From the battle to preserve American democracy to charter school chaos: The week’s top stories on NC Policy Watch

By
January 21, 2022
In Commentary, COVID-19, Environment, Legislature, News, race

1. Experts say Black lawmakers are sure to lose seats under new NC legislative maps

Two Black incumbent senators in eastern North Carolina have no chance of winning reelection in their newly drawn districts, according to an analysis by UCLA political scientist Jeffrey B. Lewis, who testified for Republicans in the Superior Court redistricting trial this month.

Sen. Ernestine Bazemore, a Democrat from Bertie County, is in a new 10-county district. According to Lewis, the candidate from that district whom Black voters prefer would win the Democratic primary nearly all the time but would have no chance of winning the general election.

The same would happen in the newly reconstituted district where Sen. Toby Fitch, a Wilson Democrat, lives.

The newly drawn districts would prevent Black voters who live in parts of North Carolina’s Black Belt — counties with fertile soil worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants before the Civil War — from electing their preferred candidates to the state Senate. [Read more…]

2. Former Three Rivers principal describes chaos at charter school, which state plans to close

Don McQueen, operator of Three Rivers Academy, allegedly padded enrollment numbers, paid families so students would attend class, and took other extreme measures to ensure state per-pupil funds kept flowing to the troubled charter school in Bertie County.

A former teacher detailed these allegations in an interview with Policy Watch, which were corroborated by a former principal of the school, Hans Lassiter. Lassiter worked at the controversial Bertie County charter school during the first half of the 2020-21 school year.

Lassiter has more than two decades’ of experience as a teacher and school administrator. He told Policy Watch that during his first weeks on the job as principal, in July 2020, he ran into a wall of secrecy. [Read more…]

3. After years of neglect, four of NC‘s most polluted Superfund sites funded for clean-up

With American Rescue Plan funds, EPA targets sites in Charlotte, Gastonia, Yadkinville and Jacksonville; here’s what neighbors should know

A blighted eyesore on Jacksonville’s main drag. Contaminated former dry cleaners in suburban Gastonia and far east Charlotte. A vast and abandoned creosote treatment facility that has poisoned the soil, groundwater and nearby streams and a pond.

The EPA announced in mid-December that four languishing Superfund sites in North Carolina would receive money under the American Rescue Plan, among the 49 nationwide to get the financial boost, with a total of $1 billion. All of the North Carolina Superfund sites are in environmental justice communities, based on race, income, or both. [Read more…]

4. Legislatures across country back off pandemic protocols

Despite the explosive spread of the omicron variant, many statehouses are attempting to conduct business as usual

As Dr. Jennifer Bacani McKenney walked the halls of the Kansas Statehouse on opening day of the legislative session this month, she was taken aback by what she saw.

In the hallways, where “people are chatting and hugging and all that stuff, there were probably less than half of the people wearing masks … You definitely wouldn’t have known that we were in a surge, that outside the world of the Capitol there was a crisis going on in our health care system,” said Bacani McKenney, a family physician from Fredonia, Kansas, serving as the volunteer doctor in the Statehouse for the first two days of the new session.

At that moment, Kansas, like most of the country, was seeing a sharp spike in.[Read more…]

5. Republican U.S. Senate contest among the races impacted by primary date battle

Another potential change in the date of North Carolina’s 2022 primary election, this one initiated by the Republican majorities in the state legislature, is reverberating through races statewide, including the battle for the GOP nomination in the race for Richard Burr’s soon-to-be open U.S. Senate seat.

On Wednesday, General Assembly leaders fast-tracked a bill through both chambers that shifts the current May 17 primary date to June 7.

Bill sponsors said the move was necessary to give the legislature ample time to redraw districts should the state Supreme Court next month strike down legislative and congressional maps recently approved by the General Assembly. Democrats opposed the move. saying it was premature given that the issue is now before state Supreme Court. [Read more…]

6. NC agrees to phase out support for programs that pay people with disabilities below minimum wage

Jobs that often have people with developmental disabilities working for less than minimum wage will be phased out over the next four years in North Carolina.

