Who will lead the NC Senate? Charlotte's hard choice on toll road | 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. Every Tuesday at noon, we chat with Andrew Dunn unless I'm on vacation or he is. Andrew is the creator of Longleaf Politics longleafpol dot com. You can subscribe to his newsletter at the website. There you can also catch his podcasts. He's also a contributing columnist to The Charlotte Observer. Andrew, how are you, sir? Oh, I'm doing fantastic good. I was sitting on the beach last Tuesday just feeling a yearning void in my heart not being on your show. So did you just start like talking out your recent columns and such like, just to the ocean. You couldn't stop myself, all right, So, first off, congrats on the book. We talked about it two weeks ago. Change Agent, right, I think is the name of the book about Pat McCrory. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we launched a couple of weeks ago and it's been going well. I'm excited to see the reaction that folks have had to the book. It's a, you know, the definitive. Look at a consequential political career. And yeah, I see you. You've been making the rounds, doing lots of interviews. So good luck on all of that and on the book sale. I do have to thank you. I do have to get a copy of it. So let's start with the contest to replace Phil Berger, the newly ousted but longtime leader of the North Carolina Senate. Phil Berger long thought to be invincible almost and you say, last November, states Amy Gaily drove out to Rockingham County with a warning for the sheriff there, Sam Page, do not challenge Phil Berger. So what was her argument to Sam Page before or as he was mulling this run against Burger? Yeah, so, Senator Gaily's argument was that Berger was going to basically spend all the money that the Senate caucus had on hands in order to win the primary. And Gaily argued. That with that sheriff Sampage would have no chance at actually winning, so it would be kind. Of a. Double whamie there that all the money would be gone to protect the Senate supermajority and Sam Page would not ultimately be victorious. Well, she turned out. To be half right right that Senator. Berger did spend all the money. That they had on hands. But obviously your listeners know that Shared Page. Did squeak out a victory by twenty three votes. Right, So this was an interesting piece for me to look at it because the you have sort of two parts talking about like, who's got a bunch of money that they have raised? And does this make them more attractive as a replacement for Phil Burger? You know, do they have the inside track? But there's also sort of the mechanics that I think a lot of people don't realize that Phil Berger as the Senate president pro tem. Do you say pro tempoor or pro tempoae? Where do you go with? I just I saved myself by just saying pro tem Yeah, I do too. I even asked Berger that one time and he said the same thing. So I still don't know how to pronounce it correctly. Anyway, So the leader though of the Senate, they raise a metric buttload of money or a standard buttload of money in America. So you raise all of this money, and that money is supposed to be going towards vulnerable colleagues. Right, that's sort of the that's like one of the main roles that the Senate leader does. That's exactly right. I mean, the Senate President pro. Tem has plenty of institutional power during session to steer bills and decide what's going to get a floor vote and what's not. But the way that you get to that position generally is by helping out your friends, right, is they are the. Chief fundraiser for the Senate Party caucus. And that makes sense because if you're the leader of the Senate and you make all these appointments to committees and to chairmanships, you can kill bills and shepherd bills more easily than obviously if you know you're trying to go to if you're the Senate President pro tem and you're going to you know, a donor, then you can say like, look, I'm the gatekeeper basically, so them donating to you is very helpful for whatever they need. Legislation they may be trying to enact or to block. So then that parlays to the senators right who are looking maybe at a tough reelection fight. They're going to need twenty thirty thousand dollars or something for some campaign spending, and if they can't raise that themselves, then the president pro tem would kick down that money. Is that about the Is that? Do I have that mechanism correct? Yes? Yeah, that essentially sums. It up, and it's not all on. The Senate President pro tem. You know, other. Members of leadership generally get those positions by virtue of their ability to fundraise as well. But it's super. Interesting when you go through all the General Assembly. Financial reports just how few people are actually raising a substantial amount of money. Most of them are are just kind of coasting. And so that might also explain why a lot of people were upset that Sam Page one. I'm not sure he's going to get a lot of love. I think we talked about this after he did the appearance at the Teachers' Union test that there, Yeah, there are a lot of Republicans that are not too thrilled with his victory, and that may be because they were getting campaign assistants from Phil Berger that now they may not have access to and they probably did not have access or they're not going to have access to, I should say, in this election cycle, right and they they have a super majority right now, but they could lose that. