Understanding Greensboro's Budget Lawsuit: What the Hartzman Case Means for Your Property Taxes

Jul 11

Understanding Greensboro's Budget Lawsuit: What the Hartzman Case Means for Your Property Taxes

On June 16, 2026, Greensboro City Council voted 9 to 0 to adopt a budget that raised the city property tax rate to 79.85 cents per $100 of assessed value, up from 67.25 cents. That is a 12.6 cent increase, roughly 18 percent, and it applies to the property values from the county's 2022 reappraisal rather than the higher values Guilford County assigned during its 2026 revaluation.

A longtime Greensboro civic activist named George Hartzman went to court over how that budget came together. He argues that the budget the public commented on at the required hearing was not the budget Council actually adopted, and that residents never got a real chance to weigh in on the version that became law. On July 10, a Guilford County Superior Court judge denied Hartzman's request to immediately block the budget, but also declined to dismiss the case, and set a preliminary injunction hearing reported for July 20.

This post walks through what actually happened, what North Carolina law requires, what jargon like "temporary restraining order" and "revenue neutral rate" actually mean, and concrete steps you can take if you want more say in how Greensboro taxes and spends. Every claim below is linked to its original source so you can read the primary material yourself rather than take anyone's word for it, including mine.

Quick facts

Question	Answer
Old city property tax rate	67.25 cents per $100 of assessed value
New city property tax rate	79.85 cents per $100 of assessed value
Size of increase	12.6 cents, about 18 percent
Budget adopted	June 16, 2026, by a 9 to 0 Council vote
Budget took effect	July 1, 2026
Lawsuit filed by	George Hartzman, Greensboro resident
First court hearing	July 10, 2026. Judge Michael Duncan denied a temporary restraining order but did not dismiss the case
Next hearing	Preliminary injunction hearing, reported for July 20, 2026

How your tax bill is actually calculated

This is the part that trips people up, so it is worth slowing down on. Your city property tax bill is one number multiplied by another: the tax rate, times your assessed property value, divided by 100. Two separate things went into this year's bill, and only one of them actually changed.

The rate went up, from 67.25 cents to 79.85 cents. That part is a real increase and it is not in dispute. What did not happen is the city also swapping in your new, higher 2026 assessed value on top of that higher rate. Because of the state moratorium, the city applied the new rate to the older assessed value from the county's 2022 reappraisal, the same value your bill was already based on before this year. The table below shows what that means using a home assessed at $300,000 in 2022, along with the scenario that did not happen for comparison.

Worked example: a home assessed at $300,000 in 2022

Scenario	Rate applied	Assessed value used	Annual city tax
Last year's bill	67.25 cents	$300,000, the 2022 value	$2,017.50
This year's actual bill	79.85 cents	$300,000, still the 2022 value	$2,395.50, an increase of $378
What did not happen	79.85 cents	The new 2026 revalued amount, which ran 40 to 65 percent higher than 2022 in many Greensboro neighborhoods	Would have been substantially higher than $2,395.50

This arrangement is temporary, not permanent. Senate Bill 889 only pauses the 2026 revaluation values for this one budget year. Under the bill, counties are expected to phase in the 2026 reappraisal values starting with the 2027 to 2028 fiscal year and continue using them until the next scheduled revaluation cycle. In other words, this year's bill used the old rate formula with a new, higher rate. Next year's bill is expected to use the new value as well, which is a separate increase still to come.

Watch the primary source yourself

You do not have to rely on any summary, including this one. The City of Greensboro records every Council meeting and posts it to its official YouTube channel, which also carries explainer videos on how the budget process works. Below is the actual June 16 meeting where the budget passed, and a short primer on how a city budget gets built in the first place.

City Council Meeting, June 16, 2026

Budget 101: How Greensboro's Budget Process Works

Every regular Council meeting is also broadcast live on GTN and archived at the city's meeting video page, so you can watch any past discussion in full rather than a highlight reel.

What actually happened

Two things were going on at once, and the order they happened in matters. It is easy to misread if you only glance at two dates side by side, so here is the sequence in full.

