Engineer. Neighbor. Vice Chair. Why Butch Lawter Wants Four More Years

Jonathan Breeden: [00:00:00] On this week’s episode of The Best of Johnston County Podcast, we could continue our candidate series leading up to the March 3rd, 2026 primary. We talked to Butch about his time growing up in Bat Cave, becoming a engineer, moving to Clayton in 1993, getting elected to the Clayton Town Council.

Ultimately, why he ran for the County Commissioners. What he thinks he’s accomplished and why he wants another four year term. So if you’re interested in what your county commissioners are up to, or why Butch Lawter wants to represent you for four more years, listen in.

Welcome to another episode of Best of Johnston County, brought to you by Breeden Law Office. Our host, Jonathan Breeden, an experienced family lawyer with a deep connection to the community, is ready to take you on a journey through the area that he has called home for over 20 years. Whether it’s a deep dive into the love locals have for the county or unraveling the complexities of family law, Best of Johnston County [00:01:00] presents an authentic slice of this unique community.

Jonathan Breeden: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Best of Johnston County Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden, and on today’s episode we have county commissioner, Vice Chairman, Butch Lawter. We’re here to talk to Butch about his time on the county commissioner. He is running for reelection. This is part of our candidate series that we’re running here up to the March 3rd, 2026, primary. Butch will have a primary opponent and Keith Branch will be on the ballot against him. Then there is no Democrat, so the winner of the primary, as often as Johnston County, is gonna be the winner of the election and will serve as a county commissioner through the year 2030. So before we do that, we’d like to ask you to like, follow, subscribe to this podcast wherever you see it, whether it be on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, or any of the other social media channels of The Best of Johnston County Podcast.

The Best of Johnston County Podcast comes out every single Monday and has now for over [00:02:00] 28 months, so go back and listen to our previous episodes, including our first two episodes, which Butch Lawter that ran in September and October of 2024 when he was the chairman of the county Commissioners and he was wearing some really cool shorts because we recorded that in the summer and it was like a hundred degrees that day.

Anyway, welcome Butch.

Butch Lawter: Yeah, no shorts today. No clips and gear today, right?

Jonathan Breeden: No clips and gear today, right? Last time you talked,

Butch Lawter: I’ll spare you that.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. You’d come from a, a picnic and didn’t realize, I guess we did it on video. But anyway, YouTube is where we get a lot of, we get thousands of views of each episode.

Butch Lawter: I know that now.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, YouTube, right? Yeah. You got your jacket now, right? Long. So anyway. Alright, so tell the people who you are, what you do.

Butch Lawter: So my name’s Butch Lawter, originally from the Western part of state. Born in Bat Cave North Carolina. There’s an actual place bat Cave. You can Google that.

Lived in Spartanburg in South Carolina. That’s my connection to Clemson. Moved to Raleigh NC State graduate there. Worked in Raleigh for six years for an environmental [00:03:00] consulting firm, and moved to Clayton in 1993 with my wife and two children at the time. Had my third my son here in Johnston County.

Lived here since then. was active in the community in Clayton on the town Council. There for 14 years starting in 1999. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it was and then in 2018 decided to run for county commissioner was successful and have served since then. And I will, I will say I had, I back in 90, I had no ambition to be a PO politician. In fact, I got asked by the, the mayor at the time or told that I should run, didn’t have any clue what a town council person did. He hounded me for about two weeks. I agreed to it and didn’t really know what I was getting into, but became I don’t, the hook is not the right word, but I found it was a passion that I had of, of being able to be involved and to serve the community through being an elected official.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. Well that was Doug McCormick, right?

Butch Lawter: It was Doug McCormick.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. Golly. And Doug McCormick was [00:04:00] Mayor of Clayton when I moved here in 2000. But during that period of time while you were on the Clayton Town Council that really knew the county commissioners, the town of Clayton had some real serious financial problems.

Butch Lawter: Oh, yes.

Jonathan Breeden: And almost got taken over by the state and all that. I mean, what did you take from that experience into being the governance you do now on the county commissioners.

