Standing with Harry Brown and rural North Carolina

by Thomas Mills, Politics North Carolina, March 18, 2015.

I’m so glad that Republicans are finally embracing redistribution of wealth. Sen. Harry Brown (R-Onslow) has proposed a new formula for doling out sales tax money that would take from the rich counties and give it to the poor. I wish they felt the same way about helping people, especially those who got hurt in the recession. 

With my rural roots and populist bent, I support Brown’s proposal, or something similar to it. Over the past thirty years or so, our rural counties have taken a beating. Globalization sent our manufacturing overseas. Changing health habits left tobacco fields fallow and tobacco barns rotting. And every recession since the early 1980s has disproportionately harmed rural counties. 

With little industry and a shrinking population, most rural counties without a tourist industry have lost their tax base. Property values are falling instead of rising, so counties must raise property tax rates just to capture the revenue needed to pay for basic services. There’s little left for investments like schools and infrastructure and even less for things like parks and recreation.

Every small town or crossroads in North Carolina has its city. For some people, it’s Raleigh. For others it’s Winston-Salem or Greenville or Asheville. Growing up in Wadesboro, ours was Charlotte, sixty miles away. Charlotte had goods and services we couldn’t get in town. We also went for entertainment. Everybody enjoyed a day of shopping at South Park or Eastland Mall and then grabbing dinner and a movie. We went to concerts at the Charlotte Coliseum or the Double Door Inn or the Palomino Club. We might not have had a ton of disposable income but Charlotte certainly got its share of it. 

Forty years later, places like Wadesboro have even fewer stores and services, so urban areas are getting even more of rural folks’ money. With the changes in the tax code, that includes more sales tax money. That movie is now taxed. So is that concert. And so is that big city hair cut. Without some change in the sales tax formula, poor rural counties are sending sales tax money to richer, urban ones. 

Besides, we can’t just turn our backs on rural North Carolina. In a changing world, in a rapidly growing state, rural North Carolina gives us our culture and our character. The Bluegrass Festival might go to Raleigh but the music originated in the fields and hollers of the western piedmont. NASCAR might bring a bunch of money to Charlotte but it started with boys running moonshine in fast cars on country roads. The Durham Blues Festival celebrates piedmont blues, music brought to the Bull City by men and women who learned to play and sing in gospel choirs and juke joints way outside of urban centers. All the people who want barbecue from our great restaurants in Raleigh owe a tip of the hat to the folks that started cooking pigs in places like Wilson and Goldsboro and Kinston. And when we need to smile, we can always look at our face jugs from Seagrove, even if we bought them in galleries in Chapel Hill or Asheville. 

The engines of progress may lie in our urban areas but our identity is still rooted in the country. We shouldn’t lose who we are. And we shouldn’t give up on rural North Carolina.