Disability rights groups announced Thursday that they reached an agreement with the state Department of Health and Human Services that will result in the state ending financial support for what’s called sheltered workshops. These are places where only people with disabilities work, often for far below minimum wage. DHHS will instead focus money on services that will help people with intellectual or developmental disabilities work in outside jobs that pay at least minimum wage, called competitive integrated employment.

Disability Rights North Carolina and the Center for Public Representation have been working on the agreement since 2020, representatives said. [Read more…]

7. The inflation blame game: Five important facts to keep in mind

The subject of inflation has been on many tongues in the public policy world of late – especially as Republican politicians comb every nook and cranny of the news cycle for topics with which to launch broadsides at the Biden administration.

In November, North Carolina Congressman Ted Budd – a candidate for Richard Burr’s soon-to-be-available U.S. Senate seat – introduced a snarky bill that would “require all personnel in the Biden White House to complete a financial literacy course focused on inflation.”

More recently, Sen. Thom Tillis has echoed this familiar conservative refrain by issuing a statement blaming the surge in prices over the past year on the Biden administration’s “out-of-control spending.”

Not surprisingly, both attacks are, in the immortal words of the iconic baseball commentator Bob Uecker in the film “Major League,” “just a bit outside.” [Read more…]

8. MLK Day numbers: The battle to preserve American democracy

In the decades since it became a national holiday, Martin Luther King Day has served as a vehicle to lift up a number of causes that Dr. King himself championed – from racial equality to ending poverty to world peace.

Today, however, as we mark what would have been MLK’s 93rd birthday, events have rendered all those causes (and many others of great import) secondary to an overriding imperative: the preservation of our democracy.

Since last January’s attempted coup in the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump, forces of the political right have doubled down on that treachery by working relentlessly to disenfranchise voters and rig elections through extreme partisan gerrymandering.

This simply cannot be allowed to stand. [Read more…]

9. Weekly Radio Interviews and Daily Commentaries:

Click here for the latest podcasts from PW Director Rob Schofield.

10. Weekly Editorial Cartoon:

 

E.R. physician: Vaccine mandates have always faced resistance…and saved lives

By
January 21, 2022
In Commentary, COVID-19

An 1806 work from English physician Robert John Thornton included an illustration of the theory that cowpox injections might lead women to have sex with bulls and produce half-cow offspring. Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

Health care professionals had high hopes that rapid vaccination of our entire U.S. population would slow COVID-19 transmission and stem the disproportionately high death count in the United States. We also hoped to avoid more concerning mutations that are inevitable when viruses multiply unchecked.

I lost my mother to COVID-19 in November of 2020, less than two months before the vaccine became available. Last spring, I checked in with my mother’s youngest brother in Oregon. He had questions about the new vaccines which had kept him from getting vaccinated. I tried to reassure him about the history, safety, and effectiveness of each of the vaccines. I described my own positive experience getting a two-shot vaccination as part of the early rollout to healthcare workers. However, he preferred to do some more investigating before committing to vaccination.

Despite impressive data on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations, only 63% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated and a smaller percentage has been boosted. A year after the vaccine rollout we find ourselves in the midst of the highest COVID-19 transmission rates and hospitalization numbers since the start of the pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy rates are still as high as 25% in certain regions of the country.

This past September, I got a 6 a.m. call from Oregon and was numb as my uncle informed me that he and my aunt had contracted COVID and had just transferred to hospital beds from the Emergency Department.

He apologized for his muffled voice as he talked to me through a breathing machine and reported his oxygen saturation was just 45% when he arrived in the ED. He joked and asked if I might be willing to come to Oregon for a house call. My aunt was able to return home on oxygen after a few days in the hospital, but four days after that phone call my uncle was gone.

I wept when my aunt called me with the news.

A cowpox vaccine certificate issued to Ole Olsen, the great-great-grandfather of the author, in Sweden in 1832.

Vaccine hesitancy is not new. It has been around for as long as there have been vaccines. It is born out of the most basic and rational thought one can have about life and health: “Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Will this vaccine help me or my loved ones survive?”

However, we know that decisions we make about our health aren’t purely rational. We smoke and drink too much. We eat too much and spend too much time idle, all the while knowing these decisions are at odds with good sense and our health.

We are easy prey to fear and emotional arguments that distract us from data, and smear the character or personality of vaccines as if they were persons to be debated or despised instead of a 225 year-old proven tool of survival.

