news-record.com

Click here for today’s Washington Watch column.

The column included:

• The Cuomo v Clearing House decision, which AG Cooper liked. (Click here for documents.)
   
• Yet another thought or two from Sen. Kay Hagan on health care. (Click here for audio of the conversation.) For background: try this article from The Hill.
   
• Sen. Richard Burr’s appointment to the U.S. Military Academy’s board of visitors.

Not included, this picture of Hagan and Rep. Howard Coble at the White House luau party.
 

The Oak Ridge ETJ/Annexation bill (S 495) passed third reading in the House Monday night. The vote was 87-29. The measure is heading back to the Senate for a concurrence vote on Tuesday.

Assuming the Senate agrees to the measure, it would become law. (The governor does not need to sign local bills.)

You can click here and here for background.

Giving Oak Ridge the power to control development in the area between its borders and the Forsyth County line has been the subject of a debate between the Guilford County and Forsyth County delegations, or at least between Rep. John Blust of Guilford and Rep. Larry Brown of Forsyth, both Republicans.

The argument here is pretty simple: Blust says that Oak Ridge ought to have control over the territory since a) it’s in Guilford County and b) residents there are simpatico with Oak Ridge.

Brown says Oak Ridge agreed in its deep dark past to keep its mitts off the area. And besides, Kernersville has designs on crossing the boarder and annexing the land. 

“There is a whole body of law in North Carolina that governs situations in which there appears to be some sort of agreement but there wasn’t really mutuality of assent,” Blust said. He argued Oak Ridge was bullied into a “one sided bargain” by earlier sessions of the General Assembly and Greensboro. “I don’t think that’s some sort of moral obligation.”

Brown stood up and shot back Monday: “I think Mr. Blust hit the nail on the head: moral obligation. If two communities can’t make moral obligations among themselves, what good are they?” Brown warned if the General Assembly passed this bill, it could lead to all sorts of agreements between cities being broken.

That prompted Rep. Robert Grady of Jacksonville to chime in, pledging his support to Brown’s cause but adding:

“But I’ll hope you’ll go home and tell your people if they trusted a unit of government to keep their word on a moral obligation, they were fools.”

Click here to listen to the evening’s debate.

House Speaker Joe Hackney spoke with reporters after the House session on Monday night. He talked about the budget negotiations between the House and Senate, which are mainly stuck on the issue of taxes.

(Click here to listen to some of that give and take.)

Background here and here.

Hackney was asked about the Senate’s plan that would do some major rewriting of the tax code, lowering the income and sales tax rates but taxing more things. The idea would be to get more revenue but be able to say you cut taxes.

The House has resisted that approach, in part because they’re skeptical of going that quickly on tax reforms.

“We think changes of that magnitude are better rolled out over time after more study of members of the House and Senate and over perhaps a period of years,”

Later, staffers expounded on what other House members have said: the Senate plan would raise the tax on electricity and start taxing Social Security income. House members don’t like those ideas and are wary of the details they haven’t seen in the Senate package.

As an aside: The House tax plan would raise sales taxes and create new upper-end income taxes. It’s a different approach and one with which the Senate disagrees.

“We’re philosophically apart,” Sen. David Hoyle told me last week.

I asked Hackney about the ongoing controversy involving Amazon.com. (Click here for background.) The company has cut off relationships with North Carolina-based affiliates over a proposal in the House tax plan. Hackney did not seem terribly torn up by the company’s move:

“Amazon has a history of acting that way. I think they did that in New York and then they backed off and reversed themselves so I’m not sure we should take that too seriously. I have my own way of dealing with it, which is I just won’t deal with Amazon.”

The House passed its version of S 311, the continuing resolution bill, Monday night. It now returns to the Senate for concurrence. A CR is needed because the new fiscal year begins on July 1 and budget writers in the House and Senate haven’t reached agreement on a new plan.

Background here.

The big philosophical difference between the House and Senate versions is one of timing. Senators wanted an open-ended CR with no end date. The Senate put a two-week limit on the CR, meaning it will expire on July 15.

When the bill comes back to the Senate Tuesday, Senators will either have to take the House version or there will have to be a quick negotiation to keep the government running.

The CR passed the House on two votes Monday night: 95-21 and then 93-23.

Rep. John Blust of Greensboro voted against both times. He said a provision added to the CR on the floor that raised tuition costs for community college students prompted him to vote against.

“I don’t know that I want to go back to struggling students … when I don’t think we’ve done everything we need to do to get our own fiscal house in order,” Blust said.

Note: two votes switched in the two minutes between second and third readings. They were Rep. Laura Wiley, a High Point Republican, and Rep. Dan Ingle, a Burlington Republican.

Wiley didn’t return a call Monday asking what in the two minutes between the two votes on the bill caused her to changer her mind.

Back in April I wrote about coal ash ponds in North Carolina and a nascent effort to regulate them. (Click here for that.)

These are ponds of toxic goo that, in most cases, sit by water ways. There are two of them up in Eden.

They started getting national attention in December when a 5.4 million gallon coal ash pond/pile run by the TVA in Tennessee broke lose and spread waste over hundreds of acres.

