Local legislators hail 'historic' session
By Matthew Whittle
Published in News on August 5, 2007 2:01 AM
Phrases like "historic" and "the best ever" flew thick and furious as the state General Assembly's 2007 legislative session adjourned for the year Thursday night.
It was, the delegates said, a productive session that saw several landmark pieces of legislation approved through a spirit of bipartisanship, despite the blemishes of former House Speaker Rep. Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, Rep. David Almond, R-Stanly and Rep. Thomas Wright, D-New Hanover all facing ethics problems
"I think we were able to keep moving above all that," said freshman Rep. Van Braxton, D-Lenoir. "Jim Black does not represent all Democrats and David Almond does not represent all Republicans.
"We just had to keep moving beyond that."
And, at the end of the day, their single-minded focus on passing watershed legislation paid off.
"I would say this has got to be a historic session for this legislature," said state Sen. John Kerr, D-Wayne. "Especially with how we changed the relationship between the state and the local governments by taking over Medicaid.
"It's going to be a historic change -- freeing up some money for schools and other things the counties need. It was probably the No. 1 thing we did, and we hope it works. It took a lot of negotiating and a lot of people coming together."
It wasn't the only piece of legislation to take a fair amount of negotiation, however, as several large environmental bills also found their way to the governor's desk -- many of them sponsored by Sen. Charlie Albertson, D-Duplin.
"I think we did real good," he said. "It's one of the best sessions we've had since I've been up here. We passed some major legislation that will be good for this state in the future."
Included among those bills was one making North Carolina the first state in the southeast to require utility companies to provide a certain percentage of their retail electricity from renewable sources, as well as one to more strictly regulate the state's landfills.
Albertson also was sponsor of a pivotal bill to effectively put a permanent ban on new hog farm lagoon and spray field operations by raising environmental standards for future expansions. The bill does offer help, though, to farmers willing to install one of five new technologies approved for dealing with hog waste.
"It's going to help the environment and it's going to help the industry be sustainable," Albertson said.
Other bills pushed through with the help of local legislators include a $100 million appropriation to the N.C. Rural Center for water and sewer infrastructure, a new cutoff age date for students entering kindergarten, money for research into specialty crops, and a biofuel center in Oxford.
The water and sewer piece was something that Kerr in particular has long sought.
"Every town in my district (Wayne, Greene and Pitt counties) needs help. I'd like to have had more, but $100 million is a good start," he said. "We've got to get ready for all the people coming to North Carolina. I think it's a good thing, but it puts a strain on our resources."
Other legislators focused primarily on the military, giving tuition assistance to members and their families, offering protection to members facing custody disputes and assistance to those families facing hardships.
"We created a new military caucus this year. I think that helped focus the light on the military and what a great asset they are to this state," said Rep. Louis Pate, R-Wayne.
As far as Wayne and Duplin counties are concerned, though, little money flowed to any local projects.
"No local projects -- what you call pork barrel -- got funded," said Rep. Russell Tucker, D-Duplin. "We just adopted a position in the House Democratic Caucus that we weren't going to do that and we didn't allow the Senate to include any of theirs.
"So, in bringing home the bacon, I think it brought it home, but it was through statewide issues."
That meant that bills looking for money for projects like the Albertson Library, the Rose Hill Community Memorial Library, the Carolina East Hospice Center and even food banks in Duplin County were denied funding.
WATCH in Wayne County wasn't funded directly, but the legislature did provide funds the health care agency can apply for.
Duplin and Wayne also both lost out on other local bills requesting a local option sales tax, and in Duplin, the ability for the county government to garnish wages as a method of collecting fees owed by residents.
They did, however, receive the ability to levy either a quarter-cent sales tax or a 0.4 percent land transfer tax as part of the Medicaid relief package.
The two counties also were the beneficiaries of two important agriculture bills.
One, which Kerr helped include in the budget, gave Wayne County several acres of property around the state-owned Cherry Research Farm for use in building a regional agricultural center. Additionally, the legislature was able to halt an effort to transfer ownership of all the state's research farms to the University of North Carolina system's Board of Governors.
In Duplin County, Albertson helped find funding to establish the Williamsdale Farm Energy Field Laboratory, which will be charged with studying alternative fuel and feed sources.
But for Braxton, the best part of the session was watching and helping such legislation take shape.
Now, he explained, he knows how to follow his bills and push harder for them in the 2008 short session -- particularly one to fund a regional jail study.
"This is just like city government, but on a much larger scale, so it took a while to learn my way around and how to do things," he said. "But I've learned a lot.
"The biggest surprise was the number of bills we passed. In my opinion we over-legislate, but that would go on whether I'm here or not, so I need to work for good legislation and against bad."
Still, he added, like with anything else, not everybody was happy with everything.
Pate and other Republicans voiced their displeasure over the continuation of the quarter-cent sales tax and the 9.5 percent increase in state spending in this year's $20.7 billion budget, as well as the option for counties to levy a land transfer tax as part of the Medicaid relief package.
Pate also expressed a bit of concern over several of the bills that were shoved through at the end of the session, including the Solid Waste Management Act, which will make landfills more expensive to operate.
"We started off kind of slow. We probably could have been more efficient that first month or so, because we were hearing bills that were introduced in January," he said.
Still, most of the bills that found their way to Gov. Mike pen were approved largely with bipartisan support.
"We do work well together," Pate said of the two parties. "Everybody's working for the good of the state and we had a lot of cooperation. I believe all in all it was a good session, and I think the attitude of the speaker had a lot to do with it.
"There were an awful lot of Republican-sponsored bills on the calendar and there have been times in the past that wouldn't have happened. I think that goes to show they're reaching across the aisle, and that lets everybody invest in it."