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This month marks the third birthday for Carolina Commentary, a North Carolina-centric political blog dedicated to pursuing collaborative and realistic approaches to solving public policy issues. Virgil Smith, former president and publisher of the Asheville Citizen-Times, formed Carolina Commentary with three of his former editorial page editors in recognition of the challenges facing the state’s media. Since then, we’ve shown our readers why they should care about specific threats to North Carolina’s system of democracy, its economy and justice for all. Our particular public policy topics include the environment, education, immigration and health care. And we’ve added additional writers–academics and other moderate progressives who hope to promote thoughtful debate that renounces ideology in favor of dialogue based on facts. What do we believe? Integrity: We commit to the highest standards in professionalism, intellectual honesty and transparency. We will be balanced, accurate and fair in our commentary. Quality: We will provide content that is thorough, fresh and innovative. Diversity: Our content will reflect the communities we serve, responsive to a diverse public. Service: Our content will be free from outside influence, political pressure or economic interests. Commentary: We will comment on issues of public interest. In the last year we’ve published 18 commentaries, including those that recommended solutions: To ensure protection of voting rights during the pandemic To provide equal access to education for all children statewide To encourage state government to use the pandemic to experiment with solutions to remedy structural ills What do we ask of you? Our thoughtful, bipartisan editorials are for sharing on any platform, whether it’s a newspaper, TV or radio website, political blog or social media site. So please, republish and share as you can. All we ask is that you attribute the content to Carolina Commentary and link to our site, www.carolinacommentary.com. Let’s keep the discussion going.

The General Assembly’s Job Number One should be focusing on recovery from the economic devastation wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention paid to immediately fixing the state’s broken unemployment benefits system. But in the 2020 short session, lawmakers have also turned their attention to other matters, one of which is welcome news indeed. Reps. Steven Ross (R-Alamance) and Mitchell Setzer (R-Catawba) have introduced House Bill 1111, also known as the “Sunshine Amendment.’’ Simply put, the legislation gets serious about safeguarding the p ublic’s right to know what their government is up to. It would codify that right in the N.C. Constitution and add requirements that any move to curb current public access to government records and meetings would have to clear a supermajority – two-thirds of the vote – in both the state House and Senate. If the measure clears the legislature, it will be on the statewide ballot as a constitutional amendment in November for approval by N.C. voters. Similar measures have passed in California and Florida by wide margins. The need for such an amendment is obvious. Elected officials and the state bureaucracy work for and are paid by the taxpayers. It’s our right to know where our tax dollars are going and how decisions are made. The matter has added urgency here in the days of coronavirus, when the very nature of public meetings has changed radically from in-person gatherings to Zoom meetings, emails, instant messaging and texts. Those are all public record. Another good reason is the contraction of media in the state, particularly the press corps covering state government. We live in a state with a population of 10 million people, and a big, complex government serves their need. The press needs every bit of help it can in keeping the public informed. Media lawyer John Bussian, who represents the N.C. Press Association and the Carolina Journal, told CJ “Given the light the virus crisis has shed on the need for government accountability — and the need for the government to be upfront with people — there couldn’t be a better time for the Sunshine Amendment to be put on the ballot.” This one’s a no-brainer. We hope legislative leaders give it the attention it deserves.

The Coronavirus will change the world, the nation and North Carolina forever. When you consider what we have learned and what we have given up, how we have transformed our lives during this pandemic will change the way we live, work and play. Almost every aspect of American life will be altered going forward. We knew that at some point in time we would continue down the road of digital transformation. That’s been speeded up by the virus. Let’s review some of the changes we can expect in our lives. Social distancing will not go away and we will lose the centuries old common greetings of a hand shake and a hug. The handshake which originated in the 5th Century B.C. in Greece will be doomed in this new reality of practicing safe behavior. The handshake was a gesture of peaceful intentions by extending your right hand to show you were not holding a weapon. Now it’s about the elbow! The old-fashioned show of affection and friendship, the hug, which originated 450 years ago in Scandinavia, is now a practice that is taboo, a result of the fear of being contaminated. Hopefully, in time these two gestures of greeting and friendship will come back to our society and the world. Technology appears to be the biggest winner during this war against the plague. We can expect to see a transition from touch screens to voice controls, much like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo. Smartphones will gain greater importance for conducting business, banking, travel, etc., especially with the pending rollout of 5G. When you review the different aspects of how we live, all options are on the table. In education, more and more parents who can afford it, will opt for digital learning to gain greater control of the education of their children. For the children in rural North Carolina, the issue of broadband and access to computers becomes more and more important for equal access. Educators have discovered