Governor Stein signed the SB 889 freeze, and Issue 5 established that nine counties are affected. Issue 6's platcard flagged, as a standalone accountability point, that the state had not published the specific list of nine counties as of that issue's close. As of this issue's research, the list still has not been published.

This is not a minor omission. Property owners and district managers in adjacent counties need to know whether their county is on the frozen list to plan FY27 budgets and TIF capture projections around known versus stale values. A revaluation freeze means that property values used for tax purposes are held at prior levels rather than updated to reflect current market conditions. For a district manager projecting TIF capture, the difference between frozen and current values can be material, and not knowing which side of the line your county falls on makes the projection guesswork.

The accountability question is straightforward: who is responsible for publishing the list, and what does a month-plus delay in publishing a straightforward statutory determination signal about implementation capacity at the state revenue department? A freeze that affects nine counties is not a complex determination. It is a list. The statutory criteria are presumably defined, the county data exists, and the determination has been made internally or the number nine would not be known. The gap between knowing the count and publishing the names is an administrative failure, not a policy dispute.

For district managers in North Carolina and in any state with similar revaluation-freeze authority, the practical lesson is that a signed bill is not the same as an implemented one. The freeze is law. The list is not public. Districts operating in counties that might be affected are now budgeting against uncertainty that the state could resolve with a press release and has not. That uncertainty has a cost: deferred investment decisions, conservative TIF projections that may leave real revenue on the table, and a general inability to plan around known values when the values are technically known but not officially disclosed.

Source: Issue 5 MB feature ("Stein Signed the Freeze. Nine Counties Now Run FY27 on Stale Values."); Issue 6 MB platcard.