Terri McLeod is a Wake County, North Carolina public school teacher. She is a single mother with a 16-year-old son. Virtually all public school teachers in Wake County in single-earner households must maintain second and even third jobs and/or side gigs in order to meet their families' most basic financial needs. Teacher pay is low and the County and its local towns are raising property taxes at staggering rates. Terri's recent pay raise was eaten up ENTIRELY by the increases in Wake County and Town of Cary property taxes. [Her Cary real-property tax alone increased over 56% from 2023 to 2024.] Terri's second jobs over the years, required to provide income to be able to afford her home, include delivering pizzas, ride sharing, clerking in a hardware store, and selling purses.

Terri is irrepressible, and here are some of the things that tried to repress her over the years: she and her son endured many weeks where their grocery budget didn't exceed $20, making beans and rice their only meals; missing a (just one!) mortgage payment and being faced with foreclosure; missing an electric company payment, causing their power to be shut off. Terri has emptied her retirement accounts that she hoped would allow for a comfortable retirement, in order to pay for current expenses.

At Terri's home in Cary, North Carolina, she cleaned massive amounts invasive species off her property and transformed it into a beautiful, stormwater-absorbing pollinator garden of beneficial native plants and noble hardwood trees. The garden provides Terri and her son (and some lucky neighbors) with strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, peas, &c.

Terri and her son love dogs. They found that offering an overnight dog-sitting service could provide enough extra income so that Terri didn't need to work extra jobs to afford their home and its increasing costs.

A week or so ago [about Oct. 15, 2024] , a County official informed her that the dog enterprise she was conducting would be classified as a kennel. A kennel requires special wastewater treatment that includes a septic system. The cost of that system is not known, but estimated to be between $12,000 and $35,000.

Terri simply cannot afford this expense, and it's not certain that her property could support a septic system.

The contention is that, keeping overnight one or two dogs, sometimes three, and on one occasion four, does not constitute a kennel. She doesn't use cages. She doesn't bathe the dogs that stay with her. They run frequently and joyfully through her fenced yard. The dogs often sleep on or at the foot of her bed. Her clients and their owners love Terri and the wonderful atmosphere she and her son provide. The final decision on the status of the enterprise will be made by the bureaucracy, or more probably, by the court system.

The GoFundMe proceeds will go entirely to Terri McLeod and her son. With it, she will:

1. contest the determination that what she operates is a kennel,

2. if, she loses on that issue, she'll retain a firm to install a septic system,

3. if she cannot install the septic system, she will shut down her dog-sitting operation and transition to selling by mail order and personal delivery the native plants and trees her property produces in abundance.

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I'm George McDowell, Army veteran and retired lawyer. I live in Cary. I'm not related to Terri. I'm setting up this GoFundMe for Terri because of the fondness and respect I have for her, and also b/c, along with many others, we're ashamed that our state, our county, and our town have inflexible bureaucratic regulations and crushing property-tax policies that will cause the economic displacement of Terri McLeod, the 2023 North Carolina Environmental Educator of the Year, and a member of what should be the most important and respected profession in any rational society.