they can instruct students from afar with comprehensive lessons plans and interaction of students using video, instant research and engagement via broadband and laptop computers. In North Carolina, every child enrolled in school is being exposed to digital learning, which is impacting the education being provided during the pandemic. Educators and parents have to prepare themselves for the changes that emanated from this period for the near future. Colleges will offer more online classes potentially impacting the trend of rising tuition fees. The media, which is always important during crises, has been challenged and diminished as a result of the move to digital. The mainstream media, specifically print publishing will be forced to increase their migration to digital or risk extinction as a source of news and information, as people expect and deserve immediate access to news and information that impacts their lives. In the medical field, the increase in telehealth and virtual doctor visits will gain a foothold for medical care, with fewer visits to medical centers and hospitals. P rescriptions will be filled online and mailed to patients with greater frequency as patients try and avoid going to the hospitals for care. We can expect expansion of hospitals and medical care to combat the annual return of Covid-19. More online ordering of prepared food, grocery items and other goods will be done online and delivered to the sanctuary of homes via delivery services and in time with drones. Financial transactions and banking will accelerate and e-commerce will expand employing a cashless system. We can expect savings accounts to grow as people will want to ensure they have emergency funds and access to credit via mobile apps. Business meetings and conferences will move even more toward video conferencing and reduced air travel as we have learned to communicate and work differently. The new technology, 5G will accelerate internet speed of delivery for personal and business operations. We can expect a decrease in of non-violent crime incarceration to reduce overcrowding of jails and prisons. The world, the nation and local communities will be searching for ways to avoid another pandemic by forever changing their lifestyles and being well stocked on the important consumer products of toilet paper, paper towels and all of the sanitizing products that we long have taken for granted. We live in a different world and it will continue to change. The good old days are just that, old days. Buckle up for the new way of life that will emerge after the world gets the better of the Coronavirus.

There’s a lot of speculation around the state regarding how long the impact of the coronavirus pandemic will last in North Carolina. Weeks? Months? The betting line here is 10 years. That’s how long it will be before the next Census. The Census, mandated by the U.S. Constitution, strives to count every individual in the country. The data is used to determine political representation and determines redistricting at the federal, state and local levels. It is also used to determine the distribution of more than $675 billion in annual funding, or more than $4 trillion over the course of the decade the data will be used. The 2020 Census is underway, and North Carolina isn’t doing so well when it comes to self-response rates. As for March 28, the national response rate for the Census stood at 30.2 percent. North Carolina checked in at 27.7 percent. But some counties fell far, far below that number. In the western part of the state, Jackson County is a picturesque locale encircled by the Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Blue Ridge escarpment. It’s home to Western Carolina University, Southwestern Community College and a wealthy retirement community in Cashiers at the south end. The response rate there was 11.9 percent. If that doesn’t pick up, it’s going to cost the county in federal funding for schools, public safety, seniors services, food assistance, you name it. The calculation for the county is that the Census count will deliver $1,600 in federal funding for each person counted, or $16,000 over the next decade. The response rates will pack a punch on a county that’s going to need help getting back on its feet – like every city, county and state in the country in a post-coronavirus world – if they don’t improve. Likely many mostly rural counties, Jackson faces some challenges with internet access in the rugged terrain of the southern Appalachians. The Census rollout has also been walloped by COVID-19. The public library had geared up to offer internet access for those who couldn’t access the form at home, but closed as a health precaution. Other community partners that stepped up also have had to step back. Another complicating factor comes with the thousands of students at WCU caught off guard by the shuttering of the institution after they’d departed for spring break. “In general, students in colleges and universities temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 virus will still be counted as part of this process. Even if they are home on Census day, April 1, they should be counted according to the residence criteria which states they should be counted where they live and sleep most of the time. We are asking schools to contact their students and remind them to respond. “Per the Census Bureau’s residence criteria, in most cases students living away from home at school should be counted at school, even if they are temporarily elsewhere due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” North Carolina needs to get its response rate up. There are no do-overs. Once it’s completed, we live with the results for the next decade. Next time you’re able to venture out, take a moment to slow down and think about the impact of tax dollars on your life and the lives of those you love. How are the roads? What’s the state of public transportation for those who need it? Are services for seniors readily accessible? How about child care? Census returns mean a lot to seniors, a lot to students and to young children. We can’t stress the latter enough, and children up to the age of 4 are at a higher risk of being undercounted. During the 2010 Census the Census Bureau estimated 25,000 young children weren’t counted in North Carolina, the eight-highest undercount in the nation. Should that happen again, that translates to $400 million off the table over a decade that should have been dedicated to a vulnerable population. If people don’t get counted, it’s not like money is being saved. The tax dollars work their way up the pipeline to be reallocated. What goes up, contrary to the saying, doesn’t always come down. Stand up and be counted. If not for yourself, for your loved ones and neighbors