The North Carolina Senate passed Senate Bill 889, the Property Tax Reappraisal Moratorium, on May 6, 2026 by a 35 to 8 vote. The House gave the bill final approval on June 10, 2026 by a 70 to 42 vote and sent it to Governor Josh Stein's desk. At that point the bill had cleared the General Assembly but was not yet law. A University of North Carolina School of Government analysis published while the bill was still pending described the real, unresolved question local governments statewide were facing that month: build the budget around the new 2026 property values already on the books, or anticipate that the moratorium would become law and use the older values instead. Governor Stein signed the bill on June 19, 2026, making it Session Law 2026-8, which formally required Guilford County and every city inside it, including Greensboro, to build FY2027 budgets using the property values from the county's 2022 reappraisal instead of the new 2026 revaluation values.

Greensboro's Council adopted its budget on June 16, three days before the governor's signature, while the bill was sitting on his desk after clearing both chambers. City Manager Nathaniel "Trey" Davis addressed that timing directly at the meeting. He told Council the rate he was presenting was "based on the current rates prior to the reappraisal," and that staff had gone back and recalculated once the moratorium's passage through the legislature became clear. The city's own budget announcement frames the resulting 79.85 cent rate as necessary to fund public safety, parks, solid waste, and infrastructure without relying on revaluation values the city could not yet safely assume it could use.

Hartzman's lawsuit does not dispute that math. His argument is procedural: that the version of the budget presented at the public hearing looked different from the version Council ultimately adopted, and that residents who showed up to comment on one budget did not get the chance to comment on the one that actually took effect. At the July 10 hearing, he told a reporter the city could still find a way to "get some transparency in local government." Senior Assistant City Attorney James Dickens argued in court that no statute or prior case law requires more than one public hearing on a budget, and asked the judge to find the case moot since the budget had already taken effect. The judge declined to call it moot, denied the immediate block, and scheduled the fuller hearing later in July.

Neither side has won or lost yet. The preliminary injunction hearing is where a judge will actually weigh the legal merits. Nothing below should be read as a prediction of that outcome.

For a deeper look at the tax rate change itself and what it means dollar for dollar on a Greensboro home, see my earlier post, Greensboro FY 2027 Budget Explained, and the companion piece on the county side, the 2026 Guilford County Revaluation.

Jargon buster

Local government and court reporting is full of terms that get thrown around without definition. Here is what the important ones actually mean.

Term	Plain language meaning
Temporary restraining order (TRO)	An emergency, short term court order that pauses an action immediately, before either side has fully argued the case. Judges grant these rarely and only when waiting would cause irreversible harm.
Preliminary injunction	A longer lasting court order that can pause an action while a lawsuit proceeds. Getting one requires a fuller hearing than a TRO, where both sides present evidence and argument.
Moot	A legal argument that a case no longer matters because the thing being challenged already happened or already changed. The city argued Hartzman's case was moot since the budget had taken effect. The judge disagreed.
Budget ordinance	The formal legal document a city council adopts each year that sets tax rates and authorizes spending for the fiscal year.
Revenue neutral rate	The tax rate that would raise the same amount of money after a revaluation as the old rate raised before it, calculated by state formula. It is a benchmark for comparison, not a rate any city is required to adopt.
Revaluation or reappraisal	A countywide reset of assessed property values to reflect current market conditions. North Carolina requires this at least once every eight years.
Moratorium	A temporary, state ordered pause. Here, a pause on using the 2026 revaluation numbers for one budget year.
Room occupancy tax	A local tax charged on short term lodging stays, including hotels and platforms like Airbnb. Greensboro charges 6 percent and Guilford County charges an additional 3 percent.
Public hearing (statutory)	A formal meeting where the public is legally entitled to speak on a proposed budget before it is adopted. North Carolina law requires at least one.
G.S. (General Statute)	Shorthand for a numbered section of North Carolina law passed by the General Assembly.

What North Carolina law actually requires

This is the heart of the legal question, so it is worth reading in the state's own words rather than a paraphrase. Under North Carolina's Local Government Budget and Fiscal Control Act, General Statute 159-12(b) says that before adopting a budget ordinance, a governing board must "hold a public hearing at which time any persons who wish to be heard" may speak. The statute does not require a second hearing if the board changes the budget afterward, and it does not require the adopted version to match the version presented at that hearing. That is the plain text Dickens was pointing to in court.

Interestingly, some state lawmakers already think that standard is too thin. A bill tracked by the University of North Carolina School of Government's Legislative Reporting Service would amend General Statute 159-12 to require at least two public hearings on separate dates for most local governments, with at least one hearing required to disclose specific revenue detail like the prior two years of tax rates and collection rates. That bill has not become law in Greensboro's case, but it shows the one hearing standard is an active, live policy debate in Raleigh, not a settled question everyone agrees is sufficient.

