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Raleigh
Gary Pearce posted on December 07, 2012 09:09
As their time in office winds down, Governors and Presidents often come down with LLS – Legacy-Leaving Syndrome.
Symptoms include a sudden fever to leave on a high note, a thirst to do something big and memorable. Side effects include a tendency to overreach (see Haley Barbour and Bill Clinton).
LLS actually can cure old ailments: Many departing executives experience a sudden rush of courage and a willingness to set aside political caution.
Frequently, you hear what one of Governor Perdue’s long-time supporters said after she pushed through the Dix land deal this week: “I wish she had governed that way for four years.”
If she had, she might be preparing today for her second inauguration.
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Gary Pearce posted on December 06, 2012 10:31
This isn’t the first Dix land fight. And it’s not the first time the state did the right thing despite short-sighted politicians.
Exactly 28 years ago, in late 1984, another outgoing governor had plans for Dix land. Governor Hunt wanted to give a chunk of it to N.C. State University for a research park.
Then-Mayor Avery Upchurch and a group of developers had come to Hunt with ambitious plans to develop the land.
Hunt said later, “The easy thing to do was to give them the land, take the money, put it in the state treasury and cut taxes. But that’s not how you build a great state. The right thing to do was to think about the public purpose: How does this best serve the public, the vision, what we can be?”
Hunt plowed ahead despite political opposition and editorial skepticism. Today you can see the “public purpose:” NCSU’s Centennial Campus.
Decades from now, people will salute Governor Perdue for setting aside land for a park in the capital city. As Raleigh continues to grow, the park indeed will “best serve the public, the vision, what we can be.”
Credit also goes to a far-sighted and bipartisan group of Raleigh leaders – led by Greg Poole, Jim Goodmon and others.
The lease will provide a source of revenue to the state, something that the state is not realizing now. The McCrory administration will have the flexibility to consolidate state employees now at Dix – and save the state $90 million a year. And the park will be a jewel for decades to come.
That’s a good deal all around.
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Carter Wrenn posted on December 05, 2012 16:19
Back in 2005, Governor Mike Easley pulled strings and got his wife a job at North Carolina State University running what he called a ‘speakers series;’ then the Governor pulled more strings and got his wife a new job paying more, $170,000 a year; then the Governor’s string-pulling landed on the front page of the News & Observer, a scandal erupted, the chancellor at NCSU resigned, and the Board of Trustees fired Mrs. Easley.
Mrs. Easley ‘retired,’ began drawing a $37,000 per year state pension, then sued the university for a million dollars for breach of contract (because they fired her a year into her five year contract).
Last August, the university quietly settled with Mrs. Easley. Last week the settlement landed on the front page of the News & Observer. Here’s how it worked: The university agreed to ‘unretire’ Mrs. Easley (for the last three years), recalculated her pension as if she’d actually been earning $170,000 a year, and, voila, Mrs. Easley’s pension doubled to $80,000 per year.
The News & Observer says given Mrs. Easley’s life expectancy she just won a million dollar settlement. The new chancellor at NCSU says that’s a good deal. And here’s how politics works: The Governor pulls strings, his wife gets a $170,000 a year job, a scandal erupts, she gets fired, the old chancellor resigns, three years later Mrs. Easley comes out of retirement, doesn’t work another day, retires again, doubles her pension, and the new chancellor says that’s a good deal.
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Gary Pearce posted on December 04, 2012 10:22
Maybe I should be more forgiving when it comes to naming a building for Jesse Helms. Maybe I should let the past go, let bygones be bygones and let go of old grudges.
No way.
Helms was a racist. He was a gay-baiter. He was a hater. On television and in the Senate, he bullied people who were weak and easy political prey.
Over the years – and from getting to know Carter – I’ve come to see that people who worked for him and supported him weren’t necessarily that way. Many of them, especially those who were young at the time, were just committed conservatives.