Butch Lawter: So, a lot of it carried over because we did I think in 97 is when Steve Biggs came on the manager and you’re correct. I mean, the town of Clayton was about ready to be taken over by the local government commission because of poor finances. I mean, they had no money the fund balance was non-existent. So from that, you start from a position of not having a lot and being able to look at budgets and really cut them, make sure they’re lean.

And then also look at as a Republican, you know, we don’t wanna raise taxes to put that on the back of the people to pay for what we need. So it was a slow, incremental process growth. You know, started happening, so you [00:05:00] had some more revenue coming in and it was just close financial mess So that was one thing I took away is, you know, you don’t take those things for granted, 2008 came and there was a belt tightening that took place.

So the basics, I guess, monitoring the financial and budgeting was what I took away from that time.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. Well, and you’re a I mean, you’re an engineer by training.

Butch Lawter: Yes.

Jonathan Breeden: You have a couple of engineering degrees. And I think you work for Withers Ravenel.

Butch Lawter: I do.

Jonathan Breeden: In your real life, we make sure we get that, you know, all these commissioners, like, it pays like almost nothing. So they all have real jobs. What do you do for Withers, Raven? I know, I know you do some design. I don’t know if you do design. I don’t know what

Butch Lawter: No, no, no, no. There’s, I have no idea.

Jonathan Breeden: There’s so many way different types of engineering.

Butch Lawter: So we have smarter people that do that stuff for me. So I am Civil Engineer. I did mostly environmental work. I’ve done some geotechnical work, but I have migrated over the years away from the calculations and design work into managing people and projects and, and clients.

So, today I am a senior development [00:06:00] officer at Withers Ravenel. I have three departments, practice areas if you will. I have utilities, I have stormwater and a little more one funding and asset management. So basically that group is, you have local governments who are in search of grants. We have a really great team who is able to go out, connect grants to local governments very successful at getting those, and so we build projects off of those. So that is it. Asset management is just what it sounds like.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Butch Lawter: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: So I remember when you ran in 2018 and supported you then, why did you run in 2018 and have you accomplished what you set out to accomplish?

Now that we’re at the end of your second term, you’ve been there seven years. Have you done what you wanted to do?

Butch Lawter: So

I felt like I checked a lot of boxes.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Butch Lawter: I went back recently and watched the candidates forum from 2018, but the reason I ran for County Commissioner is there was not a very good relationship between the town of [00:07:00] Clayton and the County.

And part of that was the commissioner that was representing District 7 at the time. So, I remember vividly asking my fellow council members, is anybody gonna run? The answer was no. And I said, well, I’m running. And some of the things I wanted to accomplish you know, that I said was updating the land use many ordinances that were 2011, some maybe 2015.

The land use plan or ordinances, comprehensive transportation plan, you know, recreation, which you and I talked a lot about over the years.

Jonathan Breeden: Yes.

Butch Lawter: And the quality of life. You know, one of the things was starting a parks and open space for the County. Not programming, but facilities. We started that simple as a public information officer. You know, we didn’t have one at the time. It was a foreign concept. In fact, you know, we had commissioner, we don’t wanna argue with people on Facebook, which is exactly, we don’t, but now we can put information out. So I think the public is more informed about what we do.

Jonathan Breeden: [00:08:00] Right.

Butch Lawter: We started live streaming our meetings. So, those were, you know, some of the things that that I wanted to accomplish that I feel like that we have. And the economic development was the other piece is, you know, we were successful, but I think we’ve seen that success, have haven’t grown.

We’ve seen a lot of success recently. We just had the Vulcan elements, you know, a thousand jobs at nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year. And, and of course our biopharmaceuticals continue to grow. The other thing that I had, I, I thought I was going to. I got a awakening on education and funding for that.

It’s not as as simple as I want to help and I’m here, here to make it better. There’s a lot of dynamics there, but I will say I do feel we’ve increased funding for our public schools. We’ve increased funding for community college. We’ve built a advanced manufacturing center, and probably the most thing that wasn’t on my radar then.

But it was part of the educational funding was the commissioner’s promise where we’ve helped almost 2000 students attend [00:09:00] JCC tuition free for the last three years. And we’ve seen enrollment at JC over that same time period go up about 60%. So we are at unprecedented growth rates in the state of North Carolina there.

