County commissioners share wants with legislators
By Steve Herring
Published in News on January 27, 2015 1:58 PM
Future school construction in Wayne County will grind to a halt if the state fails to restore lottery funding that has been raided for use in other areas, Wayne County commissioners said.
And restoring lottery funding for school construction is the top legislative priority for Wayne County as well as the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners.
It is, Wayne County Manager George Wood said, the "lynch pin" for the county.
Lottery funding was one of several legislative goals that commissioners lobbied Sens. Louis Pate of Mount Olive and Don Davis of Snow Hill and Reps. John Bell of Goldsboro and Jimmy Dixon of Calypso for during a Monday morning breakfast at Lane Tree Golf Club.
Legislators offered no promises other than to assure commissioners a bill of some kind would be filed.
"That is big dollars," Wood said. "Preserving those lottery funds and trying to get them back is really key. We would like to get back up to the 40 percent (set aside for school construction). If you can't do that, if you could look at trying to phase that in. I think we have talked about maybe over a three- or four-year period. I think it is down to like 20 or 21 percent now that we are getting.
"As you all know we have that debt service kicking in on $38.4 million that we borrowed over 20 years for these two new middle schools. That starts kicking in this year, so it would be very helpful if we had some additional lottery money coming in on that because, as it stands right now, if we use it, and the sales tax on this $38 million, then the schools are pretty much tapped out as far as building anything more."
Bell, who sponsored a lottery funding bill in the previous session, said he had spoken with officials with the N.C. Association of County Commissioners and with the Lottery Commission to see what could be done to get those funds back.
"I don't think we are being able to go in, kind of like we did last time, and say, 'We want these funds out of the already designated lottery money,'" he said. "Let's see what we can do about going after the lottery surplus.
"We know we are going to have a lottery surplus almost every year."
The surplus is a "pretty good chunk of change" running $55 million to $60 million, Bell said.
"The only downside is that you can't plan if you are going to get that," he said. "If the bill is successful, you can't budget on that. But we have to write it to say if the lottery has an 'X' amount of surplus, a certain percentage goes to the counties."
It would also require coming up with a funding formula, he said.
"If we do it even, some counties are really going to benefit and some counties are really going to suffer," he said. "So how do you put that on a scale that is fair to everybody?
"I am going to file something, but what it will look like is still up in the air."
Wood said he thinks that is a good approach.
"I think it is about the only approach that we have," Bell said.
The N.C. Association of County Commissioners should have every county in the state adopt a resolution that the General Assembly go back to the original percentages, Dixon said.
"That would be an enormous and immediate improvement," Dixon said.
However, Wood said he still thinks Bell's approach would allow the state to "stair step" funding until it is back to the original 40 percent.
That approach would soften the impact so that the state would not feel the "initial blow" since the state has used lottery revenues for "certain other things in education," Bell said.
It would also help grow the lottery as well, he said.
The bill filed in the previous session was one of the most popular because of county support statewide, Bell said.
Dixon is correct that support of the N.C. Association of County Commissioners would help provide pressure needed to get the bill passed, Wood said.