And it’s not that he said nasty things about Jim Hunt. We said nasty things about him. And those attacks pale beside what you see in politics today.
But Helms made a practice – and a career – of appealing to the worst in us.
That legacy doesn’t deserve this honor.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 28, 2012 09:47
Was Governor-elect McCrory for Governor Perdue’s Dix plan before he was against it? A well-wired TAPster says yes.
The source – whom I’ve always found to be reliable and knowledgeable – said Governor Perdue ran her plan by McCrory and Art Pope before announcing it. She thought she had their support.
But Senator Berger and Speaker Tillis squashed the idea. So yesterday Governor-elect McCrory came out against it.
If true, this suggests that the real power in Raleigh will rest in the Legislative Building next year, not the Governor’s Office.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 26, 2012 07:49
I’m always flattered to be quoted in Under the Dome, but this time I’m flummoxed. Dome took note of only three of the four rising Democratic stars I spotlighted last week (See “New Democratic Leaders” below). Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx was left out.
Paranoid Charlotteans will not doubt take this as a sign that the paper believes one former Charlotte Mayor as Governor is enough.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 21, 2012 10:51
Years ago when I enrolled at the University of North Carolina, I arrived on the campus and to my delight I found I had been assigned to the first ever co-ed dormitory. Then, my first night on campus, at orientation the powers that be introduced us to the wonders of birth control. We were all summoned to the lobby of the dormitory where they set up rows of tables lined with exhibits of every kind of birth control imaginable along with how-to manuals and free samples.
In a second room off the lobby, in case anyone had missed the practical benefits of birth control, they had set up rows of tables with exhibits depicting the horrors of abortion – they’d lined the tables with old, grainy black and white photographs of abortion mills in garages and blood-soaked sheets and, on a final table, a pair of black metal forceps that looked like they’d been used in a blacksmith shop to forge horseshoes.
As I left the room my roommate glanced back at the rows of tables and said, They included everything but a mouse on a string.
Last week, continuing its tradition of progress, the university proudly announced that this fall for the first time students will be able to live in ‘gender-neutral’ housing – which means girls and boys can now live together in on-campus apartments and suites.
The reason for this latest advancement is straightforward: A group of students convinced the powers that be that gay students would be more comfortable living with female friends and that transgender students would be happier if they could choose their roommates based on the gender they identify with.
Chancellor Holden Thorpe says it all makes sense to him and, looking back, I can’t help but wonder why we never figured out telling the fussy ole’ Chancellor Carlyle Sitterson that, to be fair to gay and transgender students, he ought to let us room with the co-eds. I guess we never dreamed any Chancellor – or at least any Chancellor raised in North Carolina – would be crazy enough to believe us.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 14, 2012 11:29
Pardon me for plugging an old friend, but you should check out what’s happening at the Research Triangle Park under new President & CEO Bob Geolas.
Last week, the Park rolled out its new master plan. It envisions more urban-type centers to complement the consummate campus setting. New companies, new talent and new minds need new digs.
This week, Geolas and his team set out on a “Pathways to Opportunity” tour, stopping at more than 20 places from one end of North Carolina to the other. The goal is to reconnect RTP with the state. That is its founding mission – to improve the quality of life for all North Carolinians. Guess what? It worked.
Geolas believes it’s time to reaffirm that mission, time to reach out across the state. And time to work together to keep North Carolina on the leading edge of global economic growth and innovation.
RTP is totally private-sector. Like all of us, it depends on government for transportation, water-sewer and education. But RTP itself gets no money from government.
This is a tour all North Carolinians should get on.
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Gary Pearce posted on October 25, 2012 08:32
Debra Goldman seems to be an equal-opportunity 911 caller. She apparently has called the police now about two fellow board members. This on top of dozens of calls to her Cary home in recent years.
If she gets elected State Auditor, the police may need to build a substation at her office.
No wonder Pat McCrory wisely put some distance between himself and her in Wednesday night’s debate.
