Beaufort County tax revaluation –Tax and spend | Eastern North Carolina Now

Opinion by:  Observer Editorial Team

Property owners will receive revaluation notices during the first quarter of 2025, within two or three months of the seating of a new Board of Beaufort County Commissioners elected in the November 2024 general election.  Who is elected will determine how much your taxes will go up next year.

You will hear a lot of talk about “revenue neutral” and some will say taxes cannot go up because of this.  Not so.  Determining what the comparative tax rate will be after the revaluation and what your actual taxes will be are two entirely different things.  State law requires the comparative rate to be calculated to show what the tax rate would be to collect the same amount of taxes as the year before the revaluation.  However, there is no law that says the amount of money we pay for taxes cannot increase.  Taxes can be raised.

Further confusing the issue is that Beaufort County is now OVER-taxing everyone.  That is, they are collecting more taxes than the cost of running County Government and stashing the money in a slush fund that now has more than 34 million dollars in it.  The majority of the present Board intends to waste this money on things like County owned rental housing, primary health care for some favored people, a park, more  internet spending and other socialistic programs.  John Rebholz and Randy Walker are two active members of the Beaufort County Affordable Housing Committee.  If elected, they will continue to support these programs.

There is an alternative. A Conservative Team of candidates is running in the March 5th primary elections. They propose to raise only the amount of money required to run government and, in addition, to reduce taxes for everyone by ten percent their first year in office.  This will “cost” about 4 million dollars.  The money is sitting there in that 34 million dollar slush fund.  This would be a huge swing between the present tax and spend Board and a newly elected Board of conservatives.  

The members of the Conservative Team are: Tandy Dunn, Steve Carawan and Hood Richardson.  Votes in the primary election for tax and spend candidates John Rebholz and Randy Walker surely guarantee higher taxes and a misused revaluation of your property.

The Conservative Team promises to vote only for Republicans for Chairman and Vice Chairman.  Republican RINO (Republican In Name Only), John Rebholz, has voted for five years for Democrat Jerry Langley to be Vice Chairman in exchange for Langley voting for RINO Fake Frankie Waters to be Chairman.  These four then vote for each others’ bad ideas.  This practice corrupts both the Republican and Democrat Parties.  Sounds a lot like Washington, D. C. instead of Washington, N. C.

The Conservative Team promises to stop growing Beaufort County government.  More employees and more expenses are coming on the tax payer each year.  There is very little oversight on this Fake Frankie Waters led Board.  Notice that Commissioner meetings are getting shorter and shorter. Fake Frankie Waters, John Rebholz, and Randy Walker along with the two Democrats are making more and more decisions in the back room, without public notice or involvement.

The Conservative Team promises to stop paying for CRT, LGBTQ and other “woke” programs in the public schools.

If you want to change Beaufort County Government, you must change the people who are running government. That means voting for the Conservative Team.  They are Steve Carawan, Tandy Dunn and Hood Richardson.