Primary season is upon us, and, in North Carolina, primary season always comes with sales tax referenda. JLF has written about four counties with tax referenda on the ballot this election cycle, and now JLF’s Joe Coletti has written a research brief examining two more.

Alamance County and Stokes County will be holding sales tax referenda on their primary ballots in the upcoming weeks. Alamance County claims they will use the revenue from the increased sales tax to lower property taxes by four cents. On the other hand, Coletti writes:

[Stokes C]ounty says only that the new revenue “may” pay for school safety “or a service-oriented entity,” suggesting that there is no definite plan.

Hearing that your tax dollars “may” got to schools is probably not the most comforting thing to hear, and that makes sense.

The thing about voters is, most of us want to know what our taxes are being raised for. The vast majority of us do not want to raise taxes only for that money to go into a nameless void in the government’s ever-expanding budget. It probably bothers many of our readers to hear a county be so slack about where sales tax revenue will go. But at least Stokes County is being honest about the way sales tax increases work.

Whenever a County Commission tells you where your sales tax dollars are going to go, they are not forging an ever-lasting contract with the public. Instead, they are giving you their word. Unfortunately, some county commissioners have proven that their word does not go very far. In Buncombe County, for instance, it was not but 18 months after the sales tax passed that the county diverted the funds. In a research brief from last year, Coletti writes:

When Buncombe County officials promised in 2011 that a quarter-cent-sales-tax increase would pay for capital repairs, renovations, and new construction at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, voters could not have expected the promise to expire in just 18 months or how much money would be diverted to the county’s general fund.

Talk about a load of Bunkum! Coletti referenced Buncombe County’s sales tax as a cautionary tale in his brief this week. He said:

Voters across the state have learned the hard lesson from Buncombe County and other places where funds have been diverted from their promised use: every political promise has an expiration date.

Read Coletti’s full brief on the Alamance and Stokes County sales tax referenda here. Learn about the other four sales tax referenda on ballots across North Carolina here.