Greensboro now has among NC’s highest municipal tax rates

North Carolina has become one of America’s great economic success stories. Year after year, the state ranks among the nation’s best places to do business, attracting new employers, new investment, and thousands of new residents. That’s worth celebrating. But Greensboro’s latest budget serves as a reminder that economic growth isn’t free. Eventually someone has to build the roads, expand the water system, hire the police officers, maintain the parks, and pay for everything a growing community expects.

A largely new Greensboro City Council adopted its latest budget, positioning Greensboro with one of the highest municipal property tax rates among North Carolina’s major cities. The decision has triggered sharp criticism, prompted a controversial lawsuit, and reignited the familiar debate over taxes and government spending.

When the North Carolina General Assembly delayed Guilford County’s scheduled property reappraisal, Greensboro had to rethink a budget that had already been centered around the new property values. City leaders still retained the authority to set the municipal tax rate, but the underlying tax base had changed. The obligations they were preparing to fund — public safety, infrastructure, and other core services — hadn’t gone away. The revenue assumptions had. It’s a good example of how decisions made in Raleigh can quietly reshape the choices available to local governments.

I asked Greensboro Mayor Pro Tem Denise Turner Roth why the council believed the increase was necessary. Her answer wasn’t about expanding government. It was about keeping pace with a city that’s growing faster than many people realize.

She pointed to retaining police officers and firefighters in a competitive labor market, repairing roads and bridges that don’t become cheaper with age, maintaining water and sewer infrastructure, reopening recreation centers on weekends, and addressing years of deferred maintenance. As she told me, the city was trying to meet “the growing needs that we’re seeing” while also catching up on obligations that had simply been pushed further down the road.

I’ve covered local government long enough to notice something else.

Residents almost always ask for more. More police downtown. Better parks. Better roads. More entertainment. More housing. Better sidewalks. Cleaner neighborhoods.

Roth acknowledged that reality during our conversation. “None of these efforts that we have to provide for are free,” she told me. She quickly added something else that deserves equal attention: “We, too, have to be frugal.”

None of this suggests that every tax increase is justified. Growth may increase costs, but it does not relieve government of its responsibility to spend wisely. Before asking taxpayers to contribute more, city leaders should be able to demonstrate that spending priorities have been carefully examined, efficiencies have been pursued, and government itself has not expanded beyond what circumstances require.

Those concerns are hardly theoretical. A recent John Locke Foundation analysis concluded that municipal spending in many North Carolina communities has grown faster than population growth and inflation. That doesn’t necessarily mean every expenditure is unnecessary, but it raises a legitimate question every local government should be prepared to answer: Are cities simply responding to growth, or are they allowing government itself to grow faster than necessary?

The distinction matters. Some expenditures reflect the unavoidable costs of serving a growing city. Others represent years of deferred maintenance that previous leaders chose to postpone. Those aren’t the same thing. Deferred maintenance shouldn’t be presented as though it were entirely new infrastructure needs, just as legitimate investments shouldn’t automatically be dismissed as government excess.

Cities cannot assume tax increases are the answer every time expenses rise. Residents deserve confidence that government is constantly examining where money is going, which programs still deliver value and what no longer makes sense. That’s not simply good budgeting. It’s part of maintaining public trust.

Business leader Richard Beard made a similar observation during a recent conversation with me, arguing that government should take “a deep dive into how we’re spending our money, where we’re spending our money, and how efficiently we’re spending it.”

This budget isn’t an isolated decision. It’s part of a broader pattern. The same council that approved one of the state’s highest municipal tax rates also rejected a proposed moratorium on new data centers, signaling a willingness to make politically difficult decisions it believes will shape Greensboro’s future. Time will determine whether residents conclude those decisions were worth the cost.

Balancing this year’s budget is largely an exercise in math. Leading a city requires something different. It requires the willingness to think beyond the next budget cycle and sometimes beyond the next election. The question is no longer simply what residents want today. It’s whether today’s investments position the community to thrive 10 or 20 years from now.

Citizens and city leaders will continue debating whether Greensboro struck the right balance. They should. Healthy communities depend on thoughtful disagreement.

North Carolina’s remarkable economic success is placing new demands on nearly every fast-growing community in the state. Every major economic development announcement celebrated today eventually reaches city hall in the form of additional infrastructure demands, public safety needs and higher expectations from residents. The challenge for local leaders is not simply accommodating that growth. It’s doing so while ensuring government grows no faster than necessary.

City leaders must demonstrate that every additional dollar reflects genuine public need rather than spending that could have been avoided through better long-term stewardship.