So there’s a lot of things to check. There’s still some things we’re close on the ordinances. So there’s. There’s some things there that I, I still wanna get accomplished.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s a lot in that answer. Golly.

Butch Lawter: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: I mean, if you’re going through that answer, I’m like, ask him about this. Ask him about this. Ask him about this. And you know, we could do this for two hours, but, and, but, but nobody would listen. I’m not Joe Rogan. So, let’s go back to the recreation.

Butch Lawter: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: We, we’ve had the, the recreation, the, they head of the recreation on this podcast, Adrian O’Neal twice recently as just six months ago. The Cleveland Park, now they have started moving some dirt.

Butch Lawter: Yep.

Jonathan Breeden: And they’re gonna do phase one. And so, which I think is a parking lot and maybe a pickleball court.

Butch Lawter: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: I think pickleball a retention pond.

Butch Lawter: Trails. Yeah. [00:10:00] And trails. Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: Trail a couple trails. Right, right. That, that, that park 50 million by the time it’s built out. Does that get done? Where does $50 million come to do that part?

Butch Lawter: So, yeah, so to

Jonathan Breeden: do it all the way now I know.

Butch Lawter: Yeah. So the initial piece has been grants and some, I think we’ve spent about a million dollars maybe when initial purchase of land. And basically it’s been grants since then matching funds for that.

So we have really taken and fee in lieu, you know, which is a developers fund that as they build, they can pay into the fee in lie for parts and recreation. So we’ve taken all that and I think it’s about $4 million we’re spending on the actual development of phase one of the park. But you’re right, we’re, we’re not gonna grant our way to $50 million worth of improvements.

And, and, and it’s, you know, depending on what we wind up doing, it could be 30 to 60, but it is in that ballpark. But I think we’re gonna have to be innovative in how we approach that because you, you know, we’re a big county, so, and here the park is in Cleveland. You know, the folks in other parts of the [00:11:00] county as well.

I don’t use, I’m not never gonna use that. Which is another side note, and I’m sure Adrian brought this up. People from all over the county come and I’ll just use my daughters. They, they live in this area, but they go to Four Oaks, to the parks, they go to Clayton, they go to Smithfield. So, you know, once you have a park, people will find their way here.

So from surprisingly far away places. So, so I think that that’s part of it. And one thing that. That we’ve talked about early on in 2018, 2019 was a special tax district, right? I don’t think that’s off the table, but we need to find a way to be fair where you know if, and I’m just gonna say with if 60% of the people within five miles are the ones using the park, that’s probably their proportionate share.

The other 40 from the rest of the county probably will need to come from, you know, fee in lieu or some other form to make match that. So it’s not right. Just like, just like in, you know, unfortunately in municipalities they pay a hundred percent. If you live outside of municipality, you can take advantage of the facilities for nothing.

Jonathan Breeden: Right?

Butch Lawter: So we wanna balance that [00:12:00] out as we’re looking around. And then wherever it is in the county, not just Cleveland, but there’s something in outside of pine level.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, I mean, I, I live in Cleveland and, and I enjoy the Clayton Parks. I enjoy Smithfield Park and sh track and, and you know, and my kids have played ball all over this county.

So I mean, I, you know, we’ve benefited even though. I don’t pay Clayton taxes and stuff, so I understand that part of it. The the, the school funding I asked you about this when you were here 18 months ago. The school funding went in like one year from 70 million or 75 million to 115 million as the County portion of the schools, the school enrollment is flat because of the growth of home schools and ALA and the charter schools and all of that stuff.

Do you believe that the County has gotten a good value for that 115 million that they got? Because it was a big jump and I know we gotta do buses and stuff, but like that seemed like [00:13:00] a lot.