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, we're going into an. Election cycle that historically has been unfriendly to Republicans. Now things have been starting to shift back a little bit this summer, but still anticipating the potential for a blue wave in November. And in my article I point out that going into you know, at the end of the second quarter the last couple of cycles, Phil Berger has had more than a million dollars in cash on hand to be able to spread spread around to candidates and challenging election cycles. And now he's essentially tapped out. All of that money is gone. All right, So who has money? Who's got money now? Left? In the Senate. Well, so there's a clear front runner in terms of fundraising, and I would argue potentially for the leader of the next leader of the Senate Republican Caucus, and that is Senator Michael. Lee from New Hanover County. He has a little bit over than over a million dollars in cash on hand. However, there is a big caveat there and that Michael Lee is one of those potentially vulnerable senators. You know, his district is fairly purple. He lost his seat in twenty eighteen, which was the last time we had a Trump in the White House and a midterm election cycle. Now his district has gotten a little bit friendlier to him since then. But Senator Lee is going to need to spend a good bit of that money on his own race. Isn't he already a senator in Utah? Yeah, maybe he's doing both jobs at once. Terrible terrible punt. Okay, So there's Michael Lee a lot of money, but he's got a tough race maybe ahead of him, so he may not be willing to cough up as much cash to his colleagues. Then you've got and you break down all of this in your piece at Long Leave Politics, the Deputy President pro Tim Ralph Hies. Where does he stand? Yeah, he's in the mix. So basically what I did was I looked at all of the people that have been floated as potential new Senate leaders and used their cash on hand numbers as a decent proxy of what they've. Been able to fundraise so far this year. And Brent Jackson, Senator Brent Jackson actually comes in or yeah, Brent. Jackson comes in second with about seven. Hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Then you've got Todd Johnson of Union County at just under half a million, and Ralph Hi's from my favorite North Carolina mountain town of Spruce Pine is well behind with about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then the aforementioned Senator Gaily at about one hundred and eight thousand. So none of those numbers are. Particularly eye popping. There's gonna be a void without Senator Burger's money to spread to some of the potentially vulnerable senators. However, the Senate map is a lot harder for Democrats to break through. You know, there's only fifty Senate seats. There's potentially more vulnerable House seats. You know, with one hundred and twenty members over there, I think the Senate will be okay. But this is a decent proxy if we're looking at who has the inside track to the next leadership role, all right. And so real quick, also about Amy Gaily, I thought this was interesting. She doesn't have a lot of money. You mentioned one hundred eight thousand dollars in the piece. She already is in leadership, but you say she could be a consensus option. So how does that How would that play out? Do you think if it did? Yeah, So, these these conversations are undoubtedly already happening and will continue to happen over the course of the year. There were some rumblings that the Senate, the current Senate caucus, was going to go ahead and coalesce around somebody ahead of the elections, though of course they will not actually formally vote on a new Senate President pro tem until the next next year after the elections. Yeah, I don't have a great insight right now into where things are going or what candidates are getting the most whipping the most votes within the caucus. But I thought Gaily might end up being someone who's broadly liked across the caucus and could end up being you know, if there is not enough votes on some of these other guys, that she might might be elevated. All right, So from North Carolina Senate new leader to the new mayor of Charlotte, you have a piece at the Charlotte Observer saying on I seventy seven, he's going to need nerve. This is Rob Harrington, the newly appointed mayor. He'll serve for about another what sixteen months or so? And on the I seventy seven issue, you wrote that Charlotte needs someone with enough independence and credibility to make hard choices, ones that others know are necessary but cannot quite bring themselves to make. You're talking about city council members there, So why do you think they're not able to make these types of necessary but hard decisions when it comes to the I seventy seven toll lane project. Well, the fact of the matter is there's. A majority of city council members who are looking at the twenty twenty seven mayor's race, and this toll issue is going to be toxic, especially in a Democratic primary. You know, the political caucuses against the toll lanes. A lot of the other more left leaning. Interest groups are against the toll lane project. I think that in their hearts, these city council members realize that they made a big whoopsie. And would love to be able to go back on it. But they are not. They don't feel like they're in a position to make that choice and take the political fallout because they're primarily looking at next year's elections and that's. Where the new mayor, Rob Harrington comes in. You know he is. He's not going to run in twenty twenty seven. I think this is more of a stewardship role for him, and he has the ability to kind of be the fall guy if he has a nerve in the stomach for it, because it will be a hard decision to make. Yeah, he will anger the activist left, no doubt about that if he does, and people on the right who don't want to lanes either. So he's going to anger people if he tries to reverse course here. But wouldn't he still need to get council members on board. Yeah, he's got to. I mean he needs to whip six votes for it to essentially pass a new resolution to undo the former resolution. Now that really is only flipping one vote. So he's got a nuance at politically, and maybe he can find someone who'd be willing to switch and then blame it on the mayor and say the mayor force me too. Yeah, maybe all right, we will leave it there. Andrew Dunn, you can read his work at long leafpol dot com. Check out his book Change Agent as well, and you can read him also with the Charlotte Observer. Andrew, thanks for your time, buddy, appreciate it. Thanks Pete. So yeah, all right. For over a year now you've heard me talking about Create a Video. Great local company in Minthill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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So they're