In May, Rep. Pricey Harrison had managed to get a coal ash regulation provision in a draft of the budget. Since then, that provision has been removed from the budget.

That’s the local angle. The national angle comes from this USA Today report Monday:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency disclosed the locations of 44 "high-hazard" coal-ash piles in 10 states on Monday, after previously saying they were keeping the locations secret to prevent them from becoming targets of terrorism.

There are seven in Kentucky, all located at the same power plants identified in December by Kentucky environmental regulators, including a LG&E's Cane Run plant in southwestern Louisville. Other states with high-hazard ash impoundments are Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to the EPA.

It turns out there are 12 different coal ash ponds on that EPA list of 44 including two in Eden North Carolina along the Dan River. Click here for the list.

Why do you care? More from the USA Today story:

"The presence of liquid coal-ash impoundments near our homes, schools and businesses could pose a serious risk to life and property in the event of an impoundment rupture" said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "By compiling a list of these facilities, EPA will be better able to identify and reduce potential risks by working with states and local emergency responders."

Final note, when I wrote about this back in April, the Eden City Manager said he had no concerns about the coal ash ponds there.

“We work excellently with Duke Energy,” said Eden City Manager Brad Corcoran. “They communicate very well with us.” He said the town had no problems or concerns with Duke’s coal ash pond or other operations.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rules that states Attorneys General can bring cases against federally chartered banks for violations of state laws. The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, disagreed. The case, Cuomo v. Clearing House Association, came about when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, and his successor Andrew Cuomo, demanded that banks in the state disclose information about their lending patterns as part of an investigation into whether minorities were being steered into bad mortgages.

The banks argued that only their federal regulator had authority to demand that information. The OCC's rules, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority, "says that the State may not enforce its valid . . . laws against national banks. The bark remains, but the bite does not."

This makes North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper happy. He had filed an amicus brief in the case.

“It’s critical that states have the right to enforce their laws against unfair loans and irresponsible lending practices. Today’s ruling is a victory for consumers in states like North Carolina, where we have strong lending laws in place and success in fighting for consumers.”

You can find out more about the case from the SCOTUS Blog (second item in the entry) and from the Cornell Law School. Click here for a PDF of the opinion.

For all those who have been following Tar Heel Two-Step over who will challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr and whether Democrats could run the proverbial yellow dog and win, this column (click here) in today's Roll Call from Stuart Rothenberg is worth a read. From the column:

Recently, Republicans have started complaining long and hard about polling conducted this cycle by Public Policy Polling in the Tar Heel State. They note, quite correctly, that PPP is a Democratic polling firm and that too many reporters fail to note their partisan bent. GOP insiders also complain about the firm’s sample, arguing that it often is too urban and too Democratic, and that its surveys understate Burr’s strength and his prospects for re-election.

(Politico's back-story on what Rothenberg is writing about is here.) There's also this caveat for the GOP:

Rather than whining about PPP, Republicans might want to try to set the record straight in North Carolina by releasing their own poll by a credible, full-time polling firm. That would go a long way to helping develop a more balanced, more thoughtful narrative about the race.

Rothenberg is a nationally known political writer and someone I've quoted as an expert source in my stories. His message in this column is relatively simple: Political writers of all stripes need to know what well they're drinking from.

Any polling firm, whether they work from a right, left or indifferent philosophy, has a stake in being correct. Giving bad information to their clients is a quick way for any polling firm to go out of business quickly. So the fact that a firm is known as a Democratic firm (as PPP is) doesn't disqualify its numbers. But, as Rothenberg says, it does require you handle them with a certain amount of care.

Most of the public polling available in North Carolina right now has some sort of ideological bent. PPP obviously has a spot on the left. Civitas has been around for a while on the right. Both firms have been known to ask some really good, insightful questions. But every once in a while, either through questions or analysis, both outfits will let their partisan flags fly.

Also on the ideological right: Carolina Strategy Group is the new kid on the block. Rasmussen tends to do regional surveys but has been known to horse-race poll in NC.

Survey USA does some non partisan work for a lot of television stations - although I've not always been sold on their samples. The Elon University Poll does some really good polling, but rarely engages in horse-race numbers.

There are probably a few others out there that I'm forgetting, but those are the places from which I see numbers most often. All of them have strengths and weaknesses.

One other reminder vis-à-vis the Burr race: At this point in the Hagan-Dole campaign, Hagan wasn't in and Democrats were still casting about for a candidate. For goodness sakes, former First Lady Mary Easley's name still came up fairly frequently at this point - wonder how that would have worked out?
 

So it turns out even if you don't live at the shore, you might be affected by coastal homeowners insurance:

RALEIGH — Plans to cope with a storm that causes havoc along the coast could leave insurers and homeowners across the state — even those from inland communities such as Greensboro — between a rock and a hard place.

The rock: North Carolina’s current system for insuring coastal homes is driving insurers out of state, potentially making insurance more expensive and harder to find.

The hard place: Plans to make sure coastal problems don’t get out of hand could end up costing property owners who live nowhere near the coast extra premiums in the event of a disaster.

