I'm Taking a New Job, but Budget Shows the Need to Keep an Eye on Transylvania

As excited as I am about my new post with Asheville Watchdog, an outstanding and inspired effort to revive local journalism, I worry about leaving my old one.

Transylvania County Manager Jaime Laughter at a meeting last year

BREVARD — My mixed feelings about pulling away from NewsBeat can be summed up with one number: 5.9 percent.

That’s the amount Transylvania County Manager Jaime Laughter said fire department budgets would increase this fiscal year.

Huh?

How’s that possible, I thought as I heard that figure repeated during the County Commission’s recent budget discussions?

How does that work out considering the then-recommended and since-approved budget called for more than doubling the revenue-neutral fire tax rate? (It’s a little more complicated, as I’ll explain below, but still . . . )

How could this be when Laughter was touting big benefits and needs the new assessment would cover — a quadrupling of the minimum number of paid, full-time firefighters at each department and the skyrocketing costs of engines and other equipment?

Could the increase actually be that low?

No, not even close.

According to last year’s budget ordinance, the county’s eight departments received $3.25 million from the 5.5-cent fire service property tax. Another $1.49 million in the general fund was marked as a “fire service supplement.”

The combined total: $4.74 million.

The new 7-cent fire assessment eliminates the need for the contribution from the general fund, which is one reason it’s so much higher than the revenue-neutral rate.

But even without the general-fund infusion, it will raise $6.78 million in revenue, according to the county’s newly adopted budget ordinance.

That’s about $2 million, or 43 percent, more than last year.

Wow.

How did Laughter get her number?

Not sure exactly, though the slide presented at the June 17 budget workshop put the Brevard Fire Department and the Transylvania County Rescue Squad in the mix, even though they’re not funded by the fire tax this year. And it included grants and donations that do not “come from the county,” the slide said, without breaking down these contributions.

The point of the many hours of the, count ‘em, five separate budget discussions was supposedly “transparency.” Laughter and commissioners said so over and over.

Okay, but if that was the case she would have focused on the funds that actually do come from the county. That’s the number taxpayers care about, the one that clearly answers their main question: How much more of my money is going to fire services?

The short answer — a whole bunch.

You didn’t really hear that in the budget presentations, which wasn’t the only misleading part.

How about the claim that this year’s tax increase would be the first one in a decade not specifically devoted to capital improvements? Laughter said it more than once. Commissioner Teresa McCall, her most reliable parrot, said it even more often.

And it’s not true. Just look at the minutes of budget discussions from 2021, the last year county property values were reappraised.

The Commission approved a tax rate significantly higher than the revenue-neutral rate for fiscal year 2021-22. The purpose, according to the minutes, was to supplement fire service, which was not necessarily a capital expense, and to cover a “shortfall in solid waste operations,” which definitely wasn’t.

This is a familiar narrative, of course — Laughter putting her vast knowledge in the service of political spin.

As I documented in my profile of her last year, she repeatedly did it when the commissioners were under fire for neglecting their voter-mandated duty to pay for school improvements.

This year’s tax increase was advantageously timed, coming a year after the election of the three commissioners most firmly in the Laughter camp — McCall, Larry Chapman and Chair Jason Chappell.

Even safely ensconced in their seats for another term, they surely didn’t want to broadcast information that might diminish their well-cultivated personas as hard-right fiscal hawks.

They didn’t need anybody talking about the total increase in the fire and general fund property tax rate, 15 percent. They definitely didn’t want it known they were voting for a 43-percent increase in property tax revenue for fire.

I should add there’s another way to look at this, one that makes Laughter look pretty masterful. Maybe political theater was the only way she could both protect her Commission from a conservative electorate and pass a responsible budget addressing long-neglected needs.

As a taxpayer — and a resident of the area evacuated for this spring’s wildfires — I’m glad to pay more to professionalize the departments. I’m glad to see that money in the general fund will be available for competitive pay for teachers and to help build a new courthouse.

I was also glad to see commissioners Jake Dalton and Chase McKelvey asking pointed questions about the budget and demonstrating independence by voting against it. Our Commission is no longer in lockstep. How refreshing.

But this group, not to mention the School Board and the Brevard City Council, also needs outside scrutiny, which I regret to say I will no longer be able to provide, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Starting next week, I’ll be working as a writer/editor for Asheville Watchdog. I might continue to post occasionally on NewsBeat but not enough to justify charging readers for it. As of today, I will stop taking money from NewsBeat’s relatively few but highly appreciated paid subscribers.

What you might get from NewsBeat are links to Watchdog stories, which are probably the most consistently excellent of any news organization’s in the state and often highly relevant to Transylvania readers.

No reporters did a better job covering the shattering of local health care in the wake of HCA’s purchase of Mission Health, which is, of course, the owner of Transylvania Regional Hospital.

Nowhere will you find more impressive investigative work than this series highlighting unscrupulous operators who took advantage of vulnerable property owners — and an archaic state law. In other words, it could happen just as easily in Brevard.

Watchdog won a national investigative journalism award for these stories, which is no surprise considering the writer is a former Pulitzer Prize winner.

She’s not the only one on Watchdog’s leadership team, which also includes former high-level editors and publishers of some of the biggest and best newspapers in the country.

These people are very good, in other words, and very worthy of the donations needed to provide this extremely valuable service.

The chance to work with such accomplished and committed journalists makes this probably the best job offer I’ve ever had, one I couldn’t turn down.

Overall, I’m thrilled.

My only misgiving is that I won’t be able to provide the regular local coverage that has been extremely rewarding to me and, I like to think, important to the community.

At least I won’t be able to do it full time. But I will work Transylvania’s issues into stories about larger regional topics. So do me and yourselves a favor. Keep an eye on the doings of the Council, the School Board, the County Commission.

Let me know if they do something really newsworthy and I’ll get it to the readers of NewsBeat or, better yet, the much bigger audience of Watchdog.

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com