like, we're going to we're going to charge you act the cost. So all of the members of the KURTIPO that voted against it, that voted to withdraw their support, they're now going to be on the hook. And they were warned by the way about this. But the City of Charlotte, I guess, didn't believe that the state would do that. And as Andrew writes in this column, the hard reality is that the project is the only serious option on the table. NCDOT has signaled a willingness to work with the community on a version that people can stomach, but that cannot happen if Charlotte kills the project altogether. And that's where the new mayor's position matters. Finding six votes is going to be hard, and taking the blame will be painful, he says. I think city council members know that they have created a problem they cannot easily clean up on their own. The members who voted to rescind support will not want to reverse themselves. The activists who oppose the project will see reconsideration as betrayal. And that may be part of why Harrington made sense for the appointment. Right, he's not running again, He does not have to protect a campaign, he doesn't have to build a future coalition or treat this issue as a test of his political brand. So maybe he's in there to try to reverse this thing now again, he's gonna have to get one council member to flip their vote, and I don't know who that would be. And if I haven't already said so, which I don't think I did. Welcome to the program. I hope you're doing well. Thanks for hanging out. Remember if you miss any of the program, you can get it for free at thepetepod dot com that stands it's short for Peter, the Pete pod and podcast. Yes, thepeatpod dot com also, And I put links to all of the show prep up on the Patreon page. All the links are at the peat pod. So if you were like, oh, it's a really good article that Pete was quoting, I want to read it, go to the peatpod dot com. You can also go directly to Patreon and it's all free, so you get access to it, and you know, have to pay for it. All right. So this story was from a few days back. But remember when the Charlotte City Council voted to do the one hundred and fifty day moratorium on data centers. Remember that we're all going to die. Yeah. The city staff went about organizing a task force, not a task force. So it's so it's the data center, not a task force task force, as I understand it. Okay, from the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte's long anticipated data center Focus Group was scheduled to convene in Quiet a few days ago without the knowledge of the City Council or really anybody outside city staff and hand picked participants go fix of it, all right. The City Council passed a one hundred and fifty day moratorium on new data center developments back in June. They gave city staff until at least November to come up with policy recommendations on how the city can regulate them without running a foul of state law. Okay, that's what the city council told the staff to do. We want you staff to tell us what to do because we're not experts or very bright in some cases, like that's what they told staff to do. So staff starts reaching out to various people. They set up a meeting. In fact, they set up two. One was on July ninth, and then the other is going to be or was. I don't even know if they're still going to have this on Thursday, July twenty third. But the council was not made aware that city staff had scheduled these two meetings, and so obviously this is a problem for some reason. How dare city staff schedule meetings with the people to help them craft the policy recommendations that you told them to craft for you, because you don't know what you're doing when it comes to data centers and you just caved to the left wing mob. Okay. The council also supported the creation of a stakeholder group to work with staff on the issue. Oh, the old stakeholder group. And I'm not talking about people standing around a charcoal grill. These are people who supposedly have a stake in data centers. And by that we mean you know, neighborhood activists and political you know, loud mouths. I guess I would be shocked, like for example, there was the one guy we spoke with him actually on the program. He went down to the city council. His name was Craig Reynolds, and he was like, I've worked in this industry. I can help you with this policy and stuff. I'm curious did they reach out to him? Are they going to bring in any data center experts? Are they going to bring in any AI experts? Are they going to bring in anybody that builds these data centers to actually tell them this is how the data centers are built, right, these are the sizes, these are the the impacts. I saw one stat the other day, all of the data center is one of the criticisms he hear is that they're gonna use all of the water. We're gonna have no more water and we're in a drought. Oh my gosh, we have no water for a data center. They use less than lawns and their closed loop systems, so the water is used and then recycled inside the system, so they don't really use any water at all. So like these these this fear mongering around the data centers, is it came out of nowhere totally organically, right, That's why you've got small towns in the middle of nowhere where nobody wants to actually build a data center. They're like, we need to do a data center moratorium. Nobody wants a data center there. Okay, let's somebody has a very high opinion of themselves. I really really seeing your city here, your town as a location for one of these data centers. Now, I've said this many times. It is clear to me when you look at the funding where this money is coming from. It's getting routed through. I also saw it's China. Okay, the money is coming via China. The organization the funding right for the quote unquote grassroots opposition. It's this campaign is being waged by China. Why, because they want us to fall behind in the AI race. That's why they've been pumping money into these nonprofit groups to fund all of these anti data center campaigns. Meanwhile, they've been subsidizing data center construction in China itself. Okay, why would you do that? Obviously, it's the