North Carolina Now; Episode from 1999-07-21

It's Wednesday, July 21st, tonight, the challenge of political compromise in North Carolina, now. Good evening. I'm Rita Matray. Welcome to North Carolina now. With a ceremonial gesture to open the doors of each chamber, House and Senate members officially adjourned this year's long session of the General Assembly. Today's adjournment puts the wraps on a 22 week long session. On tonight's edition of North Carolina now, we'll hear from Governor Jim Hunt, House Speaker Jim Black and Mark Bassnight, the President Pro Tem of the Senate. All three will weigh in with their thoughts on this just concluded legislative session. But first, we're going to check in with our legislative bureau for a wrap-up of the activities that have taken place over the last couple of days. And legislative correspondent John Basin joins us now. Hello, John. Hi, I'm Rita.

Lawmakers had hoped to wrap this session up yesterday, but there was still some work to be done today. What was the hold-up? Well, around here things seldom go as planned, Rita, particularly when it comes to adjournment. And the lawmakers in their slightly frayed tempers, everybody ready to be home, they managed to find little insults in the bills they were passing back and forth between each other. Things that were enough by some standards to demand that they stay another day and work out some negotiations. One more day than they had hoped to plan, than they had planned to stay, but they were able to knock it out today and finish up late today. I know that one of those hitches had to do with the legislative study commissions bill. And the reason why I point that out is we seem to be seeing this session, the House really flexing its muscle and trying to prove its importance in this whole legislative process. We saw it with the UNC bonds legislation, and now we saw it in the study commission bill. As a long time observer of the General Assembly, what's your take on this?

Well, I don't know that I'd say that the House is trying to flex its muscle. In North Carolina, there is no upper chamber, unlike the U.S. Congress where the Senate is considered the upper chamber and the House the lower chamber. Down here, the two houses, the two chambers are equal. They both serve two-year terms, and there's no particular extra effort or extra thing that goes along with being a senator rather than being a representative. You represent more people, but otherwise you are equal. And the House is divided this year much closer along party lines than the Senate is. The Senate has a wide margin in favor of the Democrats. So any bill, anything potentially could become a close vote because of the thin margin held by the Democrats who controlled the House. And what we saw yesterday was again a situation where there was enough concern about something the Senate had done to the study bill that the House decided that it wanted to stay and negotiate a little bit more. And again, it was just a situation where the close margin between the two parties leads to a totally different atmosphere and a different dynamics in the House than you have in the Senate. Now among some of the last minute loose ends that needed to be tied up was the decision to pull North Carolina out of the Southeast Compact Commission. Tell us about that.

Well back in 1983, North Carolina joined with another number of other southern states to form this Compact to handle low-level radioactive waste. North Carolina shortly thereafter was named to be the second host state, South Carolina, hold being the first host state. But ever since then things have not gone smoothly, Marita, and in fact over the years tens of millions of dollars have been spent and still there is no site prepared and ready to accept the waste from these other states. In fact, what also has happened is that the volume of waste to be stored has gone drastically down, it's gone down so drastically that all over the country these compacts have been falling apart. And here this week North Carolina took the final step, maybe some would say the inevitable step of withdrawing from the compact. And what's happening to that waste now is that the small generators, that is the hospitals, are sending their waste to a commercial site out of state, it's very inexpensive compared to preparing a site here according to the people who support this bill. And the commercial generators continue to store their waste on site. So that's the way that that has played out, Governor Hunt got the state into the compact.

I think in his second term as governor and now as he's in his fourth term, he led the charge to pull the state out. Now our state now has some new clean air and water legislation. Tell us about that. Well, the legislature did pass clean air and clean water legislation this year. The clean air legislation looks to move North Carolina. And now we're seeing video of the governor signing that legislation today. The clean air legislation looks to move North Carolina to low sulfur fuel, which will make a huge difference. The experts say in the amount of ozone pollution the state has. The other thing that will happen with that is that over the years over the next decade, more counties will have emissions inspections. Right now, nine of the more urban counties have emissions inspections on your car. That will expand to a total of 48 counties. I think over the next 10 years, those inspections when added to the cost of the safety inspection we're all having to have. We'll cost somewhere between 25 and 35, maybe $40 total. That was a sticking point for some opponents of this clean air legislation.

