Beaufort County Takes Another Step Toward Early Revaluation | Eastern North Carolina Now

It is a question of fairness

    The Beaufort County Commissioners voted 4 to 3 to move as "quick as is practicable" to effect an earlier property revaluation in order to correct the property values that were the cumulative effect of the Beaufort County property revaluation performed in 2009, and enacted on January 2010. For early evaluation were county commissioners: Democrat Commissioner Jerry Langley, who joined Republicans Hood Richardson, Gary Brinn and Stan Deatherage. RINO County Commissioner Al Klemm joined Democrats Ed Booth and Bob Belcher to keep the current questionable values in place until 2018. The new revaluation effort, winning the 4 to 3 vote, will attempt to complete that revaluation by 2016 at the latest.

    At the heart of this resolved effort by a slim majority of the county commissioners is to force the unwieldy values of Beaufort County property into some semblance of reasonableness for Beaufort County property values, and the citizens that pay their property taxes. In many instances of property values, most of it on the water, there are recent property sales presently occurring that are selling for 1/3 to 1/2 of the county's property assessments as appraised in the 2010 property revaluation.

    Commissioner Hood Richardson, a spending hawk extraordinaire, advised the Beaufort County Commissioners that, "an early revaluation has nothing to do with spending some extra money to bring property values in line with reality, but with enacting a policy of fairness in county assessed property values."

    Beaufort County Commissioner Al Klemm, who had previously given lip service to an early revaluation when forced to interact with effected county property owners during Beaufort County's Board of Equalization of Review, of which Klemm is a participant, stated, "It's just spending extra county funds to change something that might please one party, but just make another one angry."

    County Commissioner Klemm, in that same meeting, then went on to spend $107,000.00 additionally, just one month after the conclusion of the 2013 / 2014 fiscal county budget, to fix a roof on the campus of Beaufort County Community College. Mere moments later, the erratically inconsistent County Commissioner voted to investigate the feasibility of building a new county jail on county owned property about 2 miles south of Chocowinity, North Carolina rather than building a smaller version of that jail directly behind the Beaufort County Court House in the county seat of Washington, NC about 6 miles northeast from the new proposed location. Inconclusive studies have suggested that it could cost as much as $800,000.00 annually to transport prisoners from an ancillary location in Chocowinity south to the county court house. In both of these votes to spend additional, and, in the case of the new jail, large sums of money, the RINO (Republican in name only) County Commissioner voted with the Democrat county commissioners in the majority to do so.

    Additionally, County Commissioner Klemm's distracted discourse on the additional cost to perform said early revaluation was completely bogus considering that, by North Carolina general statute, the county commissioners are required to set aside money on an annual basis to perform these revaluations, revaluations to effect a condition of fairness.

    Remarkably, the county commissioners tabled this motion from that July general meeting to be considered at this August general meeting, at the behest of Commissioner Klemm so he could analyze certain "metrics" of "cost benefit analysis" on the feasibility of an early revaluation.

    Oh well, RINOs will be RINOs.