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http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/opinion/columnists/way/

Tax revolt breathtaking in scope, spunk

Feb 26, 2009

Will the county commissioners and town councils in Orange County ever be able to conduct business as usual again?

Only at their own peril, it would seem, with the war drums beating loudly for tax relief and reduced spending.

But the elite political class, despite being afforded many perks, has suffered too often from a tin ear. It’s an affliction known to infect the governing rulers since time immemorial, and is responsible for Americans pledging allegiance today to the Stars and Stripes instead of the Union Jack.

Don’t lay all the blame on the governing boards in Orange County. They’ve been propped up for years by tax-and-spend liberals at the voting booths who clamor for more services, more programs, more government, more, more, more.

But something happened Monday that sucked the breath out of lungs all across the county. In a stunning show of angry force, a movement was born. An anti-tax revolt that crystallized in the twinkling of an eye drew somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 people looking to change the status quo. The bulging mass of humanity spilled out of the Big Barn in Hillsborough into the parking lots and across the streets of the Daniel Boone Village.

Carrboro resident Bryan Berger, the architect of the movement who started with a simple wooden sign, hand-painted, in his yard just a few weeks ago, said “extravagant, irresponsible local spending” is the jet fuel that launched this rocket.

And he pulls no punches in blaming the county commissioners for years of tax hikes culminating in this year’s property revaluation that saddled taxpayers with an average 23 percent increase in home values amid a dismal national economy and plummeting home sales.

“Now they’ve put the last straw on the camel’s back, and the camel’s back is broke,” Berger said. “They’re going to reap what they’ve sown.”

Berger said the rapid rise of the Orange Tax Revolt is making it necessary for organizers to meet again next week to continue planning strategy, which will include finding a much larger venue to hold what he expects will be thousands of unhappy taxpayers on March 16.

More signs will be put up, fliers will be sent out, a mass e-mail distribution list is being organized and telephone banks are being set up to keep interested people informed. And there has been an extraordinary amount of interest, Berger said, from UNC professors complaining about the skyrocketing value placed on their townhomes to farmers near tears over a 60 percent property revaluation and seniors begging him to wage the good fight because they are going to lose their family homestead without tax relief.

Berger said consideration is being given to seeking something similar to California’s Proposition 13, which “stopped the obscene property taxes in California.” He lived in Michigan at a time it had the nation’s second-highest property taxes when the state, like California before it, put a cap on annual property tax rates.

While he’s immediately interested in toppling tax madness in Orange County, “We truly hope it’s going to grow from here and go statewide,” Berger said. “We are going to fight to have it made law that you can’t rape the property owner any more because of irresponsible spending by these officials.”

Roy Loflin, spokesman for Orange County FreedomWorks, the anti-tax, limited-government organization providing much of the structure to the tax revolt, said he’s not seen anything like what is taking shape. That’s saying something. Since his group first formed in 2001, FreedomWorks has been involved in successfully opposing the merger of city and county schools, bond issues and the recent land transfer tax.

“This one has generated more attention than those in the past,” Loflin said. “Our objective is to get the taxes lowered. We feel as these concerned citizens do, that the revaluation was made based on data that was really out of date. They used data from before the current economic turndown.”

Meanwhile, folks like Chapel Hill’s Wen Gong are doing what they can to aid and abet. He’s set up a Google group to track the tax revolt.

Gong, like others, is outraged that his property value was set at $323,591 in 2006, but in 2009 it’s leaped to $565,000.

“Is Chapel Hill experiencing some kind of magical housing bubble to warrant such an artificial tax valuation? I don’t think so,” Gong said.

Stay tuned. With elections around the corner, who wants to bet there’s an anti-tax slate of candidates? The time is ripe.

Dan E. Way is editor of The Chapel Hill Herald. E-mail him at dway@heraldsun.com or call 918-1035.

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