NC constitutional amendments: love 'em or leave 'em? | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. And as we always do, on Tuesdays at noon, we chat with Andrew Dunn from Long Leave Politics. You can get his newsletter, go to his website, listen to the podcast long leafpol dot com, and he is also a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer. Andrew, how are you, sir? I am doing well, refreshed, rested, right, yeah, get back to it. So I saw, I saw you. You made a road trip for the holiday weekend. No, No, we were right here at home, hungout, went to the pool, did some grilling. Where did I say, Oh, did you not you took a recent trip with the kids, did you not? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, okay, maybe that's what I saw? All right, So well, glad you had a good weekend. So I was reading through some of your stuff over the last week and the North Carolina constitutional amendments we've got now we're at five I think proposed at least I think two are definites for the November ballot. We could see some more. So you actually did a write up on this the other day about the five proposed amendments that North Carolina voters will get to choose whether or not to include in our constitution from henceforth. Number one is the right to work constitutional amendment. And you say you are one hundred percent on board with this. Why. Yeah, So I did a recap of the five proposed constitutional amendments, and right after I had a sixth one got added into the mix, so it became out of date almost as soon as I hit published. But now this interview was over. We can't trust anything you're saying. Now, that's right. But now even with the sixth that we have now, right to work is still at the top of my list. You know, since nineteen since the nineteen forties, North Carolina has been a right to work state, which basically means that you cannot be forced to join a union as a condition of your employment, and to me, that seems like the sort of thing that belongs in the state constitution. You know, it's good to have it in law, but conservatives have been pushing to get that bumped up in status all the way to the constitution for a long time now, and now seems like the right time. I mean, having the right to work, you know. One, it just seems right morally you shouldn't be forced to join something you don't want to join. But it's also a huge part in underpinning North Carolina's economic success, So it seems like the right time and looking forward to getting that over the finish line, right. And much like voter ID, you put it into the constitution, and it makes it more difficult for future legislatures to just simply change a law, right if they get Like if Democrats were to retake control of both chambers and they have the governor's mansion, they could easily rewrite the law and then require union membership just like that. Putting it in as a constitutional amendment requires a super majority out of both of the chambers, and as you point out in your piece here, it does not require governor's signature to go to the voters. So it just makes it more difficult to codifies it in a stronger way for a longer period of time. Yes, yeah, that's accurate, But I don't think that's the best way to view it, you know, because there are some things in years, some things that are getting proposed to constitutional amendments which are good for the current moment, but you might not be the right place or the constitution might not be the right place for them. But in terms of right to work, I think that does belong in the constitution, right. That's why you're one hundred percent for it. Okay, So let's go now to the levee limits. We've talked about this before. This would essentially create a mechanism to restrain local governments from increasing property tax rates at too high of an amount. What is too high, we don't know yet, because right they're just going to ask us right now whether we want to impose a levee limit. And you like this idea too. Yeah, And this also belongs in the constitution because it's really unclear whether North Carolina could do this under the current constitution. So it really does require an amendment to give the General Assembly the tools to actually do this. And we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but basically, what the idea is is that local governments are going to have some sort of guardrails on how much they can increase property taxes from year to year. Now, the mechanics of it get we'll have to get hashed out after November. I imagine that this will be approved by the voters because it seems to be fairly popular, and then the General Assembly will have to come back and actually work out what those limits will be. So I imagine we'll be talking about this a lot more in the months to come, maybe next session, to implement this. And you know, I've got some concerns. There's good ways to put this into practice and there's bad ways to do it, but the idea as a whole is a really solid one, and so we need to get the amendment over the finish line to start that process. Yeah, and it also and Democrats have been accusing Republicans of simply trying to you know, drive turnout in an election cycle where they're probably going to lose seats, especially up at the congressional level. And my response to that is, okay, so what like, of course you put stuff to your voters that you want them to get passionate about to go turn out. And you know, if you're running on a campaign of affordability, as the Democrats are doing, this is a pretty good way to piggy back along that affordability campaign. Seems to me like it seems smart from a political standpoint. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, there's never a wrong time to do the right thing. Nice next farming a constitutional right to farm, and I think also to to do timber farming, right to forestry. And so I think I think you're right on this when you say that this may just seem to be like symbolic, a little bit performative whatever, much like the hunting and fishing constitutional right. But I can also see where, you know, they may come a time down the road where some you know, Democrats may take control and they're like, you know what, no more timber harvesting. We're not allowed to timber, you know, not allowed to farm for timber anymore. So I could see that happening. Yeah, it certainly could happen. And you know, North Carolina is losing farmland at a faster pace than any other state except Texas. So I do think at some point this is going to become a bigger issue. You know what, what does North Carolina do to kind of stem the loss of farmland? So yeah, I'm on board with this one. All right. The one you may not be on board with Senate Bill ten eighty capping the personal income tax rate at three point five percent? Why do you want to raise taxes? Andrew? I do not want to raise taxes. I got to be super clear on that one. I am good with low taxes, and I honestly I would love to see the personal income tax rate go down to zero. You know, North Carolina just really you know, we it's kind of been in the mix. There's been rumblings about it, talking about it, but there hasn't ever really been a push to do it. I would love to see that. I just don't think the state constitution is the right place to do this. You know. For one, this the proposed amendment would cap it at three point five percent, and we actually have never had a tax rate that low, and we don't know what the impact is going to be. You know, this the budget framework that's been laid out that hasn't been enacted yet, would bring the tax rate down to three point four to nine percent, but that would be the first time we actually were under this limit. I mean, I get the argument to, you know, we've got this win, let's codify it, let's lock it in for the long term. But what my worry is is that without similar measures around reigning in spending, we're going to get to a point here in the next year or two where you know, we're constitutionally limited on the personal income tax rate. So the General Assembly wants to keep spending and increasing spending, so they end up raising taxes all over the place in other areas, and I just don't I don't want to see that. Happen, all right, And finally that you cover your in your piece over at long leave politics. House Bill one forty four, And this was one that I was interested to read your take on because I not spent a lot of time looking into this one. But this basically makes the state Board of Education an elected body rather than an appointed body, which it is right now. They would create what fourteen districts around the state, and then you would have those fourteen people elected. You would then have a Lieutenant governor and treasurer who would stay on the Board of Education, and the state Superintendent would serve as chair, which would give you what seventeen total members on the board. Event Yeah, I mean North Carolina's education governance is just so complicated and messed up, and that's why I'm not on board with this one. How it's supposed to work, I guess under the current constitution is the General Assembly passes laws that are broad education policy, and then the State Board of Education is supposed to be the entity that takes all that and turns it into actual rules and regulations. But we've kind of gotten to a point over the last few decades where we've got kind of a lot of education bureaucrats on the State Board of Education that try to make things way too complicated. And my fear is that without some you know, more structural reforms to how education governance happens, that just changing it from an appointed body to an elected one isn't going to actually solve the problem. So what I would I would really rather see actually the governor be more accountable on education rather than kind of this messy, too many cooks in the kitchen situation we have now. Yeah, because like the governor will run on you know, some education platform and then has very little control to actually get any of that implemented except through his Board of Education appointees. But then you've also got the state superintendent of public Instruction, and if that person, like we saw under Catherine Truett, she was constantly and also who was was it Mark Johnson? I think was his name right, like the I think he was. There was a big lawsuit between the state board and him. Yeah, yeah, so like they will butt heads if you've got appointees that are from one political party and you've got a DPI uh superintendent from another political party or even just a different you know, educational philosophy. So yeah, it's always been it's always been a mess, and I don't really understand how it actually functions. And maybe that's by design. So this way, nobody knows who to go after when education starts. Failing, exactly. I think the governor's the democratic governors in particular kind of like it that way. They can they can lean in where they want, and then they can wash their hands or responsibility on everything else. Yeah. No, that's fair, that's good. I mean, it's a it's a sound political strategy. I don't I don't like it, but it's it's a sound strategy. All right. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for your time as always, and we'll talk to you next Tuesday. Yes, sir, all right, that's Andrew Dunne. He is again the publisher of long Leaf Politics. Go check out his podcast and the newsletter at long leaf pol dot com. And of course he is a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life. And our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. So I was out of town over the weekend. I went down to Topsail, not Topsail. That's how you know if someone's not from round here, they say Topsail, it's not it's Topsail, right. And I had a friend, well, Christie's college friend lives down there. Town called Sneed's Fairry, I believe, and so we went down there. I had a great time. On Saturday, we went out on the pontoon boat. By the way, I highly recommend Reef Donkey. That's the company. It's apparently named after a fish. I asked. And get this, the captain of the pontoon was from my hometown. He came down from West Islip, New York and joined the Marines. He got out of the Marine Corps and now he had just started doing this work with the Reef Donkey crew. And I told him, dude, I've been down here since nineteen ninety two. I have never met anyone from West Island. Now granted it's a small town. It's actually a hamlet, but he was the first one I ever met. So there we go. Then we went over to Wilmington, hung around downtown Wilmington. I have a cousin, she moved down there several years ago, so hung out with her. She gave us a tour. She apparently works for a woman who's dubbed the Queen of Wilmington. She's like a real estate agent or something. Right there on Market Street. We did the Henrietta boat tour up the river, up the Cape Fear River. That was really interesting. Learned a lot. About the history of the city and the river and all of that, how it got its name and everything. And she was telling me because her house is near the bridge that goes over into Leland County, and she apparently has been in the newspapers because she's been fighting the NCDOT plan to basically to take her house along with like the whole neighborhood they want because they they want to make the bride, well, they have to make the bridge. According to some federal feasibility study from like thirty years ago, they have to make the bridge like one hundred and sixty five feet tall, even though there's no large boats that actually go up the Cape Fear River anymore. So anyway, so like she's been fighting this and we were talking about that, and she was talking about the money that like under the Biden administration, I think it was with the Build Back Better Bill or whatever the that thing was called, and they had allocated like a chunk of money and now they're they're risking not getting the chunk of money because the opposition to this, to this project and all of that. And if you know, like the bridge that they're talking about replacing is the one right there, if you're in downtown Wilmington on the on the banks of the Cape Fear River, there's that what's it called a moveable bridge, So it's not a drawbridge, it's a bridge where like the whole middle section rises up like an elevator. That's the bridge they're talking about that they have to replace because it's it's at its end of life. So she was like, and if we don't, if they don't do this, then there's not going to be any money from the federal government. I said, well, you may be in luck because I come from Charlotte and our local leaders just took a pass on like seven hundred million dollars, which is like three times as much as the federal government was going to be giving you guys. So you may be able to get this bridge done after all, right, because of this whole this pot of money that Charlotte says, it's a it's not going to tap to use to expand the I seventy seven project. Yeah, so right before we left town, we talked about the Charlotte City Council and then the the CURTIPO, right, the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization, they all they all voted against this this I seventy seven project from NCDOT. And I said, at the very beginning when people started protesting this, and there were two camps basically that were protest or were I shouldn't say protest, there was really only one camp of activists that protested it. There was another camp that was just opposed to it, but didn't really They're not like they weren't going down there and making a big stink to the CURTIPO or the city council. Right, So the first camp was the essentially the black political Caucus, right, and they were they were arguing against any demolition of any of these homes that are I think in Wesley Heights neighborhood. There was a park in Willmore, which I think has gotten pretty gentrified now. So I mean, if you're going