By Kirk Ross North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler is a bit perplexed these days. The North Carolina Senate wants to move 165 of the department’s employees and roughly 15,000 acres of state-managed research farmland to the university system, then slash the budget that funds the program. So far, the way it’s played out…
Category: Opinion
Rain barrel rescue
By Grady McCallie In the forty-first chapter of Genesis, it is written that, as Joseph languished in jail, Pharaoh dreamt. In his vision, seven fat cows were devoured by seven gaunt cows that emerged from the Nile. Ushered into Pharaoh’s presence, Joseph interpreted the dream: seven years of plenty would give way to seven years…
For the Record
Editor’s Note: He had no polling numbers to guide his thoughts, nor any indication that the cause for which he put pen to paper would see another year, let alone two and a third centuries. In late June, there was open rebellion in the land. The British fleet and a sizeable land force were due…
Exile on Jones Street
By Kirk Ross Columnist Sickus World over, if there is any consistent symptom of a sick society, it’s the infant mortality rate. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what state health director Dr. Leah Devlin said when she announced a rise in the numbers a couple years back: “But this is about much more…
If you don’t bleed, you haven’t been picking blackberries
By Rebekah L. Cowell I know I’m a Carolina gal when I’ve braved mosquitoes, spiders, snakes and large spiky thorns to reach the much-coveted gems – blackberries. The brilliance of an onyx stone winks at me from behind green leaves, its beacon message, “pick-me,†belying the nest of thorns that awaits my fingers as I…
New report highlights North Carolina’s failed health care policies
By Adam Searing Hidden away in the depths of the Legislative Office Building in Raleigh, a small part of the large-scale societal debate over health care transpired recently. It took place under harsh fluorescent lights in a cramped, windowless meeting room filled well past the fire code limits, almost entirely by professional lobbyists and legislators….
Why do we elect so many state officials?
By Wayne Goodwin Back in the 1700s, fear of king-picked chief executives and their great powers helped sow strong sentiments against strong state executives. Those seeds sprouted into many revisions of our state constitution, guaranteeing a weak governor and a state government with decentralized executive authority. As our state grew, responsibility for important policy areas…
For the Record
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a petition from a group of employees at Weaver Street Market who are concerned about the impact of moving production from Carrboro to a new facility in Hillsborough. The petition was presented to the cooperative’s board of directors at a meeting in the Carrboro Elementary School auditorium…
Exile on Jones Street
By Kirk Ross Columnist From the people who brought you massive purges of voter rolls in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere, some helpful suggestions about North Carolina’s electoral system. Seems the feds think we have too many voters on the rolls and we ought to get to whacking some folks off. That helpful federal advice comes…
Time to reform the reform
By Mike Nelson Mental health reform in North Carolina has come off the tracks and it’s time to take a good hard look at what went wrong and take corrective action. May was Mental Health Month in North Carolina, which is a good time to admit that the State of North Carolina’s experimental reform of…
Letter from the editor: The importance of summer
By Kirk Ross Editor The heat is bearing down already and those afternoon showers that truly deserve the name “cloudbursts†are beginning to roll ‘round to slick up the streets and coat the pavement with a low-hanging layer of steam. The creeks are lazy, as they usually are here, and University Lake and Cane Creek…
The road to BALLE
By Dan Coleman No, the headline is not a typo. I did not spend the first weekend of June cavorting with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in a tropical paradise. I was attending the fifth-annual conference of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, held in Berkeley, California. BALLE is the umbrella group…
The Blue Highways Journal: Dispatches from a Latter-Day Johnny Appleseed
By Jock Lauterer Let’s get this straight: Newspapers are not vanishing. At least not my kind of newspapers. Yes, many major metros are in a circulation free-fall. But not my guys. The small, local or what we call “community newspapers†– papers with circulations below 50k, many of them found off the interstates on the…
Exile on Jones Street
By Kirk Ross Columnist Crisis found If this state could have planned a crisis in mental health, it likely could not have come up with a better scenario than that which is unfolding this summer. The long-running, underfunded reform we’ve been promised has had its legs cut out from under it. Mismanagement led to a…
For the Record
An idea worth exploring We have no illusions that funding schools will be anything but a perpetual struggle between the passion of parents and educators and fiscal realism. The annual debate changes from year to year, but the fundamental reality that we can’t afford all we’d like doesn’t, and most of the time there aren’t…