Butch Lawter: Yeah. So it’s actually. This was like, I think 70 to 77, and then somewhere in the 90’s, and then the a hundred, I think it’s a hundred. Its 15 or 16.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Butch Lawter: 110 this time.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Butch Lawter: So is been over a few years, but yeah, that’s the struggle because we had, you had COVID, you had federal money come in, inflated some things got some things taken care of, and then that money went away. And so you’re right, and the growth in public schools, which includes charter schools, has been flat and I wanna say 400 students over the last three years, so.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Butch Lawter: Really. So homeschooling is really big private schools too, but so it has been flat. So that is you know, there would just say there was some internal arguments on what the final number for this year’s budget should be. I will say I was on the losing end ’cause I wanted a lower number, but no, there’s seven of us and

Jonathan Breeden: right

Butch Lawter: four of us decide what happens. But I will say that the public schools over the last four [00:14:00] years has come a long way with the transparency and the numbers.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Butch Lawter: That we have. And so kind of, I would love to have a formula, a funding formula like many Counties have where you know, going into the year you have this much growth, the spending is gonna increase by X percent.

You do the simple math and here’s your number. We haven’t gotten there yet. There is some willingness, I think, to discuss that with the school board. The board of commissioners, I think is all in favor of that to make it a lot less complicated and adversarial sometimes about what that is but I think we’re moving in that direction. But my basic philosophy is I look at. What do we pay per student last year? What is the percentage growth expected for the next year? And what is say some sort of regional inflation and apply that to the per student and multiply the numbers students and

Jonathan Breeden: Well, that’s not what the board has done.

Butch Lawter: No, no, no.

Jonathan Breeden: That’s, that’s what Butch does. But that’s not what the board,

Butch Lawter: so that’s, that’s my right.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. Alright. Well that’s cool.

Butch Lawter: That’s how, that’s how I, that’s where I start, right?

Jonathan Breeden: [00:15:00] Is there now trust between this Board of Commissioners and that Board of Education, because that has been a problem in this County.

Butch Lawter: Oh yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: For a long time. And I’m just curious, does this Board of Commissioners trust this Board of Education?

Butch Lawter:So I would say yes. And again, that has taken, I’ve been on there seven years, and it has come a long way in that time because now with their I guess their CFO, Steven Britt

Jonathan Breeden: Steven Britt a guy is sharp. So sharp.

Butch Lawter: We ask for information and we get it. And so it’s not smoking mirrors and it’s he’s consistent, you know, not that we check, you know, was it trust but verify.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Butch Lawter: That we do that and our financial team checks and has been through the process. So I think the trust not only is board to board, it is staff to staff. And so I think that’s been one of the biggest differences that I’ve seen over the years is that level of trust.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Butch Lawter: Has gone up. And I gotta give, say, kudos as we were looking at Wilsons Mills High School and some of [00:16:00] the recent projects, including Clayton High School. They took unprecedented measures to bring board members in Board of Commissioners in to their interview process and selection process to help look at architects and contractors to make decisions on who to select, and we’ve been involved throughout that process.

So that is something that never had happened before. And again, we’re the ones writing the check to them to build the schools. They build the schools.

Right? So that, that in itself has made a big difference. And then while you’ve seen the building programs we’ve had, you know, Clayton High School is a, a little outta sync for us. We usually do a vote to bond, but because of Wilson Mills opening up and wanting to get rid of mobile classroom units that we are, you know, sliding Clayton.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, you just, you’re paying Clayton outta the general fund. You’re not selling bonds. I mean,

Butch Lawter: yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. I mean, you’re, you’re budgeted the money you’re gonna sell bonds for

Butch Lawter: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, I didn’t,

Butch Lawter: we limited obligation bonds. Yeah. So typically it’s go bonds where it’s voted [00:17:00] on. Okay. This one, because of the timing, we’re gonna do limited obligation bonds. So it’s still the same.

And there’s very little financial difference in the long run of what you pay back over time. So that is, it is different. Okay. And so I think that’s what both boards are like, Hey, we’re. We can’t keep doing the same thing, just like we’re not building sprawling schools anymore. We’re building schools up.

Jonathan Breeden: Correct.

Butch Lawter: So the same thing as we’re looking at a little bit different financing not, not really, not extensive, but just a different way of doing it.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, I think the, the, the Board of Commissioners and the Board of Education has kind of caught up on the school building. Now. We, you know, the, the, the Cleveland High School expansion’s almost done.

