Budget negotiations can be contentious, and that has proven true in Lenoir County this year. One only needs to look so far as the current debate between the Lenoir County commissioners and the Lenoir County Board of Education.
Craig Hill, chairman of the county board of commissioners, took a moment to address the crowd gathered at the special called budget meeting that took place on Thursday.
Referencing Lenoir County Public Schools Superintendent Steve Mazingo’s column in the May 24 Free Press, Hill called it disappointing.
“It was simply a gross oversimplification of an extended discussion on a significant portion of the county’s budget,” Hill said. “When we’re discussing an item from another government agency that is projected to consume over 23 percent of our total budget, I hope the citizens would expect us to spend adequate time and discuss all aspects of that request.”
In an interview with Mazingo earlier in the week he expressed concern over the commissioners’ discussion of the school system at their first budget meeting.
“There was quite a bit of incorrect information,” Mazingo said, “and there were quite a few suggestions of what we needed to do that didn’t seem to be based on what was best for children or what the public may want from their schools.”
During Thursday’s budget meeting, Hill, a former principal of Kinston High School, said he had always been an advocate of the city and county school system being a truly merged system. While the city and county schools were merged into one system in 1992, the district lines were never redrawn. He also said there had been little to no change to the attendance lines since the schools were integrated in 1971.
“My only guess is the conversation regarding closing North Lenoir High School came from a conversation that I had with the superintendent on April 8, 2014,” Hill said, “when I shared with him the concerns regarding the age of Frink Middle School and the drop in the number of high school students that we have in the county county-wide.”
Hill suggested in the conversation a realignment of the county’s schools.
“In that conversation I felt that one of the ways to accomplish true merging would be to close Frink,” Hill said, “move it to the current North Lenoir site and merge North Lenoir, South Lenoir, and Kinston High School into two schools, actually close the Kinston High School site and reopen it as North Lenoir at the current Kinston High School location.”
In the interview with Mazingo, he said the school board is looking at a lot of possibilities.
“I don’t mind having discussions about possibilities that are out there,” Mazingo said. “We certainly do our share of kicking around possibilities and lots of people get upset about some of the things we discuss but that’s what it is, we’re really looking at possibilities.”
Mazingo said the board and the commissioners are looking at the situation from two different directions.
“We come at this from the point of view of what we generally think might be best for students,” Mazingo said. “The commissioners are coming at it from a different point of view. It appears that they’re looking at what might cost the least and I’m not sure that’s the very best way to look at how you run a school district.”
While the commissioners can make recommendations to the school board, only the school board can make decisions about school realignment or closures. An unscientific poll on Kinston.com this week pointed to a lack of support for closing a school to save money.
Commissioners, in what some believe was a move in retaliation, voted on a motion Thursday to reduce the school system’s $9.9 million annual funding by $197,000, reduce property tax by half a cent and to include the quarter-cent sales tax increase on the ballot in November. The money collected by the sales tax would go towards the school system and Lenoir Community College but not for the 2015-16 school year.
“If you put it on the ballot in November and it passes,” Lenoir County Manager Mike Jarman said, “the very first available date that you can collect any revenue from it would be April 1, 2016 so it will not impact the current budget year you’re talking about.”
The motion was approved by a vote of 4-2 and will go to a public hearing on Monday. The vote won’t be official until the county commission’s budget is passed later in June.
“I think it was a difficult conversation to have,” Hill said, after the meeting. “The budget is a complex animal and everybody’s requests are interrelated and we don’t always see that. I hope that this takes us to a worthy public hearing, we will listen to what the people have to say. It’s going to take a cooperative effort and I think we’ll move in that direction. Somewhere through all this anxiety the commissioners and the school board will arrive in a better place. I really believe that.”
Commissioner Eric Rouse voted against the motion.
“It was for two reasons,” Rouse said. “I wanted to see the quarter cent tied to a property tax reduction that goes straight to the taxpayers of Lenoir County. The other part is we made a commitment to the school system for a three year funding of the (iPad) project and to maintain the funding for that three years. I think the school system stepped out of bounds and should not have tried to accelerate the program.”
Mazingo was disappointed in the commissioners’ decision.
“I am a superintendent who tries to put out there to the public what’s going on and I try to react to what the public wants,” Mazingo said. “Everything we’ve proposed to do we’ve put out to the public, some of it they didn’t like and we didn’t do it. We really thought we were doing what the parents and the community wanted us to do so if we’re not I need the commissioners to tell me what it is we’re not doing.”
Jackie Brown, vice chairwoman of the county board of commissioners, voted for the motion. Brown works in the school system as a substitute teacher.
“The quarter-cent sales tax is something that has been around for a while,” Brown said, “and every time it has come up it has been defeated. The quarter-cent sales tax is the fairest tax because everybody that buys something has to pay that tax.”
Lenoir County Board of Education Chairman Jon Sargeant was also disappointed in the commissioners’ vote.
“We are very disappointed that the county commissioners have chosen not to support us in the technology project, which will be a substantial improvement for our students and our schools,” Sargeant said. “Even more disappointing than their refusal to fund our technology project, their choice to make cuts to our existing budget is going to have a detrimental impact on our students.”
Commissioner J. Mac Daughety voted against the motion and spoke out in a statement on Facebook.
“I am not in favor though of mortgaging our children’s future by either cutting out funding for the schools or trying to settle scores,” Daughety wrote. “It also is not smart and these same people and county management have preached for the last five years against any property tax reduction because the property tax and sales tax revenues for the next five to seven years are flat. It has been hammered into our heads by county management that any reduction of property tax might result in a rebound effect in the short years after resulting in an even greater property tax than we now have.”
School board member, W.D. Anderson shared his fellow board members’ disappointment.
“The denial of the funding request is one thing,” Anderson said, “but I’m hard-pressed to understand the cut of the $197,000 from the budget. I heard it explained, I just have a hard time understanding it, but we’ll just regroup and move forward and hope the open dialogue can continue and people will start talking to each other instead of at each other.”
The public hearing for the budget will take place at 9 a.m. Monday in the commissioner’s meeting room at the Lenoir County Courthouse.
Jennifer Cannon may be reached at 252-559-1073 or at Jennifer.Cannon@Kinston.com. Follow Jennifer on Twitter @JennylynnCannon.