The first vaccine was found through observation of a natural process. In the late 1700s in England where smallpox was the greatest cause of untimely death, Dr. Edward Jenner saw that milkmaids previously infected with cowpox were immune to smallpox.

Trading the discomfort of a mild illness and a few cowpox on an arm proved much safer than getting smallpox. Before that first vaccination existed, about a quarter of all children died before their first birthdays, many from infectious diseases that are now preventable. No country had a life expectancy of more than 40 years old. Since then, the average human lifespan has doubled, largely thanks to vaccines.

In 1796 as Jenner distributed his cowpox vaccination the rational question of improved survival was answered, but distractions from this answer had just begun. Some argued political and religious calamities would ensue; others proclaimed that half-cow babies would be the inevitable result. Amid all the loud angry distractions and emotional outrage expressed against smallpox vaccination, the reality was that it saved lives and kept infected people from easily causing new outbreaks.

We continue to live in such a world where emotion and fear distract our rational inclination to survive. Read more

Online orders for free at-home COVID tests to begin Jan. 19

By
January 16, 2022
In COVID-19, News

From gerrymandered maps, to conflicting COVID-19 messages, to I-95 purgatory: The week’s top stories on Policy Watch

By
January 14, 2022
In Commentary, COVID-19, Environment, Legislature, News

In this issue:

1. Panel of judges says new redistricting plans do not violate the NC constitution

Maps for new congressional and legislative districts do not violate the state constitution and can be used in the next election, a three-judge panel said in a decision Tuesday that will be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The NC League of Conservation Voters, Common Cause, the state NAACP, and voters backed by the National Redistricting Foundation challenged the maps, saying they are extreme partisan gerrymanders that dilute Black voters’ power. The three cases have been consolidated.

The same three-judge panel last year dismissed or ruled against these lawsuits.

The state Supreme Court granted the challengers’ requests for expediated appeals. The Supreme Court halted candidate filing for the 2022 primaries, and moved the primaries from March 8 to May 17.[Read more…]

2. Gerrymandering and its impact on the legitimacy of our democracy

This week saw the beginning of another season in North Carolina: redistricting lawsuit season.

Experienced followers of North Carolina politics expect it; it is every bit as reliable—maybe more so these days—than the shift from fall to winter. For those new to the state, prepare yourselves for stormy political weather. Cries of racial discrimination will be met with oaths of racial blindness. Courts for the coming decade will be filled with graphs and maps and explanations of modeling algorithms, while lawyers debate the legality of newly approved legislative and congressional district maps. As political science professors, and as engaged citizens, we feel that the public and courtroom debate over the legality of the maps has distracted us from a more fundamental concern: gerrymandering’s impact on the legitimacy of our democracy.

The distinction between legality and legitimacy is key. Legitimacy concerns adherence to objective or widely-held normative values and principles. In the United States, we judge the legitimacy of laws based on how well they conform to fundamental principles of American political morality: equality, the security of rights (including for those in the minority), and the sovereignty of the people.[Read more...]

3. Election experts: Still more to be done on state, federal elections before 2022 midterms

A panel of experts on election security hosted a conversation on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Their goal was to provide an update on how election security had been updated or improved since the 2020 election.

But really, their hope was to not let history repeat itself.

The four spoke about what needs to be done to continue safeguarding elections in 2022 and beyond as part of the National Task Force On Election Crises.

The question of whether 2022 will be better off than the rocky 2020 election period remains to be seen, but panelists discussed a number of positive issues, as well as a range of concerns: from disinformation by Russia and China to chain-of-custody issues regarding ballots. [Read more...]

4. At Appalachian State, students whipsawed over conflicting COVID-19 messages from faculty, administration

Students at Appalachian State University in Boone are getting conflicting messages from faculty and administrators as tensions over the university’s handling of COVID-19 in the spring semester boil over.

In an open letter to students sent Sunday evening, Richard Rheingans, a professor in the Department of Sustainable Development, wrote the university is “failing to provide the leadership, guidance and support that students, faculty and the broader community needs.”

Rheingans, a former health economist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who spent more than two decades teaching in schools of public health, said the university isn’t taking the necessary steps to protect students, faculty and staff on campus.