Caught in between: Companies such as Greensboro-based Alliance Mutual Insurance Co., which has 20,000 customers in the state and could find itself under water either way.

“The smaller the company, the more likely it is they could be driven out of business,” said Bob White, president and CEO of Alliance Mutual. His company insures a fraction of 1 percent of all the claims that could be paid.

Click here for the whole thing. Read more about the Beach Plan on its own website here. And read more about the plan from AP writer Emery Dalesio by clicking here.

Meanwhile, the honorables are trying to write themselves a budget. At this point, it's mathematically impossible for them to finish one before the end of the fiscal year:

Plans drafted by the House, Senate and governor all make cuts to state programs in order to balance the budget. But all rely on raising more taxes as well.

Leaders of both the House and Senate finance committees, which write the state’s tax laws, say they have agreed that they need to make changes that would raise roughly $990 million in new taxes over the next year and $1.3 billion more the year after that.

But the two chambers disagree on how that should be done.

The House budget proposal would raise income taxes on the state’s wealthiest citizens, those making more than $200,000 a year.

“It’s a good way to have a fair and balanced package that includes both a tax on high-end income and a sales tax increase,” said Rep. Paul Luebke, a Durham Democrat and the House’s chief tax writer.

By contrast, the Senate plan would lower sales and income tax rates but apply them to more items.

Click here for the whole story.

And in case you missed it on Saturday, Amazon has raised the stakes in its game of chicken with the General Assembly:

“They’re trying to tick off all their associates and get them to call down to Raleigh,” Barrett said. “I think that is pretty tacky. That’s not the way to use people who are referring business to your business.”

Barrett says he only earns a small amount from the ad on his site, www.bitsofws.com. But others have built small business based in large part on the income they derive from referrals.

“My heart bleeds for them, but we’re not the ones putting them out of business,” said Sen. David Hoyle , a Dallas Democrat and lead tax writer in the Senate. “Amazon is doing this.”

Hoyle said that even if the state did nothing, the North Carolina Department of Revenue had plans to start collecting taxes on this kind of “click through” revenue from Amazon.

Click here for that story.

Elsewhere:

• Winston-Salem's James Romoser says the race among Democrats to challenge U.S. Sen. Richard Burr lacks heft. (One editorial note here: at this sames stage in the Hagan-Dole campaign, there was NO declared candidate and people were openly thinking about trying to convince Mary Easley to run.)
• The N+O's Rob Christensen writes about Gov. Bev Perdue's sinking approval ratings. The most salient quote comes at the end from Fayetteville's Sen. Tony Rand: "The lesson,'' Rand said, "is don't get elected when the bottom is falling out.'' (As bad as Perdue's poll numbers are, I bet if you asked the same questions about the General Assembly, they'd be equally in the toilet.) 
• If you've not been following the annexation law revisions being considered on Jones Street, Asheville's Jordan Schrader gets you caught up here. (Also check out Fayetteville's Paul Woolverton on the same topic.)

My colleague Nancy McLaughlin reports (click here) that students were protesting outside of Hagan’s Greensboro office.

The students are upset that Hagan hasn’t shown support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (Dream) Act.

The proposed federal legislation would give those who came to this country as the children of undocumented workers a chance at citizenship and education options.
In North Carolina, for example, the children of illegal immigrants cannot attend community college.

“Every year, brilliant minds and futures are wasted at dry cleaners, restaurants and construction sites,” said speaker Nayely Perez Huerta, who works for a Latino advocacy group.

Meanwhile, Hagan got on the phone with reporters today to announce she was filing her first bill as a lead author:

RALEIGH — U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan wants the federal government to put in its two-cents — well, probably a great deal more than that — about financial literacy.

The North Carolina Democrat has authored a bill that would give grants to states that create financial literacy programs for students in sixth grade through high school.

“All this economic turmoil has made it clear to me that we’ve got to be doing a better job of educating our students,” said Hagan. She said much of the mortgage crisis might have been avoided if more people had a better idea about how to manage basic finances.

More on that here.

Of course, we scruffy reporter types were still asking questions about her role in health care reform. (Background: here and here.)

Bob Geary at the Indy asked Hagan to once again talk about her take on health care reform. As part of that answer, Hagan said:

“What a number of us are looking at is an option that’s more tied to a plan that’s administered at the state level,” Hagan said. “I think in something this large, the states need to have a hand in it.”

Meanwhile, an outfit called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is once again pressing Senators to push forward with health care reform. They’re on Kos and Twitter as well as their own petition website.

“Of significance, Hagan's campaign contributions scroll up left side of the new ad. We're actually considering a stand-alone Hagan ad in local media if we get enough NC signers,” writes the group’s Adam Green, who was promoting the ad today. 

Here's the ad:

A bill to give Oak Ridge authority over land use beyond its municipal borders (S 495) passed the Senate Finance Committee today.

Click here for background. Officials from Kernersville, which had designs on the area, objected to the bill but appear to be on the losing end of this debate.

Rep. John Blust, who represents the area, says the measure is expected to be on the House floor Thursday. If it passes there, the measure would have to return to the Senate for a concurrence vote.