Macon votes to retain environmental health fees
Macon County Commissioners decided last week to oppose Commissioner Paul Higdon’s push to eliminate environmental health fees, an initiative he put forth as a way to address the issue of affordable housing that plagues not only Western North Carolina but also much of the country.
“We hear about housing and housing shortages, that’s all you hear about, and nobody ever does anything about it,” said Higdon during the Nov. 12 commission meeting.
Higdon says he has never been happy with the fee schedule that Macon County has used to charge for environmental health services, and brought up the idea of waiving environmental health fees for people building new projects in Macon during the commissioner’s October meeting.
“We have an opportunity here to tip our hat to people who are willing to invest in Macon County,” he said at the time.
Higdon proposed that anyone building a house or commercial property in the county should have environmental health fees waived, while someone buying a piece of property that is already developed should still have to pay the fees. In order to have fees waived, someone would have to have a valid contract to build a house, mobile home, single wide, industrial or commercial building.
According to Public Health Director Kathy McGaha, the health department brings in about $250,000 to $300,000 a year in environmental health fees. Higdon posits that losing that revenue stream wouldn’t be a major impact on the county’s budget, which for fiscal year 2024-2025 was about $63.7 million.
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Higdon has also proposed waiving building inspection fees, which bring in around $700,000 to $750,000 in revenues a year. Higdon said that if Macon County were “an impoverished county,” this might be a different discussion, but because the county is in such a healthy financial position, it can afford to consider his proposal.
“Each year, I think we take in $4-6 million into our fund balance, and that goes in and we use it throughout the year to do whatever and generally it’s to expand the growth of government and build a government building or a government project, seldom anything to assist a private investor or whatever,” Higdon said.
From FY 2020-21 to FY 2022-23, Macon County’s fund balance grew by $13.8 million, as compared to $2.8 million from FY 2017-18 to FY 2019-20. The county still maintains the lowest property tax rate in the state at $0.27 cents per $100 of assessed property value.
“I think it would be a statement that would resonate across North Carolina,” said Higdon. “What are we going to do as a government body to assist affordable housing or any type of housing?”
McGaha said this has not been done across the state.
“I can’t find anybody, any environmental health program that has ventured into this of waiving all the fees,” said McGaha. “I think when [the board of health] look at the fees, they’re trying to figure out a way not to burden the taxpayers.”
Commissioner John Shearl, who voted with Higdon to eliminate environmental health fees, said that the county could always choose to reinstate the fee structure at a later date if it became a problem for the county.
“In my mind this is an incentive for developers to come in here and help us with this housing crisis,” Shearl said. “The government is always taxing us and spending our tax dollars to make the government bigger. The private sector needs to grow… you put a $2 million house on that piece of property, what is the tax revenue coming into the county for that? It’s huge.”
Speaking during public comment, Scott Baste said that waiving environmental health fees, or building fees, would be minimal incentive for builders and place the burden to replace those revenues on taxpayers.
“Really what we’re doing is we’re saying the taxpayers are going to now pay this fee,” Baste said.
Commissioner Josh Young had similar concerns about minimal impact for builders.
“We just built a small little building, estimated costs were around $200,000, our fee schedule is around $1,500,” Young said. “I think the fee schedule probably needs to be looked at; I don’t think I could support completely waiving fees.”
The board voted 2-3 on the motion to eliminate environmental health fees, with Higdon and Shearl in favor, and Shields, Young and Danny Antoine opposed.