“In so many ways, the Appalachian State administration has failed us throughout this pandemic and now, despite a month of warning that we would face another major covid surge, they have done virtually nothing to set us up for a safe, undisrupted semester,” Rheingans wrote. [Read more...]

5. Air testing planned for neighborhood adjacent to contaminated former missile plant in Burlington

Extent of toxic solvents still unknown; new round of testing to begin

Environmental testing could restart as early as next month at a former Army missile plant in East Burlington, the next step in cleaning up widespread contamination that has burdened a Black and Latinx neighborhood for more than 30 years.

While the sampling plan does not cover the cleanup, the results will guide the future removal or treatment of the contamination. That process will likely take at least another decade.

In a two-part story last fall, Policy Watch reported on the inertia and negligence that had delayed work at the Tarheel Army Missile Plant. Since the mid-1990s, the military, which is responsible for groundwater and some surface water contamination, has spent $2 million on a cleanup. Those efforts have largely failed, and untold amounts of toxic solvents remain, both onsite and beneath the neighborhood.[Read more…]

6. State workers can use 24-hours of paid community service leave to help ease K-12 staffing shortages

School buses

State employees can now use volunteer days to work as substitute teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers under a plan developed by Gov. Roy Cooper.

The governor announced the plan to combat K-12 staff shortages brought on by a surge of COVID-19 cases. The strategy is intended to keep students in classrooms for in-person instruction where the experts say they learn best.

“It is critical that we keep children learning in the classroom safely,” Cooper said in a statement. “This policy will encourage state employees to lend a helping hand to our students at a time of severe staffing challenges for our public schools.” [Read more...]

7. Takeaways from a snowy night in I-95 purgatory

“My boss told me if I didn’t come in, I’d get fired.” So spoke a rather grumpy but nonetheless sight-for-sore-eyes Exxon attendant near Manassas, Va., last Monday night around 10 o’clock, as he mercifully allowed my wife, Noelle, and I to fill our gas tank and use the restrooms. The circumstances of our visit – we had recently taken leave from the excruciating slog of a snowbound Interstate 95 a couple miles east – made both services essential.

We had departed the snail-like train of vehicles with the expectation of escaping for the night to some hastily arranged hotel reservations closer to the highway only to find the hotel in question and all surrounding businesses dark and without power amid a rutted patchwork of icy, unplowed parking lots. After a few moments of “what in the heck do we do now?” conversation, it became apparent that the best alternative was to try to gas up and return to the interstate crawl in hopes that the road would somehow clear.

As it turned out, the road didn’t clear – it closed – and we ended up spending the night parked on an entry ramp to the highway, dozing occasionally to the oddly comforting diesel hum of idling 18-wheelers and sporadically running our own engine to stay warm in the 17-degree chill. Around 8:30 the next morning, we followed the lead of some other lucky souls and backed off the ramp and onto the now passably plowed side roads, which eventually led west to even clearer highways and a roundabout route home. By nightfall Tuesday, 30 hours after leaving New York City, we were back in North Carolina – grateful, tired and not too much worse for wear. [Read more…]

8. EPA launches civil rights inquiry into DEQ’s permitting of biogas systems on hog farms

The Environmental Protection Agency is opening an investigation into whether state regulators violated civil rights law when last spring, they granted permits to four industrialized hog farms that are installing anaerobic digesters to produce biogas for renewable energy. The investigation is in response to a complaint against the NC Department of Environmental Quality filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing several community groups.

SELC alleges that when DEQ granted the general permits to the Smithfield-owned farms, the agency failed to protect the surrounding communities from air and water pollution. A disproportionate share of the hundreds of families who live around the hog operations in Duplin and Sampson County are Black and Latino.

Under a federal civil rights law, known as Title VI, entities that receive federal funds can’t from discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin —intentionally or unintentionally. [Read more…]

9. Weekly Radio Interviews and Daily Commentaries:

Click here to listen to the latest from Policy Watch Executive Director Rob Schofield.

10. Weekly Editorial Cartoon:

 

Supreme Court blocks Biden workplace vaccine rule, allows health care workers mandate

By
January 13, 2022
In Courts & the Law, COVID-19, News
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