Hartzman's broader constitutional claim rests on Article I, Section 19 of the North Carolina Constitution, often called the law of the land clause, which protects against being deprived of property except through lawful process. Whether a single statutory hearing on a materially different budget satisfies that protection is exactly what the July 20 hearing will address. It is an open legal question right now, not a settled one in either direction.

Timeline

Date	What happened
January 1, 2026	Guilford County's new 2026 property revaluation takes effect, raising assessed values significantly across Greensboro
May 6, 2026	The NC Senate passes Senate Bill 889, the Property Tax Reappraisal Moratorium, 35 to 8
June 10, 2026	The NC House gives the bill final passage, 70 to 42, and sends it to Governor Stein. The bill has cleared the legislature but is not yet law
June 16, 2026	Greensboro City Council votes 9 to 0 to adopt the FY2027 budget with the 79.85 cent tax rate, while the bill awaits the governor's signature
June 19, 2026	Governor Stein signs Senate Bill 889 into law as Session Law 2026-8
July 1, 2026	The new budget and tax rate take effect for fiscal year 2027
July 10, 2026	Judge Michael Duncan denies Hartzman's request for a temporary restraining order but declines to dismiss the case as moot
July 20, 2026	Preliminary injunction hearing, as reported in local coverage of the July 10 ruling

This is not only a Greensboro conversation

Budget transparency questions are coming up in city halls across North Carolina and the country right now, though the specific issues are different in each place. Seeing them side by side is useful context, not a claim that Greensboro's situation matches any of these.

City	What is happening there	Source
Cary, NC	Council raised taxes 8 percent after the town's former manager was accused of misleading Council for years about the town's finances. Mayor Harold Weinbrecht called it a "breach of trust" that had kept the tax rate artificially low.	CBS17
Asheville, NC	Council held a public hearing on a proposed tax increase, then adopted a lower final rate of 37.69 cents in a split 4 to 3 vote after resident pushback, with the mayor citing state limits on local revenue tools.	828 News Now
Fresno, CA	A judge ruled in May 2026 that the city council violated California's open meetings law by negotiating budgets for five years in a closed committee that never posted agendas or allowed public attendance. No penalties were issued.	GV Wire

What short term rentals actually contribute, with the real numbers

Because short term rentals are part of my own business, I want to be precise here rather than repeat a vague number, and I want to link every figure to where it actually came from so you can check it yourself rather than just trust me.

The tax rate itself

Greensboro charges a 6 percent room occupancy tax on short term lodging stays, and Guilford County adds another 3 percent on top of that, for a combined 9 percent. This is not a local invention. State law, General Statute 105-164.4(a)(3), sets the underlying sales tax base that occupancy taxes ride on, and General Statute 160A-215 is the specific law that authorizes cities, Greensboro named among them, to levy a municipal room occupancy tax at all. Platforms like Airbnb are required by this same body of law to collect and remit both taxes on behalf of hosts for bookings made through the platform, which means the tax gets paid automatically on nearly every platform booking, whether the guest ever thinks about it or not.

Do traditional and mid term rentals pay this too

This is a fair and specific question, and the statute actually answers it. Under G.S. 105-164.4(a)(3), an accommodation rented to the same person for 90 or more continuous days is exempt from both state sales tax and local occupancy tax entirely. A 12 month traditional lease clears that threshold easily, which is why a traditional rental like my Idlewood House or College Hill Brownstone generates no occupancy tax at all. It is governed by ordinary landlord tenant law instead, a completely different legal framework.

Mid term rentals sit in the gap. A stay under 90 consecutive days, even a 60 day corporate housing booking for a travel nurse, is legally treated the same as a short term rental and is subject to the full 9 percent combined occupancy tax plus state and local sales tax. Only once the same guest passes 90 continuous days does that specific booking become exempt going forward, and any tax already collected before hitting that threshold is required to be refunded to the guest. The UNC School of Government's own explainer on occupancy tax confirms this and lists Greensboro by name among the roughly 200 North Carolina local governments authorized to levy one.

