NC Legislature

What’s Brewing in Raleigh? Possum Stew!

The most recent unemployment numbers in North Carolina show a continued decrease in employment. Gaston County, like all the counties in the state recorded more unemployed citizens than the previous month. At 11.1 % unemployment on the county level and 10.2 state-wide, the frenzied activity in Raleigh to right this sinking ship must be at an all-time high, right? Unfortunately the answer is no. Instead the feverish legislation coming out of Raleigh amounts to a piping hot bowl of possum stew!

Instead of an “all hands on deck” approach our law-makers in Raleigh have set their sights on laws that are not only insignificant, but smacks of silliness in the face of current economic calamity.

While Number 4 is good, we actually dropped a spot in the last year while the "business friendly" Republicans were in charge of our Legislature. Maybe because they are more interested in our private lives than getting North Carolinians back to work.

The Tar Heel state ranked highest in infrastructure and technology, workforce, technology and innovation and business friendliness. The state's ranked lower in the health of its overall economy and its quality of life.

Infrastructure, technology, workforce, and innovation are all things that take time (more than two years) to establish while quality of life is more a short term (less than two years) measure.

Read more: Charlotte Observer

I was down in Beaufort last month at the Duke University Maritime Lab and the former director said that all their models are pointing to at least a 3' rise in sea level over the next century and that many coastal communities will be under water by 2100. Well, there are some in the NC Legislature who disagree with science.

This quote by Bill Chameides, current dean of the Duke U. Nichols School of the Environment pretty much sums it up:

Some in the state legislature may be feeling a good deal of self-satisfaction for concocting this little gambit, perhaps even high fiving each other and chanting things like “we don’t need no stinking climate scientists.”

Sea Level Rise, Melting Glaciers, and North Carolina Law

You can read more at: Charlotte Observer

Event: Law Enforcement Safety & Drug Policy Summit

WHEN: June 12th, 2012

WHAT TIME IS THE EVENT: Registration starts at 8 am, and the event begins at 9 am and will go through Noon. A lunch will be served to registered guests after the summit.

WHERE: North Carolina Legislative Auditorium, 16 Jones Street, Raleigh, NC

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Law Enforcement, Legislators, Legislative, Support Staff, Public Health Officials, Lobbyists, Harm Reductionists, Drug Policy Reformers, Policy Reformers, People Who Work With Incarcerated Populations and the Substance Abuse Community

WHAT WILL BE COVERED: Law Enforcement Needlestick Reduction, Law Enforcement Safety around Drug Overdoses, Reducing Recidivism While Maintaining Public Order and Drug Policy Reform

WHO WILL BE PRESENTING: Law Enforcement Safety Experts, Law Enforcement, Drug Policy Experts and Republican & Democratic Legislators, and Conservative, Liberal & Moderate Policy Institutes

This radio interview with North Carolina state Rep. Rick Glazier last week has stayed with me. Glazier and state Rep. Ray Rapp were reacting to the Republican handling of education after gaining control of the North Carolina legislature in January 2011. Glazier explained it with this story:

Sort of mind-boggling. Maybe an opening script at the beginning of this session was a precursor to what happened.

There was a Republican legislator who has been there several terms … she had a question early on, because Representative Rapp and I did chair for four years that appropriations committee, and she said, “How much do we spend on financial aid for needs-based kids going to college in North Carolina?”

I think my answer at the time we were looking at it was somewhere around $175-$200 million dollars was need-based. And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why we spend any.”

And I stopped for a minute, and I said, “What do you mean?”

Here is a question I would be interested hearing answered by the readers of BlueNC:

Should we support candidates (time/money/workers)where we don't have any chance of winning or should we direct our resources to campaigns that are winable but could use a little help to get over the hump?

I know there are many definitions of winning, I used to be very active with the Green Party and we ran many educational campaigns that we knew going in that we had no chance of winning at the ballot box but we ran them to get our message out.

So, BlueNC'ers what are your thoughts?

I hope my political sisters come out of the woodwork today and sign up to run in every district in the state. If for no other reason than to say you can't just send us home and think we'll go quietly back to being baby machines. Chris Fitzsimon provided the grim numbers yesterday.

That's the question in the minds of many observers of environmental policy-making this week, as a wave of the greenest legislators in North Carolina decline to stand for re-election in the face of radically re-engineered district lines.

The latest worrisome retirement announcement came last week from former House Speaker Joe Hackney, long considered the leading environmental champion in the N.C. General Assembly. Redistricting had gerrymandered Hackney into a "double-bunking" of incumbents with fellow legislator Rep. Verla Insko (D-Orange).

After months of waiting for the Legislature to officially end the 2011 Long Session, the NC League of Conservation Voters released its annual Conservation Scorecard. NCLCV has been scoring NC Legislators on environmental issues since 1999 and this year’s scores are the lowest they have ever been. The Scorecard is a valuable tool voters can use to evaluate which legislators best represent their environmental values. The Conservation Scorecard gives each state legislator a score of 0 to 100 based on his or her votes on key environmental bills in the recent session of the General Assembly.