North Carolina now has the highest corporate and personal tax rates in the Southeast, and if Charlotte’s recent business recruitment numbers are any indication, it’s killing us. This problem is a direct result of state legislators spending like drunken sailors over the past decade while just about every other state in the nation was cutting back.
But that’s not what really bothers me. What gets to me is how our money is being spent. Our roads — in what was once the “good roads state” — are now riddled with potholes, and road building and repair projects are decades behind schedule. We don’t have the resources to process thousands of rape and evidence kits, and more than 30,000 DNA samples sit untested in our state lab, waiting for entry into the criminal database where they could be helping authorities identify violent serial criminals. The state finally added a few more techs this year, which means the legislators who funded them might actually still be alive by the time the lab catches up on testing. Obviously, it’s not enough.
Not one dime was added to prosecutors’ budgets this year, even though our courts are overwhelmed and North Carolina now has the highest known felony dismissal rate in the nation. In Charlotte, the animal pound — which is underfunded — now has a bigger budget than the district attorney’s office. Meanwhile, a judge presiding over an equitable education court case has been desperately trying to shame state politicians into spending more money on struggling schools in poor counties. So far, though, legislators haven’t budged.
But that’s not what enrages me. No, what really pushed me over the edge was the $500,000 in the state budget to promote a multi-million dollar “country music and entertainment complex” in Roanoke Rapids, which has a population of about 14,500 — and dropping about 300 per year. Their economic consultants claim this thing will produce an increased labor income of $204.7 million over the next three years — that’s $14,069 a person — and employ over 12,000 people, which assumes there will be that many left in town by the time they get through building it. Right. And my grandmother flew around on a broomstick.
It seems that about half the cities and towns in the state either got a new museum or an expansion for an existing one in this year’s budget. I’m not kidding. Sparta, NC, population 1,700, got $400,000 to build a teapot museum. A previously unknown Charlotte group called the “Legacy Basketball Classic Foundation” got $100,000 for a national museum of African-American sports to be located in West Charlotte. That was news to the county political leaders I quizzed last week who had never heard of the foundation or the museum and wondered how it got into the state budget. Not to be outdone by Charlotte, Greensboro got $2 million for an “ACC Hall of Champions,” which will no doubt be furnished better than most of the schools in this state when it’s done.
The legislature also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that those that didn’t get museums got town hall renovations or other goodies. It looks like every podunk backwater in the state got something, no matter how frivolous.
Here are a few examples:
• $1.5 million to promote the state’s furniture and other politically connected industries.
• $600,000 for oyster hatchery research.
• $1 million for a 400-stall equestrian center for Rockingham County.
• $100,000 to advertise the existence of the Hoke County Industrial Park.
• $50,000 for New Bern’s 300th anniversary celebration.
• $30,000 to restore a Civil War gun boat and $50,000 for the Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck recovery project.
It goes on like this for page after page after page, and if you’ve got high blood pressure, I don’t recommend reading it all in one sitting.
Now, I’m not one to deny the Haliwa-Saponi tribe a new $100,000 recreation center or anything, because everyone is entitled to a little wholesome, civic-minded fun, but there comes a time when somebody has got to start asking some hard questions in Raleigh. Like whether the seafood processing companies at the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park in Dare County really need the state to spend $48,000 for a security guard for them. And why does the state subsidize the park itself? Why can’t these businesses pay the full tab for their own rent?
The North Carolina General Assembly has become notorious for its pork-barrel spending over the last decade, when the state’s population grew by 27 percent and state spending grew by 130 percent. But this year’s budget, which funds absurdity after absurdity while legislators and the governor tell us they have no money, is enough to make my head spin, and I’m pretty jaded.
Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger summed it up pretty well last month in a speech to fellow legislators.
“If someone set a bonfire to copies of this budget, it would smell like bacon,” he said.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.