Ms. Goldman says she was threatened by another school board member, apparently Keith Sutton. Sutton says her charge “may be racial.” Jim Martin says, “Sutton was not the only member, nor the first member, to issue an ‘offensive and threatening’ outburst.”
School board meetings sound like a gang fight.
It’s hard to sort out all this. But a couple of things are clear.
First, there is never an excuse for “offensive and threatening” behavior – by anybody.
Second, trouble seems to follow Goldman.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath. Goldman ought to step down and let somebody else take her place. And all of us should agree that she has no business holding an important state office.
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Carter Wrenn posted on October 24, 2012 12:01
The election in North Carolina has moved from old fashioned elbow-throwing into a more interesting topic – sex.
When she lived in Pennsylvania Debra Goldman was a volunteer firefighter – then she moved to Raleigh, ran for School Board, won in the Republican sweep in 2009 and now she’s running for State Auditor.
The roots of Goldman’s problem go back to a year ago when her house in Cary was burglarized by a thief who made off with $100,000 in jewelry and $30,000 in cash – which she had hidden in a backpack. The police came to investigate and asked, Do you have any idea who robbed you? Goldman had a lot of ideas. Names rolled off her tongue – the Democrat she ran against for School Board, her opponent’s consultant, three of her opponent’s friends, a group that supported her opponent, a Democratic County Commissioner – then a name rolled off her tongue that lit the fuse that just exploded: Chris Malone, her fellow Republican School Board member.
Why Malone? the detective asked.
The words started flowing again.
Malone, she said, had pursued her romantically and told her he loved her and when she rebuffed him he’d broken down and cried. Plus, she said, she knew two other facts: Malone was broke and her house key had been stolen out of her briefcase the same day Malone was sitting beside her at a School Board meeting.
The policeman wrote it all down then asked why Goldman kept $30,000 in a backpack. She rolled into another litany, saying she was a retired firefighter and a breast cancer survivor and when she was living in Pennsylvania after 9/11 she’d had a lot of trouble getting money out of her bank – so she kept $30,000 in her knapsack.
A few days after the burglary Goldman became even more suspicious of Malone when he showed up at the School Board meeting driving a new pickup truck;---so the police detective put in a call to Mr. Malone and ran head-on into not one but three lawyers. He got a call back from the prominent Republican attorney Kieran Shanahan and when the detective sat down with Malone, Malone had two more lawyers with him.
Malone outdid Goldman when it came to pure salacious detail. He and Goldman, he said, had become friends during the School Board election then one thing had led to another until one night just before the election they found themselves alone on the rooftop of the Clarion Hotel in downtown Raleigh and stopped being just friends and, as he put it, started ‘kissing and making out.’ After that, he said, their relationship got more physical.
The detective asked if the relationship was over and Malone said, oh, yes, he knew there’d be no more quickies in the car and no more meetings at the Hampton Inn in Cary – they were just close personal friends and by the way, he added, they’d never actually had sexual intercourse.
By then I reckon Malone’s lawyers must have been lying passed out on the floor.
Next the detective asked Malone about his new pickup truck and Malone said his brother had loaned him the money to buy it and later Malone’s brother and lawyer Shanahan met with the detective and produced the bank records to prove it – so Malone was off the hook for stealing the $130,000 but probably not with his wife or Goldman’s husband.
Now the interesting thing about all this is Malone and Goldman’s reaction when the police reports landed on the front page of the newspaper.
At first Malone bobbed and weaved, dodging reporters then put out a statement saying he’s staying in the State House race because voters know the kind of man he really is.
Goldman was even more aggressive – she issued a statement peeling the paint off the walls, slamming the News and Observer for smearing her just before the election.
So now we’ve got a candidate who’s talking about ‘quickies’ in cars and running for State House based on his character, and a candidate for State Auditor who has trouble getting money out of the bank, and there’s not a word of contrition in sight anywhere.
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