But proponents said that is not a high price to pay when it comes to having much better air in North Carolina and making the air better for people who have asthma, cutting down on respiratory infections and this kind of thing. So if you've noticed this, particularly the dirty air we've had during this heat wave, we've had recently, which tends to hold that air around the hope of bill supporters is over the next decade through this legislation. But in North Carolina's air will get better or at least not get any worse. And there's also clean water legislation that extends the moratorium on new and expanded hog farms and also require cities and industries that spill waste to issue a press release when they have a spill and to take an add out in the newspaper when they have a major spill, a big spill. And the hope there is that focuses more attention on these ongoing waste spills into our groundwater and surface water. And thanks so much for the information you've provided for us tonight. And all throughout this legislative session, we really appreciate your help. And we look forward to having you back here at RRTP Studios.

Thank you, Marita. All right. And now we turn our attention to legislative correspondence. Sonja Williams, early or Sonja had an opportunity to sit down with House Speaker Jim Black and Senate President Pro Tem Mark Bass Knight to get their thoughts on this legislative session. House Speaker Jim Black, Senate President Pro Tem Mark Bass Knight, thank you both for joining us. Now the 1999 long session has come to an end, but it's ended without a resolution to perhaps one of the biggest issues debated this session. And that's the UNC bonds proposal. Speaker Black, why was this such a difficult issue to resolve? Well, I think the House being more evenly divided between Democratic and Republican, it sort of became a little bit more of a political issue, maybe on our side. It was a major issue. Many people said it was too much too soon, but the study had been out there a long time. I think the House didn't start focusing on it until the middle of June. We were focusing on the tobacco issue and then the budget.

And so when we finally got down to that, it was just more than some people could digest. I'm very unhappy that we did not resolve that problem because the needs are there. We have buildings deteriorating at the rate of $80 million a year. We have about a $6 billion investment in buildings. It's necessary to keep those buildings up. Some of them are old chemistry laboratories, science laboratories are dilapidated. And the engineering buildings that we need to train our engineers are not up to par. The needs are great and we should have addressed it. It is apparently going to take some time for House members to digest all the information they have and to make the right decision. Now Senator Bassett, how likely is it that there will be a special session to address this issue? Unless there is some resolution or some agreement between the House and the Senate, there is no need of having a special session. We just would come in. Now we do have a study between now and then. The study will hopefully make some resolution to how we pay. I would hope that the debate on the need is over.

The recommendations that we got from the Eva Klein study from the Board of Governors and Molly Broad were very well founded. In fact, they far exceeded $3 billion or $2.7 billion at the Senate recommended and passed to the House. Her recommendation was somewhere around $8 billion if I remember correctly. She reduced that to $4.9 billion or close to $5 billion. We told her it would have to be much smaller. And in doing that, she left some projects out. So with the number of 2.7, it was a pretty legitimate number that we were faced with. There were some disagreements in some of those projects. So we said in the Senate, take out what you disagree with. But those that are critical, those that will advance the economy and the strength of the state, less or less of fund those immediately out of the reserves of the funds that we'll have in the general operating budget. And that was just our argument. Now that was contrary to be found in the Senate, I mean in the House. Which is okay, people can disagree. But the trouble that we find herself will, such as this television station, it goes off air at $65 million or some amount of money.

But also- That's a federal mandate. Yeah, what do you have facilities that are in such serious need that we knew about four or five and six years ago? So after we got to study, we got to review, we really didn't do anything with it. So now we've got to find a method of agreement between the two bodies. Well, a special session do that, I doubt it. And while bonds was perhaps the biggest issue debate at this session, it was by no means the only issue. Sooner or last night, what were some of the major accomplishments of the Senate? To back a foundation, some resolution to that hopefully. We haven't appointed the boards and haven't finalized it in totality. Educational initiatives for public schools, what we were able to do there. We had a couple of environmental bills that were extremely important to us. The dying of trees on Mount Mitchell and other peaks in the western part of our state is sad to see. It's wrong that it's happening. The environmental qualities that we have when we concern ourselves with our groundwater and our surface waters. We preserved and I salute the speaker in the highest leadership for not trying to take down some of the environmental initiatives that were attempted to be taken down last year in the year before, such as the Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

That stays intact. I think all these initiatives are very important to this state. But being able to pay public school teachers a rightful salary is extremely critical and crucial to the development of this state that we have good teachers. We keep them and we recruit them. So those initiatives were highlighted this year. Speaker Black, what were some of the successes in the House? Well, I think what we did for the community colleges, the community colleges, that is an integral part of our education system. They are the ones that train and retrain our workers. We did more for the community colleges this year than we've done in a long time. And I think that's very, very important. Again, the Senate of the past 90s said getting the teacher, getting to the third step, getting our teacher pay the national average is very, very important. We did some safe schools legislation, which I think is very important.

