By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
At their only meeting for the month on August 19, the Lee County Board of Commissioners voted 5-1 to approve $28 million in bonds that will fund construction costs and outfitting of the county’s new library. This state-of-the-art learning center will be located just off Bragg Boulevard in Sanford adjacent to the O.T. Sloan Park.
The bonds contained no requirements for a timetable of repayment or a disclosure of the associated interest rates that would accrue over the loan’s lifetime.
But the financing package has another purpose, one designed to pay for the purchase and installation of radio equipment for the Voice Interoperability Plan for Emergency Responders system across the county for emergency responding units, an item that has been recommended for years but remained fiscally out-of-reach until its inclusion now in the bond package.
VIPER allows public safety agencies to talk to one another via radio communications without having to relay the information through a communications center. Designed specifically for large scale emergencies or disasters, all public safety agencies benefit from the interoperability that the system creates, even when dealing with daily emergency calls.
It’s more than just radio equipment, though. The system includes software and transmission upgrades, interconnectivity to all fire departments, first responder and EMS units, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and Sanford Police Department, and the North Carolina Highway Patrol.
Requested by law enforcement and emergency response agencies for decades, the need for VIPER became a national priority following the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the inability to communicate among the multiple agencies and jurisdictions that responded provided strong evidence of the need for compatible and adequate communicate communications among public safety organizations.
Presented to the commissioners by County Manager Lisa Minter, the financing plan still contains several blank spaces and unanswered questions, a circumstance that forced the commissioners to choose between relying completely on the recommendation of staff or voting against the package altogether.
The discussion was lengthy, and it saw the six attending members (Democrat Robert Reives was absent) question and drill into the underpinnings of the plan far more than they otherwise might have on a similar plan on some other issue.
Whose job was it to approve the bonds?
For those who attended the meeting and listened to the discussion, many left after its conclusion scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how the financing plan would work. Flashing back first to the election of November 2020, when the voters of Lee County approved $25 million in bonds to finance what is now known as the Lee County Athletic Park, may help to provide context.
Those dollars funded the purchase of a tract of land to join together with another that had been donated to the county, creating the underpinnings of a park that would provide something for everyone: soccer, softball, and baseball fields that could host weekend tournaments; walking trails for those wanting to stay fit; and a place where people could just go for some peace and quiet.
The key to understanding the approval process in the 2020 bonds was that they were a type of financing called general obligation bonds that required a public referendum. These were voted on by the citizens of the county and approved by a margin of 58.6 percent to 41.4 percent. At the time, the commissioners chose to use this type of bond to not only fund the park, but also to gain a sense of how the public felt about future funding projects that were good for both the body and the mind.
About 18 months later when the new library project was being discussed in earnest, then-County Manager Dr. John Crumpton recommended that the library project be funded through local obligation bonds, a slightly different funding mechanism that doesn’t require approval by voters. This type of bond is often used when a governing body already has a sense of how the public likely feels about paying for a particular type of project.
Crumpton’s logic was that since voters had approved the athletic park by a wide margin just two years prior, they likely still felt the same was about a similar plan that would benefit the public’s intellectual interests in the same way that the park would do for its athletic and wellness interests.
In essence, the commissioners were using the public’s goodwill around a given set of issues to fund another project of a similar nature, but that still doesn’t explain the reasoning for coupling the library project with another that was seemingly unrelated: the county’s stepping-up of its emergency response capabilities to the VIPER radio platform.
The library and the radios
Several of the commissioners and some members of the public who spoke out during the public hearing and comment period wanted to know why the bond package presented Monday had the library funding coupled with something that had no obvious connection.
Republican Commissioner Taylor Vorbeck wanted to know why the two projects were tied together, and why the allocations for both ventures were in round numbers.
“I have issues with that,” she said. “I’ve never seen pricing for purchasing equipment provided in round numbers.”
Democratic Commissioner Mark Lovick had a similar question, asking whether there was some economic benefit to be gained through the linkage.
Minter explained at the time that the library funding was first being considered more than two years ago, discussions were taking place about the possibility of one or more school board projects in the near future that could potentially be linked with funding for the library. Those conversations never got very far.
In recent years, the county has been moving forward with addressing some of its longer-term needs and as planning for the library continued to advance slowly, county staff saw an opportunity to use local obligation bonds as a way to fund the library and the VIPER project simultaneously. But with the issuance of bonds being very similar to an installment borrowing process, collateral had to be involved.
Minter explained that the county’s tax-levying authority itself will serve as collateral for the $22 million earmarked for the library, and the library facility and the land it will occupy will provide similar collateral for the VIPER radio equipment and installation. It’s a complex process and everything still must be approved by the state Local Government Commission before the bonds can be issued, sold, and the resulting funds transferred to the county’s bank account. But that’s the essence of how everything is supposed to work, and it’s a process that already is drawing fire.
The crowd present for meeting was a little smaller than usual by the time commissioners reached the bonds subject on the agenda. Only two people spoke, and another individual sent in comments by email. Each of them raised objections to the process by which the funds are to be raised, particularly surrounding the idea of welding of two disparate funding measures.
David Smoak of Carolina Trace, a Republican candidate for a seat on the commission this November and a regular commenter at their meetings, objected to an absence of what he termed “basic information” in the Master Trust Agreement, a 71-page document that will govern the terms of the funding. Missing, Smoak said, is information on how much is being borrowed and how it will be spent, the interest rates that will be charged, the amount of financing charges that will be associated, and the amortization schedules for structures and equipment that will be part of the project.
A second speaker, Lee County GOP Chairman Jim Womack, said he didn’t oppose the VIPER project but questioned why the commissioners had not been using the county’s growth over the past several years to cover the system on a pay-as-you-go basis instead of going the “more expensive route” of doing a bond referendum.
Womack said the radio system had to be obtained because it is critical for emergency responders spread out over several agencies, but he also said there is no legal requirement for the county to pay for a library. In his view, Womack believes that money should have been spent sooner for VIPER and not at all for building a new county library.
The funding agreement is silent on how the money is to be split between the two projects, and it took several questions to Minter before the crowd heard that the library would receive $22 million, with VIPER to be allocated $6 million. She said she anticipates the sale of the bonds will bring in slightly more than the actual face value of the bonds, just as a recent sale of other bonds to finance the Lee County Athletic Park did. The county had requested the sale of $25 million for the athletic park and when the final results came in, they sold for $26.7 million.
Minter said any funds received in excess of the $28 million from the sale will go to pay for alternates on the library that are being held now in reserve until the actual amount of the funds available is known. She is optimistic that one or more of those alternates will become a part of the final project through any excess dollars.
In order to proceed without further delay on the sale of the bonds, the commissioners had to suspend their own rules so they could take a final vote on the issue on the same evening when the matter was first considered in a public hearing. The usual process is that a public hearing on such issues is held at one regular meeting and the vote on whether to adopt the measure is considered at the next one.
In the end, the commissioners approved the suspension of the rules and two other votes necessary to clear the way for issuance of the bond package. Those two votes each ended in a 5-1 result, with Vorbeck being the lone “no” each time. Vorbeck said she was concerned about a number of items that were not contained within the Master Agreement. The sale of the bonds will take place in late September.