We have the new Wilsons Mills Elementary School, Wilsons Mills High School is about to open here in August of 26. You know, they’re gonna build, they’re gonna build a new Clayton High School on the campus of Clayton High School and then tear down the old school. So I don’t know that we need that many more school buildings. You’ve gotten rid of 80% of the mobile classrooms, I believe. I think right. [00:18:00] What does the county do next? I, I, you know, we had Mike Rose on the podcast last week and, you know, we, him and I talked about the county needs a billion with a B dollars in buildings that are not schools. What are those? How do we pay for ’em?

Butch Lawter: I think that’s a half a billion.

Jonathan Breeden: It’s a half a billion.

Butch Lawter: Yeah, but I, it still has a B in it.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, I thought it was a billion because I thought the DSS building was 350 million by itself.

Butch Lawter: No, no. So the, so the, the, the billion is on the util the water. Facility. Okay, so that’s a billion. Okay. But I will say one thing we did too to change thing is we, we traditionally used design, bid and build, which is a slow process.

You get the surprise at the end. If the, if the it is over budget, you, you get, if something you thought was gonna be 125 million, you get a cost of 150 million. You’re scrambling to figure out how to how to fix that. So with this CMAR process construction manager, at risk, you get a guaranteed maximum price.

And, you know, along [00:19:00] the way, if your number’s getting outta line, there’s changes that can be made to reduce the cost. Okay. And so we, we’ve used that I think on all the projects recently, maybe not Cooper, elementary school, but we’ve used that process and that has really been effective. We thought in Wilson Mills at one time during the process it was $15 million over budget and there was a lot of what in the world’s going on, and, but we were able to correct it.

Whereas if we had gone traditional process, we’d have found out it was 125 million, you know, $15 million over budget. At the date we opened the bid and then you’re trying to figure it out. So we have that. But back to your question about our facilities. We’ve got, we in last February, we had a strategic planning session.

We prioritize our construction projects. DSS was the number one. So that’s the, the first thing on the list. We’ve got judicial annex expansion and, and out there at the courthouse we have [00:20:00] our admin building. So there’s, so we’ve got a list of about 20 different things, but all in toll, I think all the construction process our buildings that we have.

And I’m, I’m thinking that’s gonna be over 10 years. We’ll be in that. In today’s dollar is about 500 million.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. All right. So the billion was out there. But You gotta count the water plant too. So, I mean, what are we gonna do about that? I mean, we could do this for hours, but I mean, we do have a water shortage kind of, I mean, we’re buying water from all over the place. Like what’s the plan there?

Butch Lawter: So, you wanna finish the building stuff again?.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah, yeah. You can finish the building.

Butch Lawter: So I’ll say on on the buildings, what we’ve done is we, especially during the budget process, we, we run financial models.

I’ll say almost on a, on a daily basis or hourly basis, it seems like sometimes to look at, we have an unofficial fund balance level that we want to take maintain about 40, 40 to 50%. I think we’re about 55 to 60 right now. And so we look at phasing the projects in so that [00:21:00] we. We’re heading towards because we don’t wanna lose our AA bond rating, so we don’t wanna drop it and then lose that.

But we try to gradually come down and stage the project so that we’re heading towards. 40 and then as we have some debt service paid off, it’ll come back up. So we’re trying to level that out at about 40, 40%. So we look at that, but it will be through probably limit limited obligation bonds

Jonathan Breeden: okay

Butch Lawter: to pay those off because what that does is, instead of me and you paying for it today, that the folks who are coming here later and gonna need those services are, you know, because of the financing over typically 20 years, they, they’re able to pay for their part when they get here, so. Right.

Jonathan Breeden: I gotcha.

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Jonathan Breeden: So what is the plan for water and sewer?

Butch Lawter: So water sewer. We’ve completed one expansion I think last year. We’ve got another one in progress. I think we’ll be finished next year, which had about another 4 million gallons in sewer treatment capacity. But really the real issue is water. Right now we are, I won’t say we’ve allocated all we have, but we’re close.

And part of the problem with water is you’ve got what it takes on an average day, but you also have to factor in what you have on a peak day. And so that therein lies the dilemma of being able to provide water on a peak day. And so the plan for that, we right now have a lower noose water reclamation facility, which is basically almost in Wayne County.