It sometimes seems that when politicians of different political persuasions talk about the economy, and many other issues, they are like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. The blind men know nothing of elephants. Each touches a different part of the elephant’s body and explains what an elephant is like based on his experience. Their explanations are so wildly different that they suspect each other of lying and come to blows. We’re all inclined to believe we know the truth based on our subjective experience which, despite our best efforts, is limited. That makes it extremely difficult for those of us who don’t have time to spend hours climbing all over a smelly pachyderm to grasp how we should approach the powerful animal. And, of course, there are plenty of politicians who shade the truth to their advantage, intentionally tell partial truths and/or downright lies. Take for instance President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. In his version of the U.S. economy, “jobs are booming, incomes soaring (and) poverty is plummeting… I am thrilled to report to you tonight that our economy is the best it has ever been,” the president said. Then there’s Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders’ version. “This is the richest country on Earth and we have 40 million in poverty, 34 million with no health insurance and half our people living paycheck to paycheck,” he wrote on Twitter. What are North Carolina voters to make of this? Well, according to the North Carolina Justice Center, a non-profit that advocates for economic justice, while the stock market has doubled in value since 2010 when we began to recover from the Great Recession, wages for working North Carolinians have hardly budged. The Justice Center reports that the hourly wage in November 2019 was about $4.70 higher than in 2010, but inflation has wiped out virtually all of the increase. The center reports that throughout most of the 2000s, up until the Great Recession, well more than 60 percent of North Carolinians reported having a job. And while employment prospects have improved since the worst of the recession, recent labor market figures showed only 59.3 percent of North Carolinians had a job. The president said “real median household income is now at the highest level ever recorded.” But the Justice Center reports that median household income in North Carolina at the end of this decade still hasn’t reached year 2000 levels, despite recent growth. (Some of that growth has been driven by a tight labor market, and some can be attributed to raises in the minimum wage at state and local levels. The federal minimum wage hasn’t budged in a decade.) To the point of Trump’s market claims, according to a CNN Business analysis of how stocks performed under recent presidents, during the same first 763 trading days of their presidencies, stocks grew 42 percent under President Bill Clinton (the same as Trump), 45 percent under President George H.W. Bush, and 64 percent under President Barack Obama. In reality, the stock market growth under all these presidents, including President Trump, had more to do with when during the economic cycle they took office, than it did from any of their own actions or policies. That said, trade policies, regulation, monetary policy, taxes and government spending all affect the economy. But the president has only indirect control of most of these areas, as President Trump has learned. Then there are factors over which the president has no control, such as technological innovation and weather related disasters, that can impact the economy. Monetary policy is the realm of the Federal Reserve, and while the president nominates, the Senate must approve Federal Reserve governors who serve 14-year terms, meaning few presidents get to appoint an entire board. The president shares most of the power he has over the economy with Congress, where the federal budget, trade policies and laws from which regulatory policy flows must be approved. So, as we look to the coming elections, we need to take sweeping claims and soundbites about the economy with a grain of salt, no matter the candidate responsible for them. More importantly, we need to evaluate the economic proposals of our state candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives, along with those of candidates for president. The economy, like so many other issues, is far more complicated than any politician can fit into a soundbite. Trump’s approach to improving it has been tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation and renegotiating trade policies. Sanders, who represents the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, advocates higher taxes on the rich to fund social programs, a $15 federal minimum wage, and greater worker rights. More moderate Democratic candidates, like Pete Buttigieg, argue that investments in education, infrastructure and health would pay for themselves and stimulate the economy. Which of these approaches would actually do more to benefit average Americans? That’s the question we Americans will decide in November. As we make that decision, we should bear in mind that our system of government was designed to bring diverse approaches to the table in order to capture a more comprehensive picture of the whole and to allow for respectful debate and compromise. We should reject politicians for whom self-interest takes priority over public service, those who make grandiose promises they cannot achieve alone, those for whom “compromise” is a dirty word, and those who have gotten sucked into a culture of acrimony and negativism. It’s time we remembered that governing is a collaborative process. Before it’s too late.

