998 by JLF’s Center for Local Innovation, uses data reported by cities and counties to the Office of the State Treasurer to compute local-government costs per resident and, for county comparisons, as a share of personal income.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Hickory-Catawba tend to come out higher in the comparison than their leaders would like. In the new report, Charlotte’s taxes and fees were tops among large North Carolina cities for the fifth year in a row, coming in at $2,185 per person. That’s far higher than the cost of local government in the state’s second largest city, Raleigh, which invites the question of whether Charlotte residents believe they are better served by their local governments than residents of Raleigh do. I tend to doubt it, but I’m willing to listen to a counterargument.
Charlotte’s high ranking is partly due to the fact that Mecklenburg imposes an extra half-cent sales tax to fund a proposed history museum. (Well, some people call it a mass-transit system, actually, but I prefer to think of the Charlotte project as a very expensive way to commemorate the period before modern transportation when people were compelled to travel around town in trolleys and choo-choos.) Perhaps if some Wake County leaders get their way, the gap will close in future reports.
In Hickory’s case, local officials and boosters have complained for years that our analysis portrays the community unfairly. Its sales-tax collections are not boosted by a special tax rate but instead by sizable inflows of workers and shoppers, they say. Why penalize Hickory and Catawba County in the rankings by treating those tax collections as bearing down on local residents?
That misstates the purpose of the report. Ranking high in the cost of local government does not necessarily mean that a community is unattractive or its governments are poorly managed. The issues are more complex than that. In this specific case, where you have a comparatively small city (Hickory) in the center of a significant metro area (the 4th-most-populous in the state), the sales-tax figure is probably boosted quite a bit by out-of-towners. But that’s not the whole story. Hickory’s property-tax figure is also higher than average. Moreover, if the city is collecting a lot of tax money from visitors, thus shifting the cost of providing local services to them to some degree, why aren’t local taxpayers receiving the benefits of that via comparatively lower property taxes?
Obviously, Charlotte and the Catawba Valley are both places that many people enjoy living and working in, and that continue to attract new residents. They have many selling points. A relatively low cost of government is not one of them. That’s the basic message of By the Numbers. If the message is unwelcome, perhaps the right approach would be to focus on what factors under the control of government leaders could be adjusted to yield a different message in the future.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.