How many short term rentals actually exist here, and who counts them

When Greensboro's short term rental ordinance took effect, the city hired a third party vendor specifically to identify and track them. That vendor is Host Compliance, a product of Granicus, the same company that hosts Greensboro's compliance hotline portal. Reporting at the time the ordinance rolled out found roughly 800 active short term rentals operating in the city, at a point when only a few hundred had actually applied for the required zoning permit. I was not able to find a publicly posted dollar figure for what the city pays Granicus for this service. That is a specific, answerable question, not a vague one, and the way to get the real number is a direct request through the city's public records request portal or a look through the Greensboro e-Procurement System, where city contracts are supposed to be searchable. I could not locate the contract there myself in the time I spent looking, which is itself worth noting.

Separately from the city's own vendor, the market research firm Airbtics tracks active Airbnb listings in Greensboro directly. It counted 864 listings in November 2024 with typical annual host revenue of $29,109, and 789 listings in October 2025 with typical annual revenue of $33,159.

A transparent estimate, not an official figure

Snapshot	Listings	Avg annual revenue	Est. gross STR revenue	Est. city occupancy tax (6%)
Airbtics, Nov 2024	864	$29,109	$25,150,176	$1,509,011
Airbtics, Oct 2025	789	$33,159	$26,162,451	$1,569,747

Treat both rows as rough estimates built on third party market data, not published city figures. Average revenue varies enormously by property, and a citywide average will not describe any one listing. Here is why I am showing you the range rather than one clean number: the city's own FY2026 Tourism Development Authority budget ordinance puts total city occupancy tax revenue, from every hotel, motel, and short term rental in Greensboro combined, at $1,644,000. Subtract either estimate above from that total and the number left over for every hotel in Greensboro is somewhere between $74,253 and $134,989. Greensboro has multiple chain hotels operating well above that combined revenue level, so that implied remainder is almost certainly too low to be real. The honest conclusion is not that short term rentals are secretly outpacing every hotel in the city. It is that the average revenue figures in market research data like Airbtics likely skew high, probably pulled up by a smaller number of very high performing listings, which means the true STR share is real and substantial but almost certainly lower than the math above suggests. Nobody outside the city and county finance departments can resolve that uncertainty, because the hotel versus short term rental split is not broken out anywhere in the published budget documents. That gap, not knowing the channel breakdown of a tax that is otherwise fully documented, is the real, specific, and fair transparency question to raise, and it is the one I would ask Council to answer directly.

Where the money is legally required to go, and who oversees it

This part is public, it is just scattered across documents most residents will never open. Guilford County's room occupancy tax was created by the General Assembly through Session Law 1983-988, amended by Session Law 1989-39, with Greensboro's separate city level tax added by Session Law 1991-22. Under that framework, the county remits 70 percent of its net occupancy tax proceeds to the Greensboro and Guilford County Tourism Development Authority, with the remaining 30 percent going to the City of High Point. The Authority is a public body created under the Local Government Budget and Fiscal Control Act, made up of thirteen appointed members, including a county commissioner, a Greensboro City Council member, and several owners or operators of hotels, motels, or other taxable accommodations in the county, appointed jointly by the county commissioners and Greensboro City Council. Its current President and CEO, per the Authority's own public notices, is H. Fourrier.

The city's own separate occupancy tax was historically dedicated to financing renovation and expansion of the Greensboro Coliseum Complex, with a smaller share going to the Tourism Development Authority for travel and tourism promotion, a split defined in that same 1991 session law. The Authority's own published FY2026 budget ordinance shows the actual numbers: $6,463,000 in county occupancy tax revenue and $1,644,000 in city occupancy tax revenue, funding $7,996,100 in tourism marketing and operations, $170,000 in specific tourist related events, and $1,244,000 in capital improvements. The 1991 session law also requires the Authority to report its receipts and expenditures quarterly and at the close of every fiscal year to both the Greensboro City Council and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.

So the honest answer to where this money goes is not that nobody knows. It funds tourism marketing, specific cultural and tourist events, capital improvements, and historically the Coliseum Complex, overseen by a named public authority with named leadership, and it is reported quarterly by law. The real problem is accessibility. Finding that answer meant reading a 1983 session law, a 1989 amendment, a 1991 amendment, and a standalone PDF budget ordinance the Tourism Development Authority posts on its own website, none of which are linked from the city's main budget page. A resident with a full time job and no legal background has almost no realistic way to piece this together. That is worth raising with Council directly: not "where is the money going," which has an answer, but "why isn't there one page that shows it," and separately, why doesn't anyone publish the hotel versus short term rental split.

