Do we want to allow the county to confiscate a person's property because of a $50 unpaid fee? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

If you don't think so, pay attention to this drainage district issue

    At their December 3, 2012 regular monthly meeting the Beaufort County Board of Commissioner the board heard a "report" from the county's Tax Collector about drainage district assessments. At an earlier the commissioners of some of the drainage districts in the county had asked the County Commission to collect their assessments. It seems that the problem is that after the drainage district commissioners make their assessments a number of property owners have not been paying them. So the drainage district commissioners want the County to collect the money for them.

    State law mandates that if the drainage districts ask the county to bill the assessments on the regular property tax bills the county must do so, by law. But the law does not say how those assessments will be collected if the property owners don't pay. So the real issue becomes enforcement.

    In the video below you have to remember that issue to understand what is being discussed.

    Property taxes are assessed by the Board of County Commissioners. If you don't pay your vehicle property tax you are barred from getting you license plate renewed. If you don't pay your real estate taxes they can condemn you property and foreclose on it. In other words the government can confiscate your land if you don't pay your property taxes.

    But drainage district assessments are not property taxes, per se. They are more akin to homeowner association dues and assessments. So what you have here really is the drainage district commissioner wanting the county to collect their assessments as if those assessments are property taxes.

    In the discussion Hood Richardson raised the issue of enforcement. But the issue does not seem to be understood by the Tax Collector or the County Manager. What Hood wants, if the county is going to bill the assessments as a party of the property tax levies, is that it is understood by a contractual agreement with the drainage districts that the county will not be liable for collecting the drainage assessments, or at least not have carry the burden of foreclosing on the property in order to collect the drainage district assessments.

    Apparently that issue will be considered further and brought back to the Board for a decision.

    With that in mind, watch the discussion in this video clip:


    Commentary

    Every now and then an issue comes along that most of us just gloss over as not being important but in reality is very important as a matter of principle. This is one of those issues.

    The issue here, we think, is private property rights. Put in the interrogative, it is: Should the government be able to confiscate a person's property because they don't pay a trivial fee?

    Drainage districts are, in the total scheme of things, relatively unimportant. If we did not have them most of us would never know they had disappeared. Sure, having an effective drainage system is important but the small fees that are assessed to maintain them don't insure their effectiveness. And even if the effectiveness of the drainage system is important, it should rest on an age-old principle: The people who benefit should choose whether to participate or not. In other words, drainage districts should meet the "satisfied customer" standard. Or, to put it another way, the user should decide whether they benefit or not and pay accordingly. If a user chooses not to pay they should not be afforded the service. If their lack of participation damages another, the one damaged should be able to use a civil suit to remedy the injury done by someone being the proximate cause of their injury.

    But the county should not use confiscatory power to enforce collection of drainage district assessments.

    We have no problem with the county billing property owners for the assessments the drainage district assesses. But that is as far as the county should go. It should never condemn and then foreclose on a piece of property to collect a relatively trivial amount of money when not doing so will not harm the general welfare.

    In fact, condemnation is not a practical way to collect relatively small amounts of money. Drainage assessments are based on the amount of property involved but for a typical resident this amounts to less than a hundred dollars a year, we are told. In the video you hear Hood talk about spending "$600 to collect $200." What he means is it often costs more to collect these assessments than the amount of the assessment itself. But we think it equally wrong to use the coercive power of government to even force a property owner to pay the assessments. Again, if the property owner does not see the benefit they get from the drainage district then it is the district's problem to correct that, not use government power to extract compliance. The 'benefit theory' of taxation is an age-old standard. Those who benefit should be the ones to pay. It's is the same as whether a person wants to hook onto the county's water system. The corollary is: If the user does not choose to benefit from a county service they should not have to pay for something they don't avail themselves of its benefit.

    Condemnation and foreclosure to collect drainage assessments is nonsense. When the Commissioners address this issue that should be the cornerstone of whatever they decide.

    We would also go one step further. ALL condemnation/foreclosure for property taxes should be abolished. The county should use the same enforcement mechanism to collect property taxes as a business that has debts owed to it. Sue the delinquent and get a judgment against the property. Eventually the county will most likely get paid when the property changes hands. And in the meantime the property owner's credit rating will suffer. That's enough enforcement power to give the government for collecting property taxes.

    To think that in hard times the county would foreclose on a man's home for $50 and take it away from him is simply absurd. Not to mention paying a lawyer $500+ to do the dirty deed.