There’s all kind of new out there. New state Senate and House districts for some; New U.S. congressional districts; New voting machines; New voter ID requirements; A new, and considerably earlier, primary date. Take out your pencils, kids, because this is all going to be on the test. The first step for voters should be to figure out where they are after all the map redrawing. Go to the North Carolina Board of Elections Website Voter Lookup page, punch in your name and county, and you’ll see your congressional district, state Senate district, state House district, judicial, municipal and school districts. You’ll also see if you’re registration is active, a wise thing to check. Some of the congressional districts were redrawn dramatically; there’s a consensus that the old maps, which gave Republicans a 10-3 advantage in the congressional delegation, will likely shift to an 8-5 GOP advantage. Two districts, the 2nd and 6th, were redrawn to effectively freeze out GOP incumbents George Holding and Mark Walker. The second went from a +13 GOP seat to +19 Democratic. (These numbers reflect partisan leanings ranked against the county as a whole). The sixth shifted from R+16 to D+18. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site, which crunches data and analytics from topics ranging from politics to sports, says that even with the new maps, the state is still unbalanced. As of Dec. 7, 2019, unaffiliated voters were the most numerous in the state, with nearly 2.5 million Tar Heels making that choice. There were 2.23 million Democratic Party registrations and 2.04 million Republicans. Despite those numbers, FiveThirtyEight notes the GOP would take 8 of 13 congressional seats in a GOP wave year with the new maps, and also 8 of 13 in a neutral year – and in a Democratic wave year as well. It’s estimated it would take a Blue tsunami – +13 Democratic nationally – for a majority of the state’s congressional seats to turn Democratic. Back to matters at hand: Your local board of elections can tell you what kind of ID you’ll need. Oh, and you’d better get on this, because instead of a May primary, North Carolina has moved its primary back to March 3. OK. Now that you’ve figured out where you are and what races you can vote for, now you have to figure out who your picks are. This sounds straightforward, but in North Carolina, it being North Carolina and all, there’s a bit of a twist. We use a semi-closed primary, which generally means if you’re a registered party member – Constitution, Democratic, Green, Libertarian or Republican – you can only vote in your party’s primary. No crossing the line to try to pick off someone in another party you don’t like. If you’re unaffiliated, you can pick one of those party ballots. Looking at who has registered to run for U.S. president in North Carolina, you currently have a choice of 15 Democrats if you choose that ballot, one Green Party and one Republican Party choice, two Constitution candidates, and 16 Libertarian candidates. If you’re unaffiliated and want to jump into one of the crowded races, you’ll have to research the individual candidates. Just by way of example check out Vermin Love Supreme, who’s one of the 16 Libertarian candidates. Defining characteristics: Commonly wears a boot on his head; carries a large toothbrush. Platform: Mandatory tooth brushing by rule of law. Educational outreach: In past, has campaigned on zombie apocalypse awareness. Social/economic policy: Promises a free pony to Americans. In short, tough but fair. Sure, critics say Vermin may be in the pocket of Big Pony. But if he’s elected they’ll be saying that with a stunning, bright smile. Joviality aside, voters need to get to work. We’re on the clock for 2020.

As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in mid-November about whether President Trump can end the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the court’s five conservative justices signaled their inclination toward allowing the president to do so. We’re hearing a lot these days about the rule of law. And that’s a good thing. We all need a reminder that no matter how much any elected official appeals to us, no matter how charismatic, no matter how much faith we have in that individual’s intelligence, integrity or chutzpah, our Constitution requires that person to govern according to the rule of law. Contemplating the rule of law might help those of us who are appalled at the prospect that our country might deport more than 660,000 young men and women, whose plight is no fault of their own, understand where to direct our fury. As North Carolinians, it matters because our state has the seventh largest population of DACA recipients. It isn’t just these young people who will suffer if they lose their DACA status. According to an analysis by The Center for American Progress, North Carolina is home to 24,480 DACA recipients who pay $134.8 million in federal taxes and $81.7 million in state and local taxes. Their spending power is $702.5 million. They own homes, they pay rent, they work in every sector of the economy. (Contrary to President Trump’s tweet that many are criminals, no one with a criminal record qualifies for DACA status.) Moreover, North Carolina is home to 11,600 American-citizen children of DACA recipients. How did we get to this place? Under U.S. immigration law, anyone in the country without proper documentation encounters great difficulty pursuing an education beyond high school or finding work. They live in the shadows, vulnerable to exploitation and in constant fear of being deported. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides undocumented young people who were brought into the country unlawfully as children a two-year renewable deferral from deportation and the right to work or attend school during that time. It does not grant them a path to citizenship. Polls show that seventy-two percent of Americans oppose the deportation of these young people. But Republicans have consistently blocked legislation to address their plight and a polarized Congress seems unable to find any workable compromise to solve the dysfunctional immigration system that created it. In exasperation, President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing DACA, even though he himself admitted that he couldn’t “just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. … That’s not how a democracy works.” In another instance, he said, “I’m not the emperor … My job is to execute laws that are passed. And Congress right now has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system.” As Obama understood, the authority to make law resides with Congress. The authority to enforce it resides with the executive. That authority to execute the law did allow him to establish priorities for enforcing it. But it could be argued that he went beyond that. Instead of simply declaring they wouldn’t be a priority for deportation, he gave them legal status, which allows them to obtain driver’s licenses, work and pursue higher education, something the immigration law doesn’t do. Many authorities on the Constitution would argue that he overstepped his enforcement authority, actually undermining the law he was supposed to be enforcing. More to the point, if he had the authority to interpret the immigration law so liberally, his successor has the authority to take a different view. So, the first question before the Supreme Court is whether the court itself has the authority to intervene in what is, by Constitutional mandate, the authority of the executive branch to enforce the laws of the land. Should the court determine that it has the authority to review Trump’s decision to wind down the program, the administration argues that dismantling it brings enforcement back into compliance with federal immigration law which makes no exception for those brought into the country unlawfully as children. No matter how sympathetic one is to the plight of young people who have lived in the United States for almost their entire lives, most of whom can’t even remember the countries where they were born, and no matter how much they contribute to their communities or to the economies of the states where they live, it seems highly unlikely the court will block Trump from dismantling DACA. But it is not the court, or even Trump, where the primary responsibility for this despicable state of affairs lies. It lies with Congress, with the men and women we’ve elected to serve us who care more about playing to their bases than they do about reaching across the aisle to find workable compromises to solve the nation’s problems. It is at Congress that we should direct our anger and frustration, and it is to Congress that we should look for a solution. We in North Carolina, and the people of California, Texas, Illinois, New York, Florida, Arizona and other states whose economies have grown and prospered thanks to immigrant labor, and whose states benefit from the talent and dedication of these young DACA recipients, should flood the offices of our U.S. representatives and senators with demands that they do the honorable thing. That would be to pass a law granting DACA recipients’ permanent residency and a path to citizenship before the Supreme Court hands down its decision next June. Trump has said he will sign such a bill. Let’s find out.

