By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
No one wants to pay higher taxes for a jail annex.
But voters might be willing to pay a bit more at the cash register for new emergency radios and towers to make sure firefighters can find their house or an ambulance driver can get to a loved one in a crisis.
Rowan County leaders are counting on it.
County commissioners have rolled their top two public safety needs ó a new jail annex and extensive telecommunications upgrades ó into one referendum that will appear on the ballot countywide.
Voters will decide Nov. 3 whether to increase the county sales tax by one-quarter cent, or one penny for every $4 at the cash register.
“We needed a jail, and it’s not popular. And we needed radios,” County Manager Gary Page said. “By putting it on the ballot together, I knew there would be 750 firefighters and their families voting to support this, and that gave me hope.”
The county must find about $20 million, or $2 million a year for 10 years, to fund the projects, Page said.
If voters reject the sales tax increase next week, the county will be forced to cut the budget by $2 million annually, Page said. Commissioners have ruled out the other alternative, a 2-cent property tax hike.
The choices come down to layoffs and cutting nonessential services such as parks, museums and libraries, Page said.
“We’re quite fearful,” said Fran Burding, president of Friends of the Library. “We’ve given up a lot in the past few years.”
Burding said her organization’s members are encouraging friends and neighbors to vote for the sales tax increase.
“Without the increase, the library would not be able to maintain what we’ve got,” she said.
Rowan Public Library already cut hours and froze positions this year when the county decreased its allocation by $100,000, director Jeff Hall said.
Further cuts could mean fewer employees and hours, Hall said.
“I’m concerned that it could mean layoffs,” he said. Proponents of the sales tax increase face long odds. Across North Carolina, only five out of 35 proposed sales tax increases have passed in two years, Page said.
The $6 million jail annex already has encountered opposition, even though county commissioners have yet to pick a location.
The $12 million radio upgrades have been better received.
The county must upgrade its emergency telecommunications system by 2013, or the radios that firefighters, EMS personnel, emergency dispatchers and even building inspectors use will go silent.
“Basically every public safety officer in the county who talks on a radio uses this thing,” said Rob Robinson, Rowan County 911 telecommunications director.
Robinson’s preliminary study estimates Rowan County will need three new towers, in addition to the single tower now in use. The county could need more than 1,000 new digital radios.
The changes are mandated in part by the Federal Communications Commission and the fact that the current analog radio system will be obsolete by 2013.
Authorities expect the digital conversion to make the county’s already spotty radio coverage even worse.
“We already have numerous dead spots in the county with absolutely no coverage,” said John Morrison, president of the Rowan County Fire and Rescue Association. “Two tower sites would drastically improve, and three towers would give us major coverage.”
The current tower stands at Al’s Knob in Granite Quarry. The county proposes new towers, each about 300 feet tall, at Young Mountain in Cleveland in the west and Pooletown in the southeast.
The county needs a third tower near Enochville in the south, but Page said he hopes Cabarrus County will build a tower nearby and Rowan can rent space on it, saving close to $1.5 million.
The additional towers would boost coverage for another piece of emergency communications equipment: pagers.
While public safety radios in Rowan County use the 800 megahertz system, pagers that alert volunteer firefighters to a fire or medical call still use the older VHF system.
In 2013, when the 800 system goes digital, the federal government will narrow the band for the VHF system.
The new towers would hold VHF antennae to increase coverage for pagers.
“If we don’t have more tower sites out there in the far reaches, their pagers will stop working,” Morrison said. “If the pagers don’t work, we won’t need to talk on our new digital radios because we aren’t going to know we have a call.”
Opposition
The county doesn’t need to raise the sales tax, former commissioner Jim Sides said.
“The projects are necessary, but they have not completely explored avenues of revenue and they have not completely explored expenses,” said Sides, who has publicly opposed the tax hike. “They haven’t done their due diligence.”
The cost of upgrading the telecommunications system could be far less than $12 million if Rowan co-locates on towers in other counties, rather than building its own, Sides said.
And the county doesn’t know yet how many new radios firefighters will need, he said. Some analog radios can be converted to digital.
Page agreed $12 million is an estimate based on a preliminary study. The county will conduct a detailed, department-to-department study soon, with results coming in April, he said.
With those results, Page will apply for Homeland Security grants and federal stimulus funds to further offset the cost, he said.
Any savings, including grants or renting instead of building towers, would go to pay down the debt more quickly, Page said.
“We want to work with whoever is out there to save the taxpayers money,” he said.
Although the current commissioners only want the sales tax increase to run for 10 years, they can’t require a future board to rescind it.
“There’s no guarantee that it will be temporary,” Sides said.
Municipal elections
Sides criticized county leaders for putting the referendum on the ballot during a municipal election year, when turnout is traditionally low.
Because there are no countywide races this year, the sales tax question will be the only item on the ballot in some precincts.
“It could pass with very few votes,” Sides said.
Commissioners could find money for the projects without raising taxes, Sides said.
The ABC system will generate more revenue in the future, and the county eliminated enough positions this year to save $1 million annually, he argued.
The county was forced to cut 16 jobs and freeze five more to balance this year’s budget, Page said. The cuts will not mean additional future revenue, he said.
County revenue has fallen, including sales tax, building permits and recording fees.
“I had to cut 16 positions just to offset the loss of revenue,” he said.
Commissioner Raymond Coltrain said it would take cutting 65 county jobs to generate $2 million a year.
The new jail annex will require 12 additional employees, he said.
Deliver in short term
A sales tax is fair, said Robinson, the 911 telecommunications director.
“Instead of going up on property taxes, a sales tax also collects from people who rent, people who travel through our county,” Robinson said. “We get a lot of calls for service from the interstate.”
Some citizens think the county should use the surcharge collected on telephone bills to pay for new radios, he said. But that’s illegal.
The money goes to computers, telephones and other equipment inside 911 communication centers.
People rarely vote to raise their own taxes, said Dr. Benjamin Russo, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“The sales tax has serious problems, but they are less serious at the local level than the state level,” Russo said. “The sales tax base has been eroding for 30 years because of a shift from consumption toward services, away from tangible goods.”
While the sales tax isn’t viable as a sustainable revenue source, it can deliver in the short term, Russo said.
“This is a quarter-cent, that’s hard to see. And it’s meant to be temporary,” he said. “While the sales tax tends to be regressive, even poor folks won’t see that much increase.”
The sales tax increase would add 25 cents to a $100 purchase.
“People hear ‘tax’ and they close their mind,” Coltrain said. “But if someone buys an item that’s $4, this will require them to pay one more penny.”
If the referendum passes, the sales tax will increase in April 2010.