When N.C. Rep. Carl Ford was elected to the General Assembly in 2012, he set about doing, it seemed, the bidding of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, including helping to de-annex the county airport from city limits.
If carrying county commissioners’ water in Raleigh had been Ford’s only motivation, it wouldn’t have been all that surprising, considering he is a former chairman of the county board.
But now it looks as if Ford may have been at the vanguard of a movement in the Republican majority whose assumption of power coincided with his arrival in Raleigh. The current state legislature appears to include a large number of lawmakers who distrust — if not outright disdain — North Carolina’s cities and towns.
The General Assembly has already put an end to involuntary annexation, municipalities’ primary means of growth for decades. While flawed, involuntary annexation was governed by state law dictating how and when it could be used and giving residents in areas targeted for annexation recourse in the courts if they were opposed.
Just last month, into a bill on the natural gas extraction method known as fracking, lawmakers slipped a provision that would have limited the property tax revenue cities and towns can collect to no more than 8 percent above the previous year’s revenue.
That provision was taken out of the bill at the last minute, but is apparently still a live issue in Raleigh.
Now the state has done away municipalities’ ability to charge license fees of businesses within their limits.
Proponents of the repeal quickly passed last week say the fees are too uneven across the state and that some cities use them “egregiously.” As an example, they point to Charlotte, which charges firms located in other counties, states and countries for the privilege of doing business within its corporate limits.
Maybe so, but some municipalities have varied business privilege fees for good reason, such as setting higher costs for Internet gambling concerns that keep finding ways around laws and court orders banning them.
Legislators say they’ll come up with a way to replace revenue municipalities collected through business license fees, and Gov. Pat McCrory, a former Charlotte mayor, cited that pledge when he signed the repeal into law. If they don’t, cities and towns will have to raise taxes or reduce services to make up for the loss.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, and that the party of small government will stop meddling in smaller governments from Raleigh. The majority in the legislature needs to realize that if they continue on this path, the pain will spread beyond the limits of cities and towns. Municipalities won’t be the only area of destruction; they’ll just be the craters where the bombs were dropped.