And so it’s we pump the water 10 miles into an existing, our former rock quarry in Princeton, treat it and then we send it to the rest of the County. And currently there’s plans to send it [00:23:00] back to Clayton, although Clayton is in evaluating some other alternatives. So that may not be part of it, but that’s your $800 million project there.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Butch Lawter: So, but we also as commission regionalization. That was one of the things back in 2018 that I talked about is regional. Actually, I talked about that in 1999.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Butch Lawter: Was regionalization. I haven’t been very successful on that yet, but we are working on it now. But we are really looking at Harnett County done as an alternative to get the water and then as part of the inter transfer program, you can keep 2 million of it, but you have to send whatever’s over that back. And so we’re working with those through our staff and consultant to figure out how do we tap into the Cape Fear and then send the water back through sewer. And Benson will be a big part of that for Oaks done in Harnett County.

So that’s, that is the plan. But the. The, on that, you’ve got a separate, that’s an enterprise fund, so that’s not coming out of our tax dollar.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. It’s a user fee.

Butch Lawter: It’s, it’s [00:24:00] basically a user fee.

Jonathan Breeden: It’s a user fee.

Butch Lawter: We recently raised,

Jonathan Breeden: right, you raised the rate for the water and the sewer.

Butch Lawter: Yeah. Yeah. So we raised which, which y’all have done a lot. So we recently raised yes, because the state has a calculation that you can make to determine what the, those maximum fees are. System development fees. And we did that on the water. We increased the water, double the water. But our thought on that was. We have people who are here that are paying, you know, the rates now, they paid their system development fee when they came in if there was one.

But now you have new people moving in and we didn’t feel like it was fair for the existing customers to pay a higher rate when, and a and the new customers pay a lower rate that didn’t pay for the cost of it. So we decided, hey, we’re gonna raise the system development fee to the maximum to cover some of those costs of future. Plant expansion, waterline expansions, all that. So we did lower the sewer system development fee right this year. But that’s lost in the shuffle.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah, I know. Lost the shuffle.

Butch Lawter: The [00:25:00] of the water was a tremendous increase.

Jonathan Breeden: All right, I got one. I got one or two more questions. I know Is this is longer than the usual The Best of Johnston County Podcast.

The tax rate, most of us got a 20% tax increase last year after the re-evaluation. Some people got 50, 60, 70% tax increases. Some people in towns got a hundred percent tax increases. Like Benson and Selma, Princeton people got almost an 80% tax increase. Now, those towns chose not to cut the rate as much as the County did, but it was a lot.

Butch Lawter: Oh yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: You know what’s gonna happen now? Why did we have to raise taxes on average 20% across the board? And what happens with that rate in the future?

Butch Lawter: So a lot of factors went into that. Let’s start with the revaluation process, which is mandated, you know, it has, can be no longer than eight years. We had just cut it from eight to six and it’s going to four. Now, but we saw historic [00:26:00] revals across, not just, it wasn’t just Johnston County, it was across the state. And, you know, we hear a lot of conversation, well, it’s because of the growth that we had 70% was the average.

But I have a commissioner friend in Pasquotank County not a growing county, their reval went up 40%. So it was a historic, that was across the state. So we start there we had seen 30% I think in this end of the County in 2019. And so that was part of it. So the numbers, that was a big number. And then tax rate is, you know, I was gonna say financial stewardship is one of our priorities.

Which that’s more than just the tax rate. We’ve talked about bond rating, we’ve talked about fund, you know, fund balance. So you’ve gotta balance all of that with our existing need for projects that probably should have been done 20 years ago. So we’re trying to again, catch up like we are on so many things, but to get the projects done.

So it was a combination of that and [00:27:00] revenue neutral would’ve been, you know, that was my initial goal until we started factoring in all those other things and wanting to keep our fund balance at 40% as we went through the construction. But the biggest yeah, I guess thing was there’s uncertainty because we, and still today we have hundreds of millions of dollars in property values that are under appeal.

And we, you know, we made our decision mid-June and so there was more under appeal then. So there was a lot of unknowns. We weren’t sure what, you know, Clayton High School was going in. We were trying to figure out how to layer in these projects. So we went with a, a tax rate that we knew, you know, was not revenue neutral.