You have to have discipline in schools and you have to have safe schools. And the education, the things we did in education, I'm very proud of. And the good news is that working together as we did the House and Senate in a very harmonious way, we were able to craft a budget by June the 30th, which is the first time that's been done in 20 years. And it was a budget twice as large as the last budget that was done by June the 30th. So I think we're both very proud of that. And we're about to finish the session in July. And that's the first time in a long time. So we did that in 70, the fewest number of legislative days. That's 1973, I believe. So that I'm very proud of. Any items left on Don? Well, you have a growing state. We've recruited a lot of people to move here and live here. And they've bought their families. And now this is home. They call North Carolina home. And we're very happy that that's occurring. But with this group comes problems. And we have to solve these problems.

And that's part of our responsibility. One is certainly to see that we have adequate facilities and places for people to learn. Be it in the public arena, community colleges, as a speaker spoke to, and the greater universities. We have not done that to the extent that we should. We have a lot of congestion on our highways today. With this growing population, more cars. And we're not funding transportation as we should. These are tough issues. These kind of issues demand good public airing. It means that this study that will have the Blue Ribbon study that will look at transportation needs in this state. And also making the decision whether or not you're going to use buses, rail, airports to what extent. Are you going to move these people in these numbers? And are we going to be able to explore in the minds of our universities? How will move people 25 and 50 years from now? Will it be in a different mood than one we see today? So review and study and looking into the future is something we're going to have to participate in as well. And with this, with this traffic, with this new growth of people, with the doubling of the population.

I'm not sure when that is. 40 or 5th, 45 or 50 or 60 years from now. What do we do to our environment? What do we do with those trees? What do we do with the soil? The land? The water? All that we cherish and we love so much. So these are big issues that we have not been able to bring some satisfaction to it as time. There are things that we should do. There always will be things that we should do. But as a body this year, I believe we accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time by working together. And this is a wonderful speaker to work with. It has been, all the speakers are wonderful to work with that I've been with. But this one come to a greater and quicker conclusion and more successful than in some of the years past. Can you speak of black any final thoughts? Well, it has been a real joy to work with the center. They were very cooperative and helping us accomplish the things that we wanted to accomplish. And we worked together very, very well. And I think that's why we're so successful in getting a budget pass by GM30. And I look forward to working with Senator Bass Knight through the interim and through the study commissions.

And do a short session that we will do great things to. Well, it sounds like there's been a lot accomplished this session and lots more to do next session. Thank you both for taking the time to wrap this session up for us. Thank you. Now also weighing in today on the significance of this session's key legislative issues is Governor Jim Hunt. The state's chief executive officer, Officer Sawfit, today to make a special trip from the governor's mansion. Over to UNCTV's legislative offices in Raleigh to share his thoughts. Here once again, as legislative correspondent John Basin with the governor. Governor Hunt, thank you so much for being here. One major item left on the table at the end of this session is the UNC bonds. At this point, are you leaving the door open to calling a special session to bring the legislature back in to work on the bond situation some more? Well, John, we'll look at all possibilities. But let me say this. There's several things very clear about the needs of the university and our colleges. First of all, they have great needs for buildings and equipment and laboratories and things of that sort.

We cannot be first in American schools unless we've got colleges for the kids to go to after they graduate. We can't have this booming economy continue unless we, our people can do the research in those laboratories. So we have got to find a way to do those buildings. Second, I think that people in North Carolina want us to do it. There's no state in America where people love their university like they do the University of North Carolina and all of its branches and our community colleges. So I really believe they want us to do that. Third, we're going to have them willing to be able to do this in the years ahead. We've got a booming, strong, powerful economy. It's just going to be a matter of finding the way. They didn't quite get that figured out this year, but I'm confident we will in the future. We had a great session of legislature that didn't work out, but about everything else did. Closer to home, Governor, there's worry about the money that UNCTV needs to convert its 11 transmitters to digital by the year 2003. Is there concern and any thoughts there on what might be done to move that forward?

Well, we have to find that money for UNCTV. UNCTV, and I might add public radio in this state or some things that our people absolutely depend on. And again, they cherish them. We will find the way to do this. I don't know what it is today, but just for the amount of this session, we've got a lot of thinking and work to do ahead. But we will do it, and all North Carolinaians are listening and hearing us tonight need to be thinking about it too. Governor, I was a health sergeant at Arms in 1983, and I watched North Carolina enter the Southeast low-level, radioactive waste compact this week we got out of the compact. How did that come about? Well, we tried very hard to make that work. We really were conscientious in trying to find a site, but we had to protect the health and safety of our people. And so we kept working at both things as it turned out at the end, the compact people stopped sending their money. North Carolina put $30 million, $30 to $50 million of our own money into it.

