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countries: United States: North Carolina

Overview

This page is for issues local to the state of North Carolina in the United States.

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/voting: discussion of voting issues in NC

Notes

For all the pro-real-estate people who complain bitterly about the proposed transfer tax: where were you when they raised the property valuations?? That tax hits the people who actually live here, rather than people who are moving in or out of the area. The latter group are already prepared to deal with possibly taking a financial hit as they move from one area to a possibly-more-expensive one on their way up the corporate ladder. --Woozle 10:34, 7 August 2008 (EDT)

Active Issues

Stupid Rule for Charter Schools

(To be researched) If you are a charter school in NC, your funding is based entirely (or mostly?) on how many students show up on the very first day of school. The only exception is if a student is actually in the hospital. Even if a student has to be out of town for a vacation planned months and months earlier, they still have to show up for the first day of class for at least three hours, or else they do not count towards the school's enrollment -- and the school is forced by circumstances to give away that student's spot to the next person in line who can be there. (What's more, as long as the student has shown up on the first day, s/he can be absent for months afterward without affecting the school's funding. It's not, then, a matter of having high standards; the rule is simply arbitrary in the extreme.)

The regular public schools, however, have a twenty day window in which students may show up in order to be counted towards the school's funding.

It seems obvious that this rule is unfairly biased against charter schools. It only inconveniences a very few people, but the conflict can be massive when it does -- and can end up hurting both the child and the school, depending on what ultimately happens.

Also, according to this report:

Charter schools in NC do not receive any of the NC Lottery money earmarked for education.
In 2007, the average facilities funding for new elementary schools was $21,000,000 each. Charter schools get no facilities funding and must pay for facilities out of their regular operating funds.

Past Issues

Limits to Municipal Internet

House Bill 1587, aka "The Local Gov't Fair Competition Act" aka the bill to prevent local government from competing "unfairly" with the local internet monopolies (the people who name these things obviously have the same sense of irony as the real-estate developers). This issue appears to be dead for the moment, as the bill has gone to committee – but don't be surprised if it appears again in another form.

2007-07-24 N.C. Bill Limiting Municipal Internet Effectively Killed!

State-Wide Negotiation for Cable Services

The state has, after much lobbying from the cable industry, apparently passed a law which prevents local municipalities from negotiating with cable companies and instead makes it a state-wide contract. As the state is much less likely to take the time to ensure that each municipality gets what it needs from the cable (e.g. local access programming), this has been a huge victory for the cable companies and monopolistic practices in NC generally.

I have dog-eared a recent issue of the Independent with some details of the consequences, but it hasn't made its way back to my desk yet. (It's also not clear how this affects any cable company not involved with the contract, but would seem to imply that they are effectively locked out of doing business in the state -- ensuring a statewide monopoly. How is this good?) --Woozle 11:50, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Links

Reference

Wikipedia
Conservapedia (stub as of 2007-08-05)
dKosopedia site down, can't verify page (as of 2008-06-24)
SourceWatch
HTYP
NC hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center