to make it a racial thing, then it kind of seems like we'll go ahead and take the white people's park now in Wilmore, right, and that. I'm just joking. Come on now, all right, So the but the BPC organizes the neighborhood, they go down, they lean on the Democrat council members, and of course they're very susceptible to that pressure because every Democrat needs the BPC endorsement in order to get through the primaries. And so yeah, they so they caved and they were like, we were going to block it. They voted to block it, and then the Transportation Planning Organization that they blocked it too. So I said at the time, if you if you block this thing, NCDOT is going to reallocate that money someplace else around the state. And you may not like that. You could say that's unfair, but that's what the NCDOT has done in the past. And I have no doubt they will do so again. Right when when the local governing bodies say yes, we want something, and then the people rise up and say no, we don't want this, NCDOT will say, Okay, that's it, all right, you're not getting it. Because the only option that I have not heard any opposition too is a tunnel, because the other camp, besides the BPC camp, the other camp is the we shouldn't have any toll rows whatsoever, right, so that it shouldn't be a tolly which then means you have to spend the billions of dollars out of taxpayer funds, which again, now you're competing with the rest of the state for all of those funds. And I don't know if people are aware of this or not, but Charlotte does not have a lot of political pull in the General Assembly nowadays. It just doesn't, all right. So yeah, there are basically three options as best I can tell, for the widening of I seventy seven from the South Carolina border up through center City Charlotte, basically eleven miles. You can't make it any wider unless you start taking all of the properties on either side of I seventy seven, because you can't They already expanded it from two lanes to three, like what thirty years ago, twenty five years ago. I used to commute during that project. That was awful. I used to commute from rock Hill up to University City and. That was awful. But then it was three lanes, and of course we filled up all three of the lanes. We have seen explosive growth here in Charlotte. It's also a major interstate obviously, so got a lot of people going through on I seventy seven. It's the most congested strip of interstate in the state. I think it's somewhere around like one hundred thirty or one hundred fifty thousand trips a day. Expected to be like two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand trips a day within like the decade, So it's only going to get worse. So you could either buy up all the land on either side of the interstate and that's going to run you multiple billions of dollars, or you can do what nc DOT proposed, which is to do a double decker interstate, basically build one on top of the existing interstate so you have two tiers. And to fund that project, which the price tag was like three point two billion dollars, and that was the cheaper alternative. Like to do that, though, they're going to need a private company to come in and do the toll lanes. Because the private company, they take out the bonds, right, they borrow the debt, they build the project, they then charge the tolls. They recoup the costs that they fronted. And so you've got, you know, one group of people, and I have heard from you, that are like, we are already taxed, We shouldn't pay anything for these roads. They should all be free, no toll lanes, all of that. And then there's the other group that actually has political power, the Black Political Caucus, and they opposed it because it would take I think it was what thirty homes in the in the Wesley Heights neighborhood. I think it was thirty homes. They would have to take them, you know, pay the people that own the property, pay them, but seize it basically through eminent domain. And so that was objected to because this is a historically black neighborhoo and Council Member Ed Driggs, he criticized the Black Political Caucus for unnecessarily making this into some sort of a racialized issue, but they did, and the Democrats are susceptible to that argument, and so they killed it. And then I saw this the other day. Malcolm Graham, Charlotte City council member whose district would have been impacted by the project, was one of the first city officials to share his thoughts in a public forum, and he said that nc DOT right from the beginning, they fumbled the ball, Like I'm not Look, I've been critical of the of the NCDOD process, So if that's what he's talking about, them fumbling the ball. But at the end of the day, which I really hate that saying, and I'm trying to excise it from my vocabulary, but what else were they supposed to propose? You either go out, you go up, or you go underneath. And I suspect that the tunneling project would have been way more expensive. But I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know. How they would pay for that, right, I don't know if you would have to get a private company to do that and then let them toll the lanes in order to recoup their costs, I don't know. Graham shared before a gathering at the Charlotte Journalisming Collaborative Local News Impact Summit. So