The lobbying gap nobody talks about

I was paying close attention when Greensboro's short term rental ordinance was first being drafted and debated. In my own experience, Airbnb's involvement on the ground here was minimal to none. Nobody from the company reached out to me with talking points, encouraged me to show up to a hearing, or coordinated anything on my behalf. I was one host, reading agendas and showing up if I could, on my own time.

That is worth sitting with next to something Mayor Nancy Vaughan said publicly when Council was later forced to remove part of the ordinance over legal concerns. Speaking about pressure from the state legislature to preempt local STR rules entirely, she said representatives from Airbnb and Vrbo "have got a presence up in those hallways just about every day" in Raleigh. Both things are true at once. A platform can run a serious, well funded operation protecting its own regulatory interests at the state level while doing essentially nothing for the individual host who is actually filling out the $200 zoning permit application and dealing with a neighbor's noise complaint.

The numbers back up how real that institutional gap is, on both sides of this fight, using nonpartisan federal lobbying disclosure data.

Organization	Lobbying spend	Period
American Hotel and Lodging Association	$2,040,000	2025, federal, through September
Entire lodging and tourism industry	$14,835,000	2025, federal
Airbnb Inc	$1,000,000	2022, federal, a record year for the company at the time
Airbnb Inc, state level	$651,000 across nine states	2023

Neither of those companies is fighting for the host down the street. The hotel industry's spending is aimed at containing STR competition broadly. Airbnb's spending, by its own lobbying disclosures, tends to focus on issues like tax reporting thresholds and content moderation liability, protecting the platform's own business model, not the individual owner operator navigating a local zoning permit. A small, non corporate Greensboro host has no lobbyist on retainer in Raleigh or Washington representing either side of this. That gap between institutional money and the person actually paying the permit fee is real, it is documented, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

How to get involved

1. Find your Council member

Use the city's official district lookup tool to confirm your district, then reach your representative through the official Council email directory. Any message you send is a public record.

2. Watch or attend a Council meeting

Meetings are held most Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m. in the Katie Dorsett Council Chamber at the Melvin Municipal Office Building, 300 West Washington Street. They are broadcast live on GTN and streamed on the city's YouTube channel. Sign up to speak in advance through the city's speaker sign up page.

3. File a public records request

North Carolina's public records law is strong, and city budget worksheets, internal memos, and occupancy tax figures are generally accessible. Start at the city's public records request page.

4. Follow the court case

The preliminary injunction hearing, reported for July 20, 2026, is open to the public at the Guilford County Courthouse. Court hearings are a matter of public record regardless of which side you find more persuasive.

5. Review the current budget yourself

The full adopted budget document is posted at the city's Adopted Budget page. Reading the source document beats reading any summary, including this one.

Questions worth asking

Why did the version of the budget adopted on June 16 differ from the version presented at the public hearing, and would a second hearing have been possible given the SB 889 timeline?
How much room occupancy tax revenue did the city collect from short term rentals in the last fiscal year, and how is that revenue allocated?
Would Greensboro support the pending state proposal to require two public hearings before budget adoption?
What would it take for the city to publish proposed and amended budget versions online with a plain language summary of what changed between them?

Greensboro's strength has always been its neighborhoods and the people willing to show up for each other, whether that is at a Porchfest, a City Council meeting, or a courthouse. Cities genuinely need revenue to function, and this year's revaluation moratorium put every North Carolina city in an unusual, compressed timeline. Understanding how the process actually works, and where residents have real leverage to ask questions, is worth more than picking a side before the July 20 hearing even happens.

Sources

Want more on the numbers behind your own tax bill? Read Greensboro FY 2027 Budget Explained and browse more posts on the Joy Watson Real Estate blog. For the local professionals I trust for everything from plumbing to insurance, visit my Preferred Vendors page.

Joy Watson, Realtor® | Joy Watson Real Estate
Serving Greensboro, NC & the Piedmont Triad
(928) 699-8883 | joy@joywatsonrealestate.com
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Joy Watson

Joy Watson – Owner/Broker at Joy Watson Real Estate. Local Non-Corporate Greensboro Realtor who loves historic homes, helping families, and building community.

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Understanding Greensboro's Budget Lawsuit: What the Hartzman Case Means for Your Property Taxes

Understanding Greensboro's Budget Lawsuit: What the Hartzman Case Means for Your Property Taxes

How your tax bill is actually calculated