Don’t expect a sales tax increase in Vance County any time soon, Schools Superintendent Norm Shearin said Wednesday.
Asked about the prospects for the General Assembly to pass local legislation allowing a Vance County referendum on raising the sales tax by up to 1 cent, Shearin said: “I’m not optimistic.”
The proposal grew out of meetings between school and county officials to find a way to finance the school system’s capital needs. In December, the Board of Education sent the county commissioners a $28.1 million facilities plan and a request for a bond referendum to pay for it.
But the commissioners balked at the expected impact of a school bond of that size on the property tax rate, already among the state’s highest at 90 cents per $100 of valuation: an increase of 15 or 16 cents.
So Board of Education Chairman Tommy Riddle suggested a 1-cent local sales tax dedicated to school capital needs, raising the rate to 8 percent in Vance, and Shearin has embraced the proposal as the perfect solution. It would raise about $3 million per year, enough to pay for a third middle school in four years and a replacement for Clark Street Elementary School in an additional three years.
The tax would provide a permanent source of money for school facility projects. That difference is one of the advantages of a tax over a bond referendum.
The Board of Commissioners, at the recommendation of County Manager Jerry Ayscue, unanimously asked the area’s legislators this month to pursue legislation that would authorize a binding referendum on a sales tax increase. The commissioners endorsed a multiple-choice approach: piggybacking on a Pitt County bill that would do the same thing there, except that the money would be for the schools or the community college; joining that bill but getting it changed to drop the community college and allow up to a 1-cent increase, instead of a flat 1 cent; or introducing a Vance-only bill that meets the county’s needs.
Reps. Jim Crawford and Michael Wray agreed to push the sales tax for Vance, but Shearin said Wednesday that they are running into legislators’ long-held belief that the sales tax is a state prerogative and the property tax is the local revenue source.
Shearin said he doubts any of the several local sales tax bills introduced this session will pass.
Wray has said the proposed state lottery, from which 50 percent of the profits would go for school construction, could be the answer for Vance and other counties with heavy school construction needs. But county officials continue to push for the sales tax.
“The lottery is not going to meet our needs,” said Shearin, who nonetheless supports the education lottery proposal that the state House sent to the Senate this spring.
Shearin plays the Virginia lottery regularly, spending $10 per week to buy five tickets for himself and five for his wife. “I can tell you exactly how far I have to drive to buy a lottery ticket: 22 miles.”
The superintendent would rather see his money and that of other residents of border counties go to North Carolina schools. He also would prefer that 75 percent of the revenue went to bricks and mortar instead of 50 percent, but Shearin will take what he can get.
Still, his school system needs two new schools, Shearin said, and a lottery won’t buy them.
He said he’d settle for a half-cent sales tax increase, just to have something to move toward building a school that would relieve crowding at Eaton-Johnson and Henderson middle schools.
“We honestly don’t have a plan” without the sales tax, Shearin said.