But I also had done a little bit of studying on my own and looked at since 2018, for every county in, in the state, the history of their tax rate and their reval year and what I noticed as a general trend was there was, of [00:28:00] particularly the last three years, you saw a lot of counties drop the rate low, and I’m assuming they were getting to revenue neutral that the next year taxes, that the tax rate went up and thus the taxes.

So it was, it was a balance of future financial concerns and with current needs and, and knowing that with, you know, you’re talking about some, some people’s property went up a hundred percent.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh yeah.

Butch Lawter: And so if you looked at individual cases, there were some that we would have to lower the tax rate to 30%

Jonathan Breeden: right

Butch Lawter: to get them to be revenue neutral. And, and that just wasn’t possible. So we, we, we picked the picked our medicine, which was still, I mean, this end result, the, the, and we probably couched it the wrong way, right? As wet historic tax cut. But as you said,

Jonathan Breeden: a tax rate cut, but wasn’t a tax cut cut tax rate cut.

Butch Lawter: That is right

Jonathan Breeden: ’cause it was, I think you took in it’s about 20% more. Yeah. And, and, and the, the budget ended up being 420 [00:29:00] million. I think, you know, seven years ago it was 220 million. You know, we have a lot of growth and we’re gonna go through what happened with that 200 million. But a lot of growth has happened and I think the county’s in good shape.

I think the 40% fund balance is insane. I think it’s too high. I don’t think we need $250 million in a fund balance. You and I disagree on that. We’re not going to agree. I think the government is there to provide service to the people as best as possible. That money’s sitting there. You don’t have to have 40% fund balance to have AAA bond rating.

Like we’re like one of three counties in the whole state that hasn’t won anywhere near there. But you know, I know you’re conservative, you wanna save rainy day funds, all that.

Butch Lawter: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: But it is what it is.

Butch Lawter: So I will say that, and even though we disagree on the 40%. It has been as high as 70%. So, so for those of us that came on since then, as we felt like 70% was just putting money away, and again, not using it to provide services to the people, or more importantly, giving the people their money back.

Jonathan Breeden: Right, right.

Butch Lawter: Yeah. So you keep your money.

Jonathan Breeden: Right, [00:30:00] right.

Butch Lawter: And you keep your money and we’ll, we’ll head towards the 40%.

Jonathan Breeden: Why do you want to do this for five more years? Why do you wanna finish out your term and do it for four more?

Butch Lawter: Well, I think the biggest thing is I feel like the things that I’ve started and some of ’em I’ve accomplished, there’s still, regionalization is a big thing for me that I wanna make sure that I get that to a place where we can say we have a regional system or we are well on our way to a regional system.

The recreation is a big piece for it mean to make sure that we can continue to connect the dots to get Mountain to Sea Trail East Coast Greenway ’cause it does provide economic opportunities, little jobs that form because of that tourism. And we’ve, I’ll throw in, we’ve got a great executive director for our visitors bureau now Aaron Mullins, who’s come in with some great ideas.

Jonathan Breeden: And he was a guest on our podcast a few weeks ago. a rockstar.

Butch Lawter: Yes. He is.

Jonathan Breeden: We are very fortunate to have Aaron Mullins.

Butch Lawter: Absolutely. So, there’s still some things on the [00:31:00] transparency with the PIO and making sure we’re getting all the information out there that we can you know, parts and rec and then just catching up on some of the, I kind of feel like we’re moving in a positive direction and I used to, as chairman, I on to keep my foot on the gas, and I think that’s historically we’ve seen not a foot on the gas and a lot of projects be delayed.

And again, we’re trying to catch up and get some things to provide the services because the expectation level of the public is the service level is not going down.

Jonathan Breeden: Correct.

Butch Lawter: It’s going up.

Jonathan Breeden: Correct. You’re absolutely right.

Butch Lawter: And you know how it was with Parks and Recreation. That was the way the people who are, who are here, who have now experienced some of the parks, greenways trails and all that, that used to have to go to Raleigh that are now able to do it here.

And so I hear that a lot is we love it. We love the having the trails, we love having the part to take our kids, our grandkids in my case.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. No it’s awesome. That’s awesome. [00:32:00] Alright, last question we ask everybody. What do you love most about Johnston County?

