"The sky is not falling."

That was the gist of Moore County Chairman Nick Picerno's response to comments made by NC Representative Jamie Boles in a interview published in the February 5 edition of The Times.

"I'm not going to get into an argument with the County Commissioners, Boles said in the interview. "But, if the County Commissioners had stayed the course eight years ago, instead of cut, cut, cut, cut . . . " 

"But now the sky is falling. And some of them aren't running again because they know they are going to have to raise taxes." Both Chairman Picerno and Commissioner Randy Saunders are not seeking re-election.

"The sky is not falling," Picerno told The Times in a interview. "We will meet our obligations."

"If we need to raise taxes, we'll raise taxes," Picerno said. "However, we're running a surplus."

Over the past several years the County has run enough of a surplus to deposit $3 million to $6 million each year into capital reserve funds — primarily in anticipation of the need to build new schools. 

In our interview with Boles, he cited the state budget surplus as one of the achievements of the GOP majority in Raleigh.

"I'm proud of them for doing that," Picerno said. "But they are doing it, in part, by not funding what they say they are funding."

That's a reference to fact that the state's formula for allocating teachers to local school districts is based on the number of students in each grade countywide, without taking into account the number of teachers needed for each grade in each school.

The result is that local districts typically cannot meet state targets for class sizes without using county tax dollars to pay for additional teachers.

During our interview with Boles, he noted that the County is responsible only for the "brick and mortar and maintenance; the state is responsible for the rest."

"If that were true," Picerno responded, "then we could cut taxes by ten cents. Because what the county would have put up for the schools last year would have been $7.9 million."

Instead, the County spent $25.3 million on public education last year, and only $7.9 million of that is spent on "bricks and mortar." Education accounts for more than one-third of the expenditures in the General Fund budget.

Lifeguards, attendants, hours of operation — the task of determining exactly how the swimming pool in Seven Lakes will operate this coming swim season has been delegated to the Recreation Committee.

During the Board's Thursday, January 28 Work Session, Seven Lakes Landowners Association [SLLA] President Chuck Leach asked the committee to come up with a revision to Rules 9.1.7, 9, 10, and 11. From the use of flotation devices to the authorization of pool games, those rules all deal with the authority of lifeguards to manage the pool.

Leach asked the committee to develop rules for the diving board, a parental and child liability signature form, and a job description for pool assistants. He and the Community Manager would develop the schedule and salary for pool assistants, he said.

The Board would determine penalties for those who do not follow the rules, he added. 

Whether this year's pool operations will continue to include lifeguards remains an open question.

The Board voted during the January 14 Open Meeting to eliminate the one rule that requires them. But public sentiment in the meeting was strongly in favor of continuing to have lifeguards for at least part of the season and part of the day.

Depending on which members were in attendance at their meetings, the Recreation Committee has in the past voted both to eliminate lifeguards and to retain them for part of the day.

The Recreation Committee next meets on Monday, February 8 at 4:00 pm at the Landowners Office. 

Its recommendations are due back to the Board at the Thursday, February 25 Work Session.

The online auction for Beacon Ridge Country Club is on hold until February 12, while an "eleventh hour" purchase offer is being negotiated.

Scott Schwartz of Bullseye Auction & Appraisal told The Times that "an interested party has put together a letter of intent," and is working on the details of a purchase contract. He said he expected that offer would be nailed down by the middle of next week.

Bullseye is a Georgia auction firm that is handling the technical aspects of the online auction on behalf of the broker, Hilda W. Allen.

The bid deadline was originally set for February 4. Schwartz said there has been a good bit of interest in the property.

"Out of fairness to all, we decided to postpone the auction to give this buyer the opportunity to pull a deal together," he said. "If they can't pull it together, then we have an auction underway."

For more information on the sale, see this article, from our December 25 edition.

NC Representative Jamie Boles is a proud Moore Contain — and proud to represent the County in the NC General Assembly.

But you can't talk with him for very long without realizing he sees the job as bigger than that.

"I am a North Carolina Representative," he told The Times during an interview in his Southern Pines office on Thursday, January 28.

"I vote for ten million people," Boles said. "I am fortunate that I represent 88,000 people in Moore County. I am blessed. But if everybody would get up and walk out of a committee meeting or a budget meeting with 'Well, this doesn't pertain to my County, so I'm going to vote no,' where would we be?"

That broader responsibility to the state as a whole may help explain some of Boles' recent differences with the Moore County Board of Commissioners.

County Chairman Nick Picerno is actively campaigning for Boles' challenger in the March 15 GOP Primary, and the full Board of Commissioners has been passing strongly worded resolutions asking that Boles and other members of the Moore County legislative delegation explain their votes for a budget that left Moore County out when dividing up $84.8 million in new sales tax revenues.

The Commissioners have also called on the legislature to revise the way that teachers are allocated, focusing on the needs of individual schools instead of using countywide averages. And they called for the state to do away with the tier system that directs economic development money and other funds to poorer counties, while ignoring the pockets of poverty within so-called "wealthy" counties, like Moore.

Deep roots in Moore

Boles has deep roots in Moore County, coming up through the Aberdeen schools, graduating from Pinecrest, and then moving on to Sandhills Community College before entering mortuary school. A successful small businessman, Boles built a string of funeral homes in the surrounding area, centered on the flagship property on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southern Pines.