Filed Links

2019/10/28 [L..T] Victory over the worst gerrymander in modern history: Court blocks North Carolina GOP's House map “On Monday, a bipartisan panel of state court judges delivered a monumental victory against the worst gerrymander in modern history when it blocked North Carolina from using its Republican-drawn congressional map in the 2020 elections, clearing the way for a fairer replacement that could see Democrats pick up three or more seats.”
2019/10/28 [L..T] Jeremy Bertino, Proud Boy in Charlotte, North Carolina “Jeremy Bertino, of Locust, North Carolina, was exposed as a Proud Boy this week after rallying in Pittsboro, North Carolina.”
2019/10/28 [L..T] James Patrick Shillinglaw, Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement, Jamestown, North Carolina “Asheville Anti-Racism exposed James Patrick Shillinglaw, of Jamestown, North Carolina, as a member of white nationalist group Identity Evropa, recently renamed the American Identity Movement.”
2019/10/28 [L..T] Protests Continue Against Neo-Confederates in North Carolina “Anti-racists continue to mobilize in North Carolina against neo-Confederate and white nationalist groups, with this weekend seeing two more arrests on the anti-racist side.”
2014/04/24 [L..T] GOP can't even win the healthcare argument in the South «As new polling from the New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests, even in the deep South, voters aren't actually buying what Republicans are selling on health care.»
2014/04/16 [L..T] The fight to unionize the South brews at an N.C. slaughterhouse "Rodriguez worked at the Mountaire plant until 2011, when, she says, she was hit in the stomach by a large bucket used to haul meat and had a miscarriage in the plant. A doctor told her that she needed to take time off to rest. When she brought the doctor's note to Mountaire's Human Resources department, she says she was ordered to turn in her ID and fired."
2014/04/16 [L..T] Man charged in Kansas shooting once a prominent neo-Nazi in North Carolina "The man charged in the murder of three people outside the Jewish Community Center and Village Shalom assisted-living community in Overland Park, Kan., was once considered the most prominent neo-Nazi leader in North Carolina and operated a paramilitary camp in Johnston County."
2014/04/02 [L..T] The lie behind the shrinking labor force "The frightening truth is that our economy is failing to generate enough jobs. Of the jobs it does generate, too many pay stagnant or declining wages; fast-growth sectors like retail and food service are often at poverty scale. This despite the fact that we are supposedly recovering from the Great Recession, and U.S. stock markets have more than doubled since 2008."
2014/03/20 [L..T] McCrory: Here are 3 things holding back North Carolina's startups
2011/07/12 [L..T] headline::Bad law, good lawsuit It's not comfortable to side against the state of North Carolina in the lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina. Rooting against the state means hoping that we, as taxpayers who pay for the state's legal defense, lose money on litigation.
2009/07/15 [L..T] A face of the uninsured, a state of denial “A proponent himself of single-payer when he was but an Illinois legislator, Obama now counsels that the way to achieve universal coverage is by reforming – or "building on" – the private insurance system while bolstering the public insurance sector.”
2008/09/16 [L..T] Brunswick school board to consider creationism teaching «The Brunswick County school board is looking for a way for creationism to be taught in the classroom side by side with evolution.»

Projects

2007 The NC Home Sales Tax: It's a Bad Idea
- This appears to be a site created by the NC real estate industry. The tax was not on "equity" but on the sale of homes, paid by the seller. It's not clear how this is different from an impact fee, but the industry has certainly done its best to get rid of impact fees wherever possible (Durham recently did away with them, 2006?) in spite of the obvious need for impact fees to pay for new infrastructure (utilities, schools, roads...).

Articles

2007-06-06 Cities fight bill to limit broadband: "House Bill 1587, "The Local Government Fair Competition Act," is supported by the telecommunications and cable industries, which say cities have unfair advantages—they don't pay taxes and can subsidize a money-losing Internet business with revenue from the city budget. The bill sets out a long list of strict financial and political requirements should a government get into the broadband business. But the N.C. League of Municipalities and a growing number of cities oppose the measure, saying it would effectively make it impossible for local governments to provide Internet service in rural and low-income areas where private industry has decided not to."
2007-04-18 A ferry ride to an Orwellian future? by Peter Eichenberger: a nostalgic field trip turns into some unpleasant discoveries about the penal industry in NC: the River's Correction center run by GEO Group, formerly a subsidiary of Wackenhut; mentions Blackwater USA.
2006-08-16 The Vanishing Voter by Bob Geary, The Independent: gerrymandering and other systematic political corruption in NC government

News

2007-08-05 Campus research hits budget jackpot: "North Carolina has long been generous in its financial support of universities, and this year is no different. But another thing stands out in the new state budget approved by the legislature: big bucks for research. .. The centerpiece is a cancer research fund at UNC-Chapel Hill -- $25 million in the coming year, growing to $50 million a year starting in 2009."