Butch Lawter: Again, the same thing I said last time. The people don’t know that campaigning is the top thing on anybody’s list. Definitely the fundraising is not, but getting around the county and being able to talk to people and, and listen, and I think that’s the biggest thing is. They’re listening to the people because what I, my experience has been people want to be heard. And I think that if, if you are out there and listening and people have a chance, I think some of ’em don’t, they don’t expect anything.

They just wanna know that you listened. And so, but you campaign, that’s the, the best part of campaigning is being out with the people and they always enjoy that.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, I mean, you go everywhere. I mean, you’re somewhere four or five nights a week. I mean, I don’t go anywhere. You’re not there. Fire department’s, christmas parades. I mean, you can’t say, people can’t say they can’t get in touch with Butch Lawter

Butch Lawter: No.

Jonathan Breeden: And, and, and get an opinion or share. Share. I mean, golly. I complain all the time to you and Patrick Harris and Mike Rose, and anybody that’ll listen. So I, I do appreciate how much y’all are out there and how [00:33:00] much you do and everything you’ve done.

You’ve been on the JCC Board of Trustees for the last seven years. You’ve done a tremendous amount for JCC. We didn’t get into that today. But I appreciate that we were on the board of trustees of JCC together. It’s amazing what’s going on there with Dr. Linguist and everything. So I think the county’s doing great.

Personally. I think it’s, it’s awesome. I think I, I enjoy living here. I, I love, I enjoy the growth and all of that stuff and it’s gonna continue and I think y’all done a pretty good job managing, I know there’s, there’s difference of opinions about that, but, but you’re not gonna stop it.

Butch Lawter: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that when you bullet, it’s just like most things, 80% of things we agree on, the 20% we may have a big disagreement on, but I think for the most part we agree on.

And the other, I will say, the other thing we didn’t even talk about was the ag side of things, the agriculture side of things. And one of the things that I you know, kind of stumbled on to was I was thinking one day, parks and recs have fee in lieu. Why can’t we do that for farms? Then I was talking to Commissioner Stevens and she’s like, we already have that with the PUV rollback.

And so [00:34:00] I said, Hey, let’s, let’s take that rollback money and put it into farmland preservation and through the soil and water conservation folks and TLC, you know, we’ve preserved in. 3000 acres in the last few years and have some more on the book, so.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, that’s great. That’s great. That’s great. Well, we’d like to thank Butch Lawter from coming and being our guest on this week. So The Best of Johnston County Podcast, he will be on the Republican primary ballot for the District seven Commissioner race against Keith Branch on March 3rd. Early voting starts February the 12th, 2026. So just in a couple of weeks. There is no Democrat, so the winner of the primary will be the winner if you’re an unaffiliated voter. You can go and vote and choose a Republican ballot, or if you’re a Republican voter you can vote in this race. Unfortunately Democrat voters are not gonna be able to vote in the Republican primary. And unfortunately that is the only race there is. So the winner will be declared on March the third, 2026, and they will serve, they will take this term starts [00:35:00] December the seventh, 2026, and runs through early December, 2030. And so do your homework. We’re gonna have Mr. Branch on here in a few weeks. And decide who you want to vote for there. Speaking of campaigning, how can people get in touch with your campaign and learn more about you?

Butch Lawter: So they can go to my website, ButchLawter.com. You can find out about me there. It’s got my social media connections there. Also make donations if you need for my campaign.

And then you can go on social media. It’s either VoteButchLawter or ElectButchLawter on all the social media platforms. So you can find me there and if you want to, you can call me at (919) 218-2834 may not be able to talk right away, but I’ll get back to you.

Jonathan Breeden: All right. If you would not mind like, and subscribing as we mentioned earlier to this podcast where you seen it, give us a five star review down below. Tag us in your Instagram stories. Best of Johnston County that will help us grow our reach. Until next time. I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden.

That’s the end of today’s episode of Best of Johnston County, a show brought to you by the trusted team at Breeden Law Office. We thank you for [00:36:00] joining us today and we look forward to sharing more interesting facets of this community next week. Every story, every viewpoint adds another thread to the rich tapestry of Johnston County.

If the legal aspects highlighted raised some questions, help is just around the corner at www. breedenfirm. com.