As a kid, he spent Wednesday afternoons selling the Sandhills Citizen newspaper at ten cents for its publisher, former Speaker of the NC House Clifton Blue. 

"If you every wanted to be elected to any office in the state of North Carolina, you had to be approved by Mr. Blue," Boles recalled. "I remember watching politicians come through his office, and for me to be sitting in his seat today is quite an honor."

"That was one of the reasons that I ran when I did run in 2008, because I didn't feel that Moore County was being well represented in the General Assembly — and by someone who didn't come from Moore County."

Turning the battleship

Boles said he is seeking a fifth two-year term in office because there is still plenty more work to be done in furthering what some have called the "Republican Revolution" in Raleigh.

The Party took over both houses of the General Assembly in 2010 — the first time since Reconstruction that the state has been led by Republicans.

But, after more than 140 years of Democratic rule, making all the changes necessary "is like trying to turn a battleship in a canal," Boles said.

"I feel like we are on the right road — in tax reform — in education reform — and I want to finish what we have started."

Boles said it takes time for a new legislator to "learn the ropes: as far as the staff available to you and how to maneuver a bill through the House and the Senate."

When he was first elected in 2008, the Democrats were still in charge in Raleigh, and a freshman Republican Representative was allowed to vote and not much else.

Among the accomplishments of the new GOP majority to which Boles pointed were "putting more money back into education. Of course, there is never going to be enough money for education."

Not only has the GOP majority increased teacher pay, Boles said, they reduced the number of step levels in the educators' pay structure from thirty-six to six, providing teachers with more certainty about when they could expect increases.

Boles pointed to regulatory reform, as well. "Businesses are able to cut through a lot of red tape, and bring business to North Carolina," he said.

"We have paid off over a billion dollar debt to the federal government" for unemployment insurance, he added. That both ensures that unemployment insurance will be there for citizens in the future, he said, as well as reducing the level of unemployment taxes that small businesses must pay "so they can expand and hire more people."

"We have a budget surplus, which we didn't have before," Boles said. "In the past, we have been borrowing money to balance that budget and that isn't happening anymore. And now we have a billion dollar reserve."

"And we've lowered the personal income tax."

That last achievement is one that Boles expects to see expanded. He said the GOP's goal is ultimately to eliminate the income tax altogether, moving instead to a consumption, or sales, tax to fund all the state's needs — something he said would likely take six or eight years to fully accomplish.

John (JD) Zumwalt doesn't come across as a politician — and he'd be the first person to admit that.

In fact, even though he's running for the District 52 seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives, politics — at least politics as usual — is exactly what he's running against.

"I'm just fed up with the establishment," he told The Times, in an interview on Monday, January 11. "And I thought it was just DC, until I started doing my research, and I realized that's it's not just DC. It's in Raleigh as well. And is documentable — it's shockingly in your face, if you go looking for it. And I can't believe that we keep electing the same people."

Military background

Zumwalt came to Moore County, like many residents, courtesy of Ft. Bragg.

He was born and raised in East Texas, near Corpus Christi. A Vietnam vet, he worked as a policeman, firefighter, and ambulance driver. He became a tugboat pilot and then a fire boat pilot before returning to the military after a 16-year hiatus.

He served with the Army Rangers for three years, completed Green Beret training, and served with the Fifth Special Forces Group out of Ft. Campbell, KY for seven years. He then moved to US Army Special Operations Command at Ft. Bragg.

He retired in 2004 while serving in Iraq and began to work with the Army's IED Field Team and eventually with the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group.

The challenger

The District 52 seat is currently occupied by Republican Jamie Boles, who is seeking re-election to his fifth two-year term.

Zumwalt is careful to note the he's is not running against "Mr. Jamie Boles." 

"He's a good man, and people like him," he said. "I'm running against Representative Jamie Boles, because he's not a good legislator for the people."

Zumwalt begins his case against Rep. Boles with an expansion of the  sales tax approved by the General Assembly as part of the FY2016 state budget. The state broadened the categories of business subject to the sales tax to include some services, like auto and appliance repair. The expansion takes effect in March.

"Small business owners cannot afford that," Zumwalt said. "Some of them have mark-ups as low as eight percent, and they tell me they just can't afford this new tax."

"Second, it was rammed down our throats quietly," he said. "Most folks didn't even know it was happening."

"But the most important thing — and this drives me crazy — is that we cannot spend one dime of that money in Moore County. It all goes to other counties that the legislature has deemed to be more in need than we are."

The General Assembly in fact selected 79 of the state's 100 counties and divided the anticipated additional revenue of $84.8 million among them. Moore County was not one of the 79, though every county that touches Moore was included in the distribution.

"I call it giving foreign aid to other parts of North Carolina," Zumwalt said

"My opponent voted for that," he said. "What I hear people saying is that it was going to pass anyway, so it didn't matter what he did."

"Here's my analogy: If I hear someone's going to come to my house and hurt my family, and maybe four or five show up, I'm not going to stand by and do nothing. I'm going to fight tooth and nail to the very end for them."

"And that's what I want to see my legislator do for me: fight tooth and nail. Whether he can win or not, I want to hear his voice being spoken, and I want him to vote no on these things."