News

BORDER WAR: Resident fights N.C. property assessment

Ellis W. McCracken Jr. listens to arguments before the Henderson County Board of Equalization& Review.

By Bill Moss, Published: October 16, 2016

If Ellis W. McCracken Jr. called 911, an ambulance would come from Greenville County, S.C., to help. If he called the cops, Greenville County deputies would race up the mountain to see what’s up. His driver’s license calls him a resident of South Carolina. And his mail comes to his home address, in Travelers Rest, S.C.

Yet he owes property taxes to Henderson County because his house — thanks to the recently re-aligned state line — is officially in North Carolina. Try not to remind him that he can’t express his outrage at the ballot box. He’s registered to vote in South Carolina.
“Don’t rub it in,” he says. “It’s interesting, and painful.”
The interesting and painful case of Ellis W. McCracken Jr. is a footnote in the long-running saga of the disputed border separating the Carolinas. McCracken is entangled in what might be the last chapter of a story that starts in 1735, when King George II offered the first direction on drawing the boundary line.
“The line shall begin at the sea, thirty miles from the west side of the mouth of the Cape Fear River,” the king decreed from across the Atlantic. “From thence it shall run on a northwest course to the thirty-fifth parallel of north latitude and from thence due west to the South Seas.”
That king’s order to separate the two colonies with two straight lines was not as simple to carry out as it sounds.
“The original 1735 survey party, for example, had members who sometimes didn’t show up, sometimes didn’t get paid and often gave up while trudging through the ghastly swamps and wilderness they encountered on their way up from the coast,” the New York Times reported in a 2014 account of the border dispute. “That may explain why they failed to reach their target, the 35th Parallel, after two years of effort: Instead, they drove a stake into the ground 12 miles too far to the south, and went home.”
Another surveying party deployed in 1764 headed west from the erroneous stake, “despite explicit orders from King George III to verify that the first surveyors had indeed reached the 35th Parallel,” the Times said. “By the time they detected their error, 64 miles later, they had shaved 422,000 acres off what was supposed to be South Carolina.”

Gas station aggrieved

A variety of factors vexed efforts by the two states to settle the boundary location, not least because trees and geographic markers disappeared over time and because stone monuments vanished in forests, brush and swamps.
Bruised by a similar long-running border dispute with the state of Georgia, South Carolina agreed to try and settle the Carolinas border amicably. The states formed a Joint Boundary Commission to oversee a new survey and to document potential negative impacts or contested issues.
The most famous of these gnarly consequences involved Lewis Efird and his gas station, which, he assumed, was just south of the state line in South Carolina.
“Unfortunately,” the Times noted, “the survey work showed conclusively that his pumps were in a part of North Carolina where gas is more expensive, beer sales are not allowed and fireworks are illegal.”
“Our business is going to be destroyed,” Efird told commissioners during a public hearing.
A compromise approved in the Legislature notched Efird’s store back into South Carolina. But no relief is in sight for McCracken. He appeared last week before the Henderson County Board of Equalization and Review, officially to contest the valuation the Henderson County tax assessor put on his 8,214-square-foot home in Cliffs Valley North in Travelers Rest, S.C. But McCracken and his lawyer, Vincent J. Borden, of the Van Winkle Law Firm, offered evidence that McCracken ought not be taxed in North Carolina to begin with.
When McCracken retired as general counsel of Anheuser Busch in St. Louis, he and his wife, Jacquelyn, first settled on Amelia Island near Jacksonville, Fla.
“Every time there was a squall off West Africa my wife thought it was time to pack the car” and evacuate, he said. That led them to the Cliffs development off U.S. 25 in Travelers Rest. What might have been a stone’s throw to North Carolina is now, according to the Joint Border Commission and Henderson County, a stone’s drop.
McCracken’s two-story home — and significantly the home’s master bedroom — is in North Carolina, the new line showed, while the rest of his land is in South Carolina. To be exact .58 acre of the .85-acre parcel is in North Carolina, the Henderson County assessor says.
Before the McCrackens started construction, “they had been notified that both (Greenville County and Henderson County) would be taxing the property,” Borden told the Board of E&R. McCracken said that in a telephone conversation Greenville County’s tax assessor confirmed that “Greenville County was going to be the sole taxing authority.”
If that did happen, though, it was before the Legislature agreed on the re-aligned border, in 2013. The next year, McCracken received his first tax bill from Henderson County, based on an assessment of his home and the six-tenths of an acre, of $2,021,500. McCracken disputes the assessment even if he stipulates that his house is in North Carolina.
McCracken counters with an appraisal he commissioned that valued the house and the entire .85-acre property at $1,495,000.
Hank Outlaw, of the Henderson County tax assessor’s office, told the Board of E&R there were multiple problems with McCracken’s appraisal. The appraiser, Joseph E. Kirton, is not licensed in North Carolina. And Kirton’s appraisal, on March 14 of this year, is more than a year beyond the effective date of the last Henderson County valuation, which was Jan. 1, 2015. For tax purposes, by law, that value holds until the next revaluation, in 2019. Kirton’s “comparables” included the sale price of homes that were half the size of McCracken’s house, Outlaw said. Plus, the sales were not in North Carolina.
“With all due respect,” Outlaw said, “we’re not discussing how South Carolina valuates property. We’re in Henderson County, North Carolina, and this is how we appraise property. This is based on the most recent schedule adopted by the Board of Commissioners.”
Outlaw used Henderson County and Buncombe County sales to verify the value.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any that straddle the state line,” he said.
After an interior inspection of the McCracken home, the Henderson County assessor made an adjustment that resulted in a considerable tax break. The change, lowering the quality grade from AAA to AA-plus, reduced the assessment by $235,600, to $1,785,900.

McCracken was not mollified.
“We don’t receive any services whatsoever from Henderson County,” he said. “All of our services are provided by Greenville County. In fact, when all this erupted I said I’ll pay for one but I’m not going to pay two.”
A courtly lawyer, McCracken sounded determined to take his case as far on appeal as he could go.
“I believe so because the only hurdle we had before getting into court was to go through this,” he said.
His appeal would go next to the state Property Tax Commission and from there to the N.C. Court of Appeals.
Two-hundred and eighty-one years after King George II’s boundary order, peace has not yet arrived at the McCracken home, at 106 Peaceful Night Trail, Travelers Rest, S.C.