the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative Local News Impact Summit. Okay, he said he believed something has to be done to the highway to address congestion, but the approach matters. Quote, you have to do it with the community. You can't be at the table when the plans are done and the drawings are laid out. The community has to be at the table right from the beginning. Okay, this has been in the works for twenty years. Twenty years now. There are ways for you to engage with NCDOT as a resident. People don't know this, but it's true. I have I have neighbors who have we have an NCDOT issue in our neighborhood, and I've actually spoken with pas. Has my neighbor spoken to like the head of the division of NCDOT. He talks to NCDOT. They have, They got their plans posted online. You can look through their plans and such. They held their first community meeting because their process is like here here are ideas, like these are the things that we're contemplating, and they lay them out and then of course the community's like, well, that's going to impact us, so we're opposed to it. So I'm like, I'm at a loss to understand what else NCDOT he could have produced by way of a plan that would have passed muster to the neighborhood or to the Black political caucus. What else was like, what else is to be done unless you're going to tunnel underneath? And maybe that's what happens in twenty or thirty years from now. Graham was among the council members who voted earlier this month to effectively rescind support for the project. He said, reading a Charlotte Observer article prior to the meeting about the ongoing I seventy seven debate in the project's potential impacts on his neighbors swayed his decision. At the end of the day, he says, dang it, he says, I came down to my neighbors, or sorry, it came down to my neighbors and their discomfort with the process. He then. Said the decision by the Regional Transportation Planning Organization was a quote defining moment for the. City, and on that I agree. I agree that is is a defining moment, but I don't think it's a defining moment in the way he may mean that. He said, many have come to feel officials are more concerned about those moving to Charlotte and not those who have called the city home forever. Charlotte is changing and growing. There's so many people in our community that feel they're victims of the change and not part of it. People are saying, what about us? So I seventy seven has victimized you? I seventies So the interstate system, you're a victim of the interstate system? Do you drive the interstate system? Do you, as a forever resident of Charlotte, do you drive on I seventy seven? I suspect you do. I mean, well, I try to avoid it. But then again, I mean, I guess I'm one who moved here thirty five years ago, so I don't count the people have been here forever, which is a really long time. And you may want to call like some I don't know, genealogists, or maybe at least the Guinness Book of World Records, because you guys have been here forever. That seems like a really long time, you know. But it will be a defining vote, and I'm not really sure what your alternative is what you're like, what's your plan? What are the alternatives here? If you're not going to expand I seventy seven up and you can't do it out and you don't have the money for either, and you don't have the money for a tunnel, and you don't want tolls. Chairlifts? How about that chairlifts? See, I'm just look, I'm trying to throw out some solutions here. There are no bad ideas under the cone of creativity. Okay, so I'm just tossing out some ideas chairlifts. But for cars we can use magnets. I'm just spitballing. Personal note here, My long local nightmare is over. They have finally restocked Pete's coffee in the station. Yeah, in the breakroom. There no relation. It's spelled pee t but it is pronounced much like my name Pete, which is p e t E. It's different. But so Pete's coffee is Pete's coffee. I do love the Petez coffee. No relation, no for real, because like I drink their dcalf and I mean I also drink you know, the caffeinated stuff too, But they're the only ones that use some sort of Swiss water process, which doesn't use alcohol to decaffeinate the coffee, and so it like doesn't give me headaches. DCAF coffee gives me headaches. I am I am like the one percent. There. Apparently one percent of the population gets headaches from that process, and I am the one percent. And now AOC wants to text me. All right, let me see here. I've got some messages on the text line. This from seven oh four number who says, why don't the city of Charlotte make all through. Take bypass? Yeah, sure, we could build a whole new bypass for way more money, and you would have to probably seize way more property because you already have the I seventy seven footprint. So if you put a double decker on top of that, then you're not having to acquire rights of way, buy more land, buy houses by retail, by commercial, by all of the stuff, for whatever the bypass would be. Unless you're saying, force everybody onto what four eighty five, But if you've been on four eighty five west of I seventy seven after about, oh, I don't know, three point thirty in the afternoon, it's like, can't over there. It's it's all three lanes completely jammed up. So anyway, another