It is no secret that women are underrepresented in American politics. We have never had a female president of the United States and women make up just 24 percent of Congress, 18 percent of America’s governors and 26 percent of state legislatures. And those who may think that local offices are the solution have thus far seen those hopes unrealized as women make up just 21 percent of mayors and comprise similar proportions of county commissions. While these data may leave little hope for even the most optimistic, the 2018 election suggested that maybe there was a silver lining for those who seek a more representative government. Running on the backs of the “blue wave” of 2018, women inched up in the representational calculus—adding 256 state legislative seats and 28 congressional seats over the previous year. Scholars, as they are want to do, debate the causes of this wave, but all recognize that the historic representation of female candidates was a function not only of voting behavior, but of supply. Simply put, more women were elected to office because more women ran for office. The question remains whether 2018’s “year of the woman” will inspire more women to run for office in the future. If we accept (and the scholarly literature as well as common sense would suggest that we should) that more women in office is a good thing for democracy, then regardless of partisanship, we should want to see more women running for office in 2019. Now I know what you may be thinking—2019 isn’t an election year. And to some degree, that’s true. This is not an “on-cycle” election year, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t electing anyone in 2019. In fact, there are 564 people running for a variety of offices in Western North Carolina, including mayor, city council, county soil and water commission, and county boards of education. Whoever wins these elections, they will make a bevy of decisions that affect our utilities, schools, roads, and lands. Unfortunately, the list of declared candidates in WNC doesn’t suggest much change from the past in terms of the potential for more equal gender representation in our region. Slightly more than one-fifth of candidates running for office in 2019 from WNC are women—similar to the current distribution of female representation in local government. When it comes to executive offices in local government in WNC, the numbers are even worse—less than 17 percent of people running for mayor in WNC in 2019 are women. While this rather average number of women running for office doesn’t bode well for an increase in female representation in our region, it doesn’t mean that we won’t see any change. Local elections in off-years such as 2019 have notoriously low turnout. That means that it’s a lot easier to sway the results of an election than it would be in a presidential or on-cycle election where turnout is expected to be high. A concerted effort to elect more women at the local level could therefore stand a greater chance of success in 2019 than it might in 2020. Stacking the farm-team of future politicians with more female representation can only increase the possibility that today’s local representation will be followed by tomorrow’s greater representation at higher offices. So, you are searching for a more representative government, there’s no better time to start than 2019. Christopher Cooper is the Robert Lee Madison Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University.

In just a few generations the industrial revolution, along with the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that grew out of the American Revolution, spawned what can only be described as an avalanche of new and wonderful things. Better farm equipment, time-saving appliances, automobiles, telephones, televisions, La-Z-Boy recliners, plastic in all its many forms, countless electronic devices. The list is endless. These amazing devices make life more convenient and, in many ways, easier for people around the world, and their production has been the major driver of the U.S. and other economies since before Henry Ford figured out how to mass produce cars. But here’s a hard fact. There’s a disastrous fallout from this wondrous era. You can see it in the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating garbage dump two times the size of Texas that floats between Hawaii and California. You can see it in mounds caught behind downed limbs in rivers. You can see it littering beaches, in unregulated heaps in cities around the world, in the bellies of dead whales. You can see it in the junked cars and piles of plastic toys and broken furniture in a host of North Carolina yards. What you can’t see is the microscopic bits of plastic falling to the ground when it rains. That’s right. A federal research report published in July, based on analysis of 300 rainwater samples collected in 2017 at six urban sites in the Denver and Boulder areas in Colorado, found microscopic fragments of green, blue, purple, red and silver plastic. There are no federal regulations to prevent this type of pollution and the implications for the health of the environment or of its human and other animal inhabitants are unknown. The amount of solid waste generated by consumerism, the big driver of our economy, is unsustainable not only because it pollutes the environment, but because it is an inexcusable waste of natural resources. The amount of metal in rusting cars sitting in front yards and junkyards in North Carolina alone would build an untold number of battleships. It’s no use blaming people for not recycling or for just tossing things instead of properly disposing of them. Even those responsible consumers who put their garbage on the street for pickup or haul it to the nearest convenience center contribute to the high cost of building and maintaining costly landfills that are increasingly hard to site. And now that China will no longer take much of our recycling, many municipalities are just throwing it away. There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we view consumerism and real consequences for heedless consumerism. Former President Jimmy Carter once said, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but (what) one owns. But we’ve discovered that only things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. “ Most studies of what makes people happy indicate that spending time with those they love, meaningful work and a positive attitude are at the top of the list. Religious belief, giving to others, gratitude, forgiveness, personal freedom and health are also high on the list. That suggests that excessive consumerism and the debt, overwork and isolation that often results would be counterproductive to health and happiness. Yet, Americans are constantly enticed by advertisements that imply a new car, a bigger house, or