same reason the Soviets funded the anti nuclear propaganda and anti nuclear campaigns in America for decades is they wanted us to fall behind. We will hamstring ourselves. That's what China wants Now I've seen some people say, well, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is throwing a bunch of money at you know, these various left wing nonprofits, and that is true, and some of them haven't have been engaged in the anti data center campaigns. Sure, it could be that they want to limit competition themselves, or could also be that they just you know, throw a bunch of money at the left so the left leaves them alone. Pretty standard. Jesse Jackson sort of pioneered this model. So they throw a bunch of money to these left wing NGOs, It goes into a big sort of umbrella organization, and then the funds get distributed, you know, down to smaller groups that the original funders really have no idea about. So Zuckerberg could giving money to the sixteen nineteen fund sixteen nineteen then fund's anti data center thing, and he has no idea about it. That's not why he gave them money. Or maybe he did give them money in order to limit competition. That's possible as well. None of those are good arguments to ban data centers, though, right just if anything, it's the opposite. Why would we be surrendering our position on this to communist China, except to make them stronger. I have been informed that the city did, in fact reach out to Craig Reynolds about the data center being on the data center not a task force, focus group, community group, stakeholder group. But I'm I don't know. It's a working title. I don't think they know what it is yet. So that's good news. Glad to hear that Craig seemed to know his stuff, you know, So that's good that to get they get somebody in there that's not just you know, a bunch of Marxist anti data center people from the Charlotte Observer story. City. Oh sorry, the Heather Bullock, Charlotte's chief sustainability and resiliency officer, sent out a recruitment email for this not a task force, and said the city was forming a data center task force, not a task force, to include neighborhood leaders, environmental groups, developers, and industry. A city spokesperson said following publication that Bullock misspoke and that the formal title is a community group, not a task force. Okay, just want to be clear, this is a community group, not a task force. Don't know what the difference there is, so it's not a task Force. City council members were not aware the group is convening, much to their frustration, and then it has quotes from a couple council members who are frustrated. Deputy City Manager Alison Craig sent council members a memo Thursday evening saying the community group is a group is not intended to replace public engagement. The group will rely on technical experts to help staff understand complex information before the city communicates that information with the public. But we can't have that, my goodness, we cannot. We definitely don't want to have city staff informed about what the data centers do, how they operate, the different kinds, right, we don't need that. Let's just have them take recommendations from the Marxists to ban them. Since the moratorium vote on June eighth, city officials have been meeting with a consultant to study data centers and their impacts. She did not name the consultant. This is the Deputy City Manager Craig. Charlotte will launch a community engagement and outreach plan in August. From the text line, John says it would be helpful if someone could explain the data centers in general, so everyone understands exactly what we're talking about. No, no, John, No, we will not be doing any such thing. We do not need all of the information about data centers. All you need to know is that they're going to kill everybody within like one hundred mile radius. They're going to drink all of the water, and they're going to pollute all the air, and they're going to drive up everybody's electricity rates. That's all data centers do. That's it. And they apparently function as Elon Musk's brain. That's my understanding of the data centers. All everybody needs to know. John says a couple of questions. What exactly is a data center? Ooh, ooh, ooh, I know, it's basically a building full of servers, that's it. It's a building of servers. Right, what are they supporting the Internet? We already have data centers North Carolina or no, yeah, Charlotte has had Charlotte already has data centers. We've got them all over the place. We've had them for thirty years. You just didn't hear about it until like a minute ago. Because they want to build more data centers because with the rise of cloud computing, right, everything stored in the cloud. It's not a cloud, not really a cloud. People, they're servers, They're they're at server farms. I mean you can call it a server. Oh maybe we call them server farms instead of data centers. Call them a server farm. And then people think it's like a farm now because then China would buy them all. Yeah, probably not a good idea. What are they supporting? You so? And they are also supporting all of the rise in AI. AI uses a lot of computational power, right, so that's what they're also being used for. Does the data center have to be close to where it is being used? I believe it depends on the kind of data center, but generally you want them to be close to you know, power grids. They got to have you know, water hookups and stuff, so you can't you can't just be out in the middle of nowhere. But yes, he says, I've heard Elon Musk talking about putting them in space because it's easier to keep them cool. Yes, I have heard that as well, but they haven't been able to do it yet, but maybe they will at some point. That would be amazing. I'm sure that they'll be banned up there too. Though I'm sure people would be opposed to building them in space or under the ocean. I've heard that one as well. They're going to put them in water. You can try to put them under the water. Sure that'll be opposed as well for reasons. 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 thepetecalanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.