AG 2016 12 19 - Laserfiche WebLink

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exceed the amount of publicly-provided services supplied to them? (2) Does the fact that farm and forest lands are taxed on the basis of their Present Use Value—instead of their potential value in residential or commercial uses—mean that they are contributing less in tax revenues than the value of publicly provided services they receive? As has been found in other COCS studies, the answer to both of these questions is "no" for Gaston County. The residential sector contributes only 810 to the county's coffers for each dollar's worth of services that it receives. Commercial and industrial land uses are the largest net contributors to the public purse, contributing $2.41 in revenues for each dollar of publicly provided services that they receive. Despite being taxed on the basis of current land uses, property in agricultural land uses is found to be a net contributor to the local budget, generating $1.13 in revenues for every dollar of public services that it receives. At the outset, it is important to recognize two important limitations of analyses such as the one presented here. First, COCS studies highlight the relative demands of various land uses on local fiscal resources given the current pattern of development. As such, one should be cautious in extrapolating from the results of studies such as this in order to gauge the impact of future patterns of development on local public finance. Nonetheless, the results of studies such as this are useful in informing debates over such issues as whether or not alternative types of land uses are likely to contribute more in tax dollars than they demand in the way of services. Second, the current study in no way deals with the social value of each of these forms of development—i.e., their contribution(positive or negative) to the well-being of the county's citizens. Rather it focuses on the more narrow issue of whether or not these land uses "pay their own way"with regard to county revenues and expenditures. It is important to bear in mind that there is nothing sacred about an exact balance between revenues and expenditures associated with a particular land use, even when balancing the local budget is an overriding priority. Indeed, one of the primary functions of a local government is to redistribute local financial resources such that services desired by citizens are supplied, even when those services cannot pay for themselves. Determining the optimal distribution of those resources is a public policy issue to be resolved in the political arena. A study such as this fits into the process wherein such issues are resolved by shedding light on the relative costs and benefits of the specific distribution of financial resources implicit in the existing pattern of development. 2 G-4 Page 245