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Gov. Bev Perdue sat down with groups of scruffy reporter types Monday and Tuesday at the executive mansion. I joined the Tuesday gaggle and spent about an hour taking turns quizzing the governor.

I’ve already posted video of a couple of segments, one on the opening of the civil rights museum (click here) and one on the politics of 2010 (click here). Also, there's a newspaper story for the summary-minded. Click here for that.

The links in this post are audio files. I've sliced and diced the audio up into segments that cover most of what she had to say. And I've included a bit of the conversation in writing before each clip, so you can judge whether you want to listen to the clip.

To be precise, the questioning didn’t begin until Perdue gave a 15 minute opening statement. It’s interesting if you want to know how Perdue herself views the first year of her term. The most interesting thing in this whole 15 minutes to me is that Perdue adopts tax reform as a "personal priority." There's a growing consensus that the effort to remake North Carolina's tax system won't happen before next year's short session in May.

"Granted, we did not accomplish the rewrite of the tax code. I intend to have that as a personal priority, but I don't believe that's something you can do overnight," Perdue said.

Perdue was asked if she felt her plans for the first year of her term were derailed by the economic setbacks.

"It was hard for me when I asking everybody else in the state government to suck it up and make cuts, and when I watched family after family across the state make horrible, horrible decisions about they were going to do, to think about anything new and expansion. So, if that's a derailment, call it what you want,” Perdue said.

A reporter pointed out to Perdue that while there has been a bunch of job announcements in recent months, darned few of them went down east. What, the questioner wanted to know, could she do to get things going east of 95?

Perdue said she was taking jobs where she could get them. And she pointed out that the east coast of North Carolina is not a monolith.

“I think the southeast has actually done better than the northeast. The northeast continues to be a real challenge for all of us. And a lot of that challenge is tied to the educational level of the folks there and the poverty of many of our residents,” Perdue said.

Perdue said that a grant application that the state is about to send to the feds for help funding public schools will probably target many northeastern North Carolina counties for help.

Many North Carolina school systems are seeing their schools “re-segregate,” divide back along racial and ethnic lines, as a result of bussing school boards abandoning bussing polices. There is some concern that this will lead to minority kids learning in inferior schools. Click here for background. 

"This is the most troublesome thing I think has happened," Perdue said. "I don't believe in bussing kids an hour and half in the morning, but I actually don't believe separate is equal, I really don't,” Perdue said. But, she said, the problem is not just one of dividing along racial lines.

“I will argue with you ... that it is not just race, it is income. If I am poor, regardless of where I am in the state, regardless of if I'm black or white or Hispanic, male or female, if I am poor, if I don't have some kind of extra educational help, my chances aren't level with other kids,” Perdue said. “So I think whether its racially done or economically done, there has to be some kind of momentum to continue to have diversity in our schools."

Perdue said there’s little she can do as governor to force local schools systems to create more economically and racially divers classrooms, but she said she would use the bully pulpit to encourage them to do so.

One of the early battles of Perdue’s administration was her attempt to consolidate power over the schools. She tried to vest her appointed state school board chairman, Bill Harrison, with the power of CEO over the schools. That was much to the displeasure of elected school superintendent June Atkinson, who sued and won a case to thwart Perdue’s effort.

“It didn’t work, I lost,” Perdue said. “Am I going to spend a year or two years trying to raise money and take a constitutional amendment to the voters? No. If other groups want to do that, let them go ahead. I’ve given it my best shot…I think actually the people fundamentally wanted the question answered, it was probably done the wrong way.”

Perdue said she wanted to make the change to clear up the lines of authority and answer once and for all who was responsible for schools in North Carolina. Rather, she said, the state is stuck with a three-headed-monster: the state superintendent, the governor and the school board. “We still have a three-headed monster,” she said. “I think those questions will remain unresolved…I’d love to see it resolved but I don’t believe it’s going to happen on my watch.”

Perdue was asked about the budget. The stock phrase “cautiously optimistic” might apply.

“We’re going to be okay when we come back next summer,” Perdue said. She teased a little bit too. “I’ve got a little good news in my back pocket that we’ll dribble out in the first of the year,” Perdue said. Perdue also talks about the bad times in this clip.

“Two months last year, two months, I would sit up at night trying to figure out how I was going to pay the bills,” Perdue said. “There (were) times we were so close to the edge and that I really worried how we were going to pay the bills. I didn’t go out and steal every pot of money I could find in North Carolina or furlough teachers and state employees because I thought it was cute to do. I did it to pay the bills.”

Perdue said she favored the idea of health care reform moving through Congress right now. But she worried that the expansion of Medicaid would over-burden the already cash-strapped state.

“North Carolina, as many other states, really (doesn’t) have the money for unfunded mandates,” Perdue said. “It’s going to be very hard for us to pick up – they’re telling me – a third-to-half-million new Medicaid patients unless we have some more help from the federal government.”

Perdue was asked about the various legal and ethical problems current and former state officials have run into.

She pointed to her policies that would remove appointees from boards if they refuse to cooperate with investigations. And she added that until there is a new system in place, there is necessarily an intersection between money and politics. The way to keep that intersection from becoming problematic is to make things as transparent as possible.

"Until the federal government or until you all help us come up with a totally different kind of campaign finance system, I continue to believe you have to disclose, disclose, and disclose, that you can’t err on the side of non-transparency,” Perdue said. “The more we require of people that give money and people who accept money to disclose, the better off we are."