the latest, greatest gadget are the ticket to a blissful life. Measuring wealth in relationships, job satisfaction and the ability to maintain healthy attitudes and always balancing that against the need for things is tough in such a cultural environment, but it’s a shift worth striving for. Government at every level can help to encourage such a shift by creating tax breaks and other incentives for companies to become circular, as the furniture company Ikea has announced it plans to do by 2030. The company’s goal is to design every product it makes to be reused, repaired, upgraded, and ultimately recycled. Local governments can begin charging for garbage and recycling the way they charge for water use. Those who throw away more, pay more. Unofficial garbage dumps on private property also need to be regulated because they pose a public health problem. Rather than being punitive, government should offer incentives to help people who would otherwise be unable to clean up or remove such piles of garbage. Coming to terms with the unsustainable use of resources and the enormous impact of unbridled consumerism on the state, national and world environment poses one of the most complex and daunting challenges of our time. It was an unintended consequence of inventive and entrepreneurial forces that led to a better quality of life for many. Ikea’s decision to become a circular company hints that those same forces are waking up to the need to meet this challenge. All of us should do what we can to promote government policy that encourages and supports such initiatives.

With the peak months for hurricane activity upon us (August through October), government forecasters in charge of predicting hurricane activity have elevated the chances of an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season to 45% (up from 30% from the outlook issued in May). This means we may see 10-17 named storms, 5-9 hurricanes and 2-4 major hurricanes. With blue tarps still whipping in the breeze on roofs across New Hanover County, this is not good news for those not yet recovered from last year’s record-breaking Hurricane Florence. On Sept. 10, 2018 as the storm gained strength in the Atlantic with winds of 140 miles per hour, the National Weather Service predicted the storm soon would make landfall near Wilmington in New Hanover County, North Carolina’s most populous coastal county with 232,274 residents. Under a voluntary evacuation order and at the urging of local officials and the governor, thousands fled inland. But many others stayed put to ride out the storm. Florence eventually made landfall at Wrightsville Beach at 7:15 a.m. on Sept. 14 gusting to 105 mph. When the storm pushed into nearby Wilmington, a massive tree crashed through the roof of the one-story brick home of Lesha and Adam Johnson. Firefighters from the station less than a mile away struggled for hours during the storm to reach the family inside and were able to save Adam, 48. But Lesha, 41 , and their 8-month-old son, also named Adam, died. Lesha owned her own business, was attending college, and had worked at the Wilmington Housing Authority as a director of property management. The family had stocked up as they prepared to ride out the storm. The home wasn’t in a flood zone. Adam, a janitor, said they felt they would be safe, especially since public officials had stressed the primary danger from the hurricane would be storm flooding and had not placed Wilmington under a mandatory evacuation order. The Johnsons had all the information and made a reasoned decision to remain in their home during the storm. Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo, who repeatedly urged people to leave, explained that the city had never been under a mandatory evacuation order. Discussions with the county, the governor and federal officials concluded that the rest of the state could not handle a mass exodus from its largest coastal county. “I just don’t think there were enough resources inside the state, as well as fuel, to be able to handle it,” he told the Port City Daily. We have to ask, why this was the case when the governor of our neighboring state to the south was able to order the mandatory evacuation of 1 million people living on its coast in one sweep? “We know the evacuation order I’m issuing will be inconvenient,” S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster said. “But we’re not going to gamble with the lives of the people of South Carolina. Not a one.” Why could North Carolina not make a coordinated mandatory evacuation of its coastal population with the same efficient decisiveness? Gov. Roy Cooper declared a mandatory evacuation of the state’s barrier islands for Florence, but otherwise North Carolina primarily relied on local governments to make evacuation declarations. Is this the best approach? This is a question worth asking. As our climate changes due to global warming, we are likely to see increasingly intense storms. Warmer oceans mean bigger, wetter and slower hurricanes may become the norm. On Sept. 16 after two days of relentless wind and rainfall, floodwaters blocked all roads in and cut off New Hanover from the rest of the world. Food, water an d fuel became scarce for those who did not evacuate. The county had lost power. Many structures were damaged from the relentless wind and 27 inches of rain that battered the county. Flood waters rose in roads, homes and businesses. Wilmington’s storied live oaks and long-leaf pines downed power lines and blocked the streets. Shelters were at capacity and short on supplies. After the storm, the city’s sidewalks told the tale: Water-logged carpet, sheet rock and household goods joined the mountains of stacked tree trunks and limbs on virtually every street. New Hanover County spent the next three months clearing 3 million cubic yards of vegetative debris. Today, digital billboards across Wilmington implore the local citizenry to be prepared for the next big one. Plan. Be prepared with an emergency readiness kit. Tick all those boxes on the hurricane readiness checklist. Some 42 people died in North Carolina from Florence. The state suffered $22 billion in property damage. State and local officials have scratched their collective heads in the months since Florence and vowed they will do better next time to protect life and property. Securing homes and businesses to better withstand the next storm and upgrading roads to resist rising waters must take place. While the damage from Florence in New Hanover was significant had the hurricane come ashore at 140 mph, many more lives would have been lost and the damage would have been unfathomable. Already into the 2019 hurricane season, the sense of urgency is clear. While the population is urged to act before the next storm, the wheels of government must move quickly and with courage.

