Unlike many other states, the state of North Carolina does not allow impact fees to be assessed against builders. Unfortunately, it would seem the NC Homebuilders Association has much more pull than we do: https://www.nchba.org/.../legislativ.../why-not-impact-fees/. This law is outside of Iredell County and the Town of Mooresville's purview, and is certainly beyond MGSD's control. In fact, the North Carolina Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue in a 2016 decision (QUALITY BUILT HOMES V. TOWN OF CARTHAGE). In this case the Town of Carthage, due to extreme growth, passed ordinances allowing impact fees for water and sewer system expansions. The Town cited the Public Enterprise Statutes, N.C.G.S. §§ 160A-311 to -338 as their basis for the ordinance. The builder sued the town and the case made its way to the state Supreme Court who ruled that public enterprise statutes “clearly and unambiguously fail to give [cities] the essential prospective charging power necessary to assess impact fees.”
In North Carolina, the responsibility of building, equipping, and maintaining school facilities is given to our state’s counties; G.S. 115C-408(b) stipulates that public school facility requirements will be met by county governments. More often than not this responsibility is met through School Bonds. While the school district tries to partner with the Town at times, like with facility use agreements for our athletic fields, our performing arts center, etcetera, we are completely separate entities and the Town Government has no fiduciary duty to our school district.
Growth puts our school systems in a predicament. We are not allowed to turn a child in our district away. We have to find a way to house them. What we can do, and continue to do, is work diligently to find the most cost effective way to meet the demands of providing seats for the children in our district. We have attempted to do this by not allowing people from outside of MGSD to choice into our school district. Within our district, we no longer allow choice between our three elementary schools. While our three elementary schools, in addition to our middle school, are all at or over capacity, we made the decision to forego asking our citizens to support both an additional middle school and elementary school. We studied the situation and found that if we can get the additional middle school, we can reconfigure our grades to also free up a bit of space at our elementary schools. We currently have a grade configuration of K - 3 at our three elementary schools, 4 - 6 at our two intermediate schools, 7 - 8 at our one middle schools, and 9 - 12 at our one high school. With two middle schools, we could shift our 6th grade from our two intermediate schools to the middle schools. Then we could shift our third grade to our two intermediate schools. This would make our three elementary schools K-2 schools instead of the current K-3 school configuration. We make all of these decisions with careful deliberation, keeping the interests of our students and community in mind.