But at the end, they were not putting the money up. It turned out that the best thing to do for our state was to get out. We still have a responsibility to try to find a way to deal with that waste in this state, and I'm sure we'll do it. But this was a step to take now, times change, and now is the time for us to get out after honoring our commitments and working so hard to try to make it work. Governor, what do you see as the highlights of this session in terms of your agenda and what the legislature was able to do to meet it? Well, this has been a very, very good session of the legislature. One of the best in my memory, and I can remember a few. First of all, this legislature really did big things to move us forward for children and schools and our future. We took the next big step to move us toward full funding of Smart Start. We did big things to improve our public schools.

We're raising standards for teachers, and we took the, made the third installment on a four-year plan to move our teachers to the national average. We've already moved about 14 places just in two years. We did some big things for safer schools in North Carolina. To raise the standards that our students must meet, so we were really moving to improve these schools. We did some very good things. Community colleges had their best session in history. The university's got a good operating budget, I believe, out of this session. We had, we passed historic legislation for clean air and clean water, bills that I signed just today. I am delighted about those things, and we're not going to let up on our efforts to phase out hoggligoons. We're going to be moving administratively to do things that we need to do to protect our people in that regard. We passed legislation to share the prosperity in North Carolina, to have more good jobs, and especially to have them in areas that need them so badly. So a lot of good things happened in this legislature.

It'll take a while for people to get out and talk about it and hear about it and learn all about it. But I am very, very proud of it, and I'm especially proud that they passed a budget-owned time for the first time in 20 years. First time in 20 years, a lot of folks are happy about that. Governor, our time is just about any final thoughts reflecting back on this session. Well, I would simply say this. When I made my state of the state message, I said we ought to make children in schools our priority. That's exactly what this legislature has done. And I want to tell you, North Carolina is moving toward that thing I want us to commit to, and that's making our schools first in America by 2010. I'm going to work every day as long as I'm governor and afterward to try to get this state committed to that. I think we can do it, and it can be the biggest investing we've ever done. Governor, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. And for the rest of what else is happening around our state, we turn to Mitchell Lewis, who's back from vacation, Mitch. Thanks, Marita. Good evening, everyone. Just one day after state lawmakers failed to act on the UNC Bond proposal, the UNC Board of Governors met in Chapel Hill to discuss future system-wide funding matters.

The university's governing board approved a $1.7 billion operating budget for the entire 16-campus system, and discussed a number of other appropriation topics including bonds. Speaking on behalf of the board, UNC System President Molly Corbett-Broad says the university will press on with major funding requests, keeping future generations in mind. We will redouble our efforts to carry our educational program to the citizens and to the legislators. To describe the condition of crumbling buildings and the need for new facilities. I think the important message is one to the high school students of North Carolina that we cannot let them down, and we must together find the will and the way to repair these university facilities and to prepare for expansion. President Broad says the university will welcome any recommendations made by a legislative study committee that's currently looking at the report on the university's needs. And UNC Board of Governors Chairman Ben Ruffin says no one in the legislature disagrees with the needs outlined in the renovation study.

Tens of thousands of fish have been found dead and floating on the surface of the Pamlico River at the far eastern edge of the state. The fish kill is estimated to have consumed 85,000 men hidden along a 12-mile stretch of the river. State Environmental Officials report evidence of sores on the fish indicating the micro-fisteria may be to blame for the fish kill. Last month the fish kill in the same part of the river killed about 13,000 fish. A group of business people, politicians and athletes are traveling to Canada this week to represent North Carolina in a bid to bring the Pan Am Games to the Tar Heal State. The group of about 35 people will survey this year's 1999 event being held in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The delegation is expected to survey transportation and housing arrangements for the game's 5,000 participating athletes. The research triangle area is competing against Miami, Florida and San Antonio, Texas for the 2007 bid. And now for a look at tomorrow's weather, highs across the state will range from the mid-80s to mid-90s.

Skies will be partly cloudy with a slight chance of rain. In business news, North Carolina headquartered Bank of America is cutting back on its number of foreign customers. The banking giant suffered heavy foreign loan losses after its recent merger. Since March, Bank of America has sold its consumer loans and deposits in India, Singapore and Taiwan. Company officials say the bank is focusing on markets where it's large enough to be a major player. While university officials battled their own financial concerns, others are worried about the financial situations of students on college campuses. North Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill that would limit credit card solicitations at colleges and universities. The proposal would also require financial counseling as part of new student orientation. Legislators are concerned that some college freshmen are not ready for the responsibility of having a credit card. Credit companies defend their practices and say most college students are responsible consumers. And now for a look at what happened on Wall Street today. 尸画到日.

And that wraps up tonight's edition of North Carolina now. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow. Good night.