If you live south of Asheville, it’s smart to check your mapping software before making a trip to the city. Checking ahead can save you from scrambling for alternate routes or, worse, sitting in a traffic slow-down on Interstate 26 while a 30-minute trip turns into one that takes an hour or more. Roads around the Western North Carolina hub haven’t kept up with population growth, as is the case with other parts of the state. Between 2010 and 2019, North Carolina grew by 9.65 percent, according to U.S. Census estimates, making it one of the fastest-growing states in the U.S. In June 2018, Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law the Build NC Bond Act to help expedite highway projects. The bonds will come into play if the DOT maintains a strong project delivery pace and needs additional funds. Something, at least, is being done to catch up with road needs. But growth is impacting every aspect of the North Carolina’s infrastructure. Cooper and state lawmakers face other urgent needs including managing storm water flooding, planning for sea level rise along the state’s coast and upgrading the state’s dams and bridges. But perhaps the most urgent is providing adequate school facilities to educate its young people. North Carolina schools face an $8 billion backlog in school facilities needed by fiscal year 2020-2021, according to a report from the North Carolina Justice Center. It’s a backlog that, according to the report, is a self-inflicted wound caused by rounds of tax cuts passed by the General Assembly since 2013. Those cuts have reduced state revenues by $3.6 billion a year. “This rash of tax cuts has dramatically undermined our ability to deliver needed services for North Carolina’s growing population,” the report, published in March 2019 says. Before the Great Recession, school construction was supplemented by state government using a portion of corporate income tax and by lottery revenue. Since that time, corporate tax cuts and diversion of lottery income to other purposes has diminished state support for school construction by hundreds of millions of dollars. Charlotte teacher Justin Parmenter wrote about some of the situations that have resulted in his blog “Notes from the Chalkboard” in May 2018. One Mecklenburg teacher taught in a trailer infested with ants living inside its walls. She and her students suffered bites. “Classes with so many children that some have to sit on the floor. Other classes taking place in closets. Blind students who can’t get books in Braille. … Teachers forced to stop class to attend to special medical needs because there’s no nurse on duty. Welcome to public schools in North Carolina,” Parmenter wrote in the post. The American Society of Civil Engineers periodically grades the nation’s infrastructure and that of each state. North Carolina’s infrastructure was last graded in 2013, at which time the state’s schools received a “C.” The report card noted that “over 58% of North Carolina schools will require renovations in the next 5 years….” The ASCE projected those renovation costs at $8 billion. But the legislature did not increase funding to meet those needs. Instead, it took funds off the table by slicing the corporate tax rate from 6.9 percent in 2013 to 2.5 percent in 2019. North Carolina’s education infrastructure continues to fall behind as lawmakers choose corporate tax cuts over educating the workforce on which those very corporations will depend in years to come. One of the most basic functions of government is to provide an infrastructure that allows people, the human capital that supports the economy, to realize their full potential. The infrastructure should facilitate the creation of jobs and the education and safety of the workforce. Without roads that move traffic, schools that educate a future workforce, wastewater and storm water systems that prevent flooding and keep water clean, not only are people at risk of dying unnecessarily, business that brings prosperity will go elsewhere. A safe, effective and efficient infrastructure underpins a thriving economy and a thriving economy provides the wealth to support the infrastructure on which it depends, but if that wealth is diverted to other ends, the infrastructure begins to fail and the economy it supports will eventually suffer as well. In June, Gov. Cooper vetoed a state budget for the fiscal year that began July 1. That budget failed to include a bond initiative asked for by the governor and passed by the House that would have provided a secure and sustained source of revenue to fund school capital needs. The governor’s compromise proposal includes the bond initiative, albeit at $3.5 billion instead of the original $3.9 billion request. If legislators want to keep North Carolina competitive, they will accept the compromise proposal and phase out the corporate tax cuts they’ve implemented to pay the debt service rather than robbing other areas of the state budget and undermining other critical needs.