message here. David says, it's interesting that we have money for a football stadium, a basketball venue, a baseball stadium, and the NASCAR Hall of Fame all downtown, but we don't have money for our own roads. Seems to me we have the money, it's just a priority problem. Well, so I understand why one would think that. However, all of those all of those projects, as far as I recall, they are funded mainly through user taxes, like a tolley that's a user tax, but those taxes are generated off of hotel and well tourism taxes. Let me say, right, there's a car rental tax, there is a hotel motel tax, there's prepared food and beverage taxes. So that's how they generate the lot of the revenue for that stuff. That's not to say that the city hasn't coughed up a bunch of money for like arena improvements. They've done that, but that's city that's not state right, So the city they can't build. The city cannot build an expansion of I seventy seven because it's a state road. This is Bill and Huntersville. I may have said this before, but if you look at the original I seventy seven, it destroyed many more non black owned houses and farms then it then, ever, did an impact in a black community. At Rick is right. I don't know what that means. This is a red herring. It decimated the nation's Ford and Steel Creek area. Just route the commercial traffic around town and give them a ticket or a fine if they passed through Charlotte, that would be great short term. Solution, right. Well, you would then also have to police it to make sure that any of the local truck traffic still can gain access. Right because if if you got trucks that are going into Center City or anything close nearby, like, how else are you going to get there? Do you know why they have to rely on an outside contractor to build that huge expense of a highway because the state cannot borrow money to do highway work. They need to change that. If toll roads are so good and they'll pay for themselves, then they should borrow the money, build a road and. Pay it back with the tolls. The state does does do that, like the Monroe Bypass, right, that's a state road, and that's why it's like forty eight cents or whatever it is to drive that thing. That's super cheap. But yeah, they don't. But the expense of going through Charlotte is billions and billions of dollars. And yeah, I mean, I guess if you want the state to float some more transportation bonds and then you're going to have the state lawmakers deciding which ones should get prioritized in order to sell that to the voters. And you're going to rely then on voters from not here, not Charlotte to vote for billions of dollars in bonds, in debt, and then the interest payments that come along with that, right, you're going to have to pay them. Or so you're gonna have to get those voters to agree to take out debt and pay interest on that debt for an eleven mile strip in Charlotte. Maybe they would vote for Charlotte to get a wide ended I seventy seven, even though the residents of Charlotte opposed it. See, I just I don't see. I don't see how this goes any other way other than just continued congestion for the next two or three decades. What happened to light rail and rock hilled that got killed. And who was it? Was it Pineville that said you're not coming through here? I think it was Pineville or maybe it was Matthews years ago. Oops, hang on a second. Until Charlotte stops catering to the perpetual victims in the city, things will only continue to get worse. If you need me, I will be in Union County. Well. Yeah, and that's what a lot of conservatives have done. They've they've fled. Yeah, they've they've left Charlotte. And that's why they can't get anybody elected anymore. And that's why Charlotte keeps getting you know, Democrat controlled governing bodies making these same decisions over and over and over again. Bill wants to know who's stolen land? Are those potentially affected neighborhoods built on? Yeah? Did they? Did? They start off with a land acknowledgment statement before before the n CDA Tea meetings, seven oh four member says, won't it be special to see the city of Charlotte beg to have Elon Musk bring his boring company to bore the new lanes under seventy seven one day? I know they love Elon. Yeah, remember the city because they hated Elon Musk so much when he came out for Trump and was part of the DOJE effort. Remember, they cut off all purchases of Tesla's and it has nothing to do with Elon Musk. There's nothing to do with Elon. It was just about the Tesla, Bain says. In my mind, I keep coming back to the total number of people affected? Did I hear thirty? While that is small, they all have an opinion, what do the majority thing? Do they understand they might be able to negotiate a settlement for their individual homes that's based on replacement value, not current value. That could be a lot of money. If it's not about the money, I understand, But what if, say fifteen want the money or need the money. I could be totally wrong on my approach, but I have not heard this specifically addressed by the thirty homeowners can ask for a lot, Yes, indeed they can. Indeed they can. But then you're you're also gonna have people that are opposed to the toll lane in general just that as well. So I don't know. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.