County Budget Questions Remain

Metro meeting left questions about public notice, fund balances, and how closely local spending is being examined

#Opinion • 4:30 p.m. June 22, 2026

This month’s meeting of the county commissioners was unintentionally revelatory. We rezoned more agricultural parcels to residential use and passed the second reading of the jail renovation funds.

It has since come out that the bid for the renovations may not have been properly posted. Lest I be accused of taking a sideswipe at any one department, it appears, at the time of my typing this, that the blame for this failure to properly post the bid falls on the newspaper that published it or the engineering firm that we hired to handle the process, not an employee of Moore County.

I have reached out to CTAS state attorneys for guidance on how we should proceed, specifically whether we will need to put the bid back out.

Budget questions

We then had the second first reading of the 2027 budget, with the proposed 2-cent tax increase. All 15 commissioners were present this time. Anything I could say about the discussion surrounding the budget would simply sound like an exaggeration or as if I were taking people out of context.

I would implore anyone who thinks they know how the county is being run because they have spoken to a member of local government and who has been persuaded that my public statements, including articles here, are nothing more than divisive rhetoric, to please watch this month’s County Commission meeting video.

I would encourage you to watch at least the budget discussion, with timestamps at 4:10-17:30, and bonus content through the 25:50 mark.

All I will say about this budget is that either many other members are privy to answers to questions that are not answered or publicly available, or there is an incuriosity so deep that it looks intentional when it comes to how our county spends money.

A note on fund balances

I’ll make one note on the fund balances in case you do watch the video. It was stated that the ending fund balances are generally higher than estimated, dismissing the concerns that I raised in last month’s article. While I cannot confirm the validity of the estimated claim, I can confirm that for five of the past eight audited years, our general fund ending balance, or savings account, has declined. One of the years it went up was three years ago, when we increased the tax rate specifically to boost the ending fund balance.

Across our whole government, excluding schools and highway departments because of the significant outside funding and the wildly fluctuating nature of the highway department’s budget due to the contingency of state funding, three out of the past eight audited years – FY 2018, FY 2024, and FY 2025 – saw an overall reduction in fund balances.

So if we estimate we will have 10% fewer dollars in the bank at the end of the year and end up with 8% fewer, I guess that’s a win in the eyes of the budget committee.

What this meeting revealed

There is nothing more I can say about this meeting that would not be perceived as wild-eyed, hair-on-fire, character-bashing. I could drone on about numbers, taxes, ineptitude, or malfeasance. I have no quippy little words for what I have witnessed over the past four years serving in this capacity.

I have refrained from calling this meeting a council meeting. A council is a body for consultation and public deliberation. I’ll leave it up to you to listen for yourself and determine what this gathering was.

A plea to citizens

I will end with this plea: If you love this place and any of the people in this county, if you care at all about the future of this county, please spend 15-20 minutes watching the time-stamped portions of the video above, or the whole thing.

If, in this 250th year since the birth of our nation, you still have any sense of civic duty, please sacrifice just a few hours of your time in the coming month to familiarize yourself with the actual state and trajectory of our county. Speak with the people who are running, purportedly, to represent you in whatever office.

Then, regardless of the election's outcome, keep it up. What happens next is entirely up to you, the citizens of Moore County.