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has introduced legislation, SB 790, that would give North Carolina land to South Carolina’s Catawba Indian Nation for an off-reservation casino. At first glance, as they’re not making land anymore, the idea of giving away part of our state doesn’t strike us as a very good idea. After further scrutiny, this idea looks even worse. Some background: The Catawba say they have ancestral homelands in South and North Carolina. The tribe gained federal recognition in 1941. They terminated their tribal status in 1959 and received individual landholdings in 1962. The tribe reconsidered the termination, was recognized by the state of South Carolina in 1973 and regained federal recognition in 1993 in exchange for dropping claims to land around the York County, S.C., area. The tribe received $50 million. The agreement included a “service area” in six North Carolina counties where Catawbas live that made them eligible for the same federal benefits as Catawba on the South Carolina reservation. Much of this seems like dry history, but it’s important viewed through the lens of SB 790. The 1993 settlement is the thin reed proponents are trying to hang a casino on. North Carolina already has two casinos, in Murphy and Cherokee, operated by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). The operations have been good community partners, are large employers and have been an economic lifesaver for counties such as Swain. Eighty-seven percent of land in Swain is in federal ownership. (Forty percent of the Smoky Mountains National Park lies within its boundaries.) While the park draws healthy tourism business, the ownership issue means outside of tourism there’s little economic opportunity. Enter Harrah’s Cherokee Casino. In 1995, before Harrah’s opened, the Swain unemployment rate was 18 percent. Now it’s around 5 percent. Beyond the jobs, the Eastern Band has been a responsible steward of gaming profits, launching efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, revive spoken Cherokee – which was in danger of dying off – and myriad health and education initiatives. It’s been a good deal. Graham’s legislation would effectively turn back the clock on that good deal. There’s a finite amount of gamers, and Cherokee draws patrons from large population centers like Charlotte, Columbia and Greenville. With the proposed casino near King’s Mountain, they’d have a much shorter drive. The effect on the Eastern Band, Harrah’s and the oasis of jobs created in far Western North Carolina, historically and economically stressed region, would likely be akin to a series of plant closings. Self-inflicted closings created by Sen. Graham’s bill. Well, at least North Carolina’s U.S. Senators are rising to the fight. Right? Not exactly. Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis , both Republicans, are cosponsors of Graham’s bill. Here’s a fun bit of history: In 2003 Tillis served as North Carolina House Speaker. That year he and more than 100 House legislators signed a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell asking her to block a proposal for a casino complex. It appears Mr. Tillis has evolved on the issue. Needless to say the EBCI isn’t happy with these developments. For one, Tillis was nominated to challenge D emocratic Sen. Kay Hagan for a Senate seat in 2014 at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, whe re the state GOP was holding its convention, so this doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a “thank you.’’ Beyond that, the Cherokee seem to have history, precedent and the law firmly on their side. “The proposed casino off of I-85 in Cleveland County,’’ the tribe said in a statement, “would encroach upon Cherokee aboriginal territory – territory ceded by the Cherokee by treaty, and territory recognized as Cherokee territory by the U.S. Indian Claims Commission. The Catawba have no valid aboriginal or historical claim to Cleveland County.” How about the law and precedent? North Carolina has signed a compact with the Cherokee that allows casino gaming. South Carolina has no such agreement. Instead of working to change South Carolina law, the p lan now is, heck, just take part of North Carolina. SB 790 does that and OKs a casino by doing an end-run around a very great deal of law and precedent. How unprecedented? Well … How many times has land for a tribe been designated outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs process? Zero. How many times in U.S. history has legislation been passed that would take away the right of a state’s governor to concur with or oppose a Department of Interior recommendation regarding a new casino? Zero. For that matter, how many times has Congress enacted legislation to authorize an off-reservation casino? Zero. On May 1 the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held a hearing on SB 790, a news item completely lost in the noise of the Mueller/Barr affairs. EBCI Principal Chief Richard Sneed did notice and issued a statement that read in part, “Today’s hearing on Senate Bill 790 to give North Carolina land to the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina for an off-reservation casino reaffirms our concerns about this bill. Congress has never authorized an off-reservation casino by legislation, for good reason. “The bill circumvents the federal processes that give local stakeholders – the State Senate, the Governor, community members, and interested North and South Carolinians – a voice in whether to move forward with the casino,’’ Sneed continued. “Rather than hear from interested parties, this bill silences those voices and replaces the process with backroom political dealing.” We’re not sure why Burr and Tillis would be onboard with this. In the case of Graham, it’s interesting to recall that Wallace Cheves formed Sky Boat LLC in 2009 to help develop Catawba gaming. Cheves was a co-chair of Graham’s most recent presidential effort in South Carolina. Small world.