Commissioners approve $28 million in bonds for new library, first responder

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…