Editorial: Legislators' plotting to sow disfunction in government must end

Friday, July 13, 2018 -- North Carolinians cannot passively stand by as legislators ignore the popular will. If they make it harder to get to the polls - be more determined to vote. If they keep their agenda and deliberations secret, demand they come out of the shadows and backrooms. If they won't help your public school students and teachers do better, make sure your kids and their instructors know you support them.

Posted 9:00 a.m. Jul 13, 2018 — Updated 9:00 a.m. Jul 13, 2018

CBC Editorial: Friday, July 13, 2018; Editorial #8322

The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company

Imagine a place where the most powerful leaders:

Make voting LESS convenient and MORE difficult for citizens.
Fail to provide funding to fix, expand and build new schools but demand smaller class sizes.
Complain that public schools aren’t effectively teaching students and then CUT FUNDING for the program that has been helping the lowest performing schools do better.

Russia maybe? Iran, Venezuela or North Korea?

Look no further than your local member of the North Carolina General Assembly. It is there, where a handful of powerful leaders -- Senators Phil Berger, Harry Brown and Bill Rabon, along with House Speaker Tim Moore, Nelson Dollar and David Lewis – plot in secret and pursue an incomprehensible ideological agenda that is leaving critical state government institutions in shambles and needs ignored.

EXHIBIT A: Purposefully creating dysfunctional local boards of elections by making them four member boards (two Republicans and two Democrats). In Wake County, Republicans seeking to depress the vote of young people, oppose a voting site on the N.C. State University campus – where there are always very high turnouts. The local board split 2-2. Now the battle goes to the state board – and perhaps even to the courts. Similar dysfunction has infected election boards in Orange, Guilford and Forsyth counties.Shouldn’t legislators be working toward building systems that can develop consensus, resolve differences and make decisions? Shouldn’t board of elections be working on ways to make it as easy as possible to get the most citizens to vote? Apparently not in North Carolina.

EXHIBIT B: While legislators couldn’t work fast enough to pack the fall ballot with a half-dozen unnecessary and anti-citizen state constitutional amendments, they failed to address the pressing construction needs of our public schools. Throughout the state, public school buildings aren’t adequate to handle the numbers of students attending them or the needs of teachers to provide effective instruction. Schools are in desperate need of repair and expansion. New schools are needed for growing populations.

Yet a tax-cut obsessed legislature failed to consider a $2 billion statewide school construction bond issue on the ballot that would have helped finance much-needed work. Even the most challenged in the most decrepit schools know the math here. Cutting class size without providing additional classrooms doesn’t add up.

EXHIBIT C: How can the state’s lowest performing schools get any better when $5.1 million is slashed from the budget to help them? To meet the cuts, the state’s top education official eliminated 61 jobs – firing 40 current employees – many of whom were working effectively to improve these schools. At the same time the legislature has been sending hundreds of millions of dollars, in “opportunity scholarship” vouchers, to private schools with NO accountability or transparency to determine even if students are attending class, let alone learning anything.

Slashing budgets to help low performing schools is wrong. Superintendent Mark Johnson’s firings simply cut the heart out of assisting low-performing schools.

North Carolinians cannot passively stand by as the legislature runs wild and ignores popular will.

If they make it harder to get to the polls – be more determined to vote.I
f they keep their agenda and deliberations secret, demand they come out of the shadows and backrooms.
If they won’t let you decide key issues to help your local communities, get to the polls to express yourselves.
If they won’t help your students and teachers in public schools do better, make sure your kids and their instructors know you support them.

See you at the polls.

Suggest A Correction