Press Releases and Newsletters
Vehicle tax to rise if Raleigh budget is OK’d (News and Observer)
Vehicle tax to rise if Raleigh budget is OK’d (News and Observer)
RALEIGH Motorists living in Raleigh could see a $5 jump in their annual vehicle tax for each car, truck or SUV they own if the City Council agrees with the proposed budget for next year presented Tuesday by Raleigh City Manager J. Russell Allen.
Allen’s $620.4 million budget for the 2010 fiscal year beginning July 1 doesn’t include a property tax increase or any layoffs of city staff. It does factor in the elimination of 24 vacant positions, mostly from the city’s solid waste and public works departments, and delays replacing city vehicles, including two fire engines and 46 police cars, according tocity budget documents.
The proposed budget is 11.1 percent less than the city budget this year.
Water rates are also expected to rise about 9 percent this summer. Successful consumer conservation efforts and an increase in debt payments for expanding the city water-and-sewer system have left the system that serves Raleigh and several surrounding communities struggling to stay in the black.
The prolonged recession and a drop in sales and property tax revenues have left Triangle communities, including Raleigh, scrambling to find ways to cover their bottom lines. The city’s general fund was facing a $7.5 million shortfall for the next fiscal year, mostly from a significant drop in sales tax revenue.
To cover that gap, Allen told the council he had to trim in several places, including cutting by 10 percent money earmarked for arts programs and grants that go to human services groups like the Interfaith-Food Shuttle and other nonprofits that provide services to city residents.
“There were a lot of difficult decisions,” Allen told the City Council.
The $5 increase for every vehicle registered to city residents would provide additional revenue to Raleigh’s public transit system, which runs the city’s CAT bus system as well as the Accessible Raleigh Transit program that coordinates and provides transportation for disabled city residents, Allen said. Two weeks ago, the city council allocated $1 million extra to keep the ART program running.
A public hearing on the proposed budget is scheduled for 7 p.m. June 1 at the council chambers in the Avery Upchurch Government Complex, 222 W. Hargett Street.
Published Wed, May 19, 2010 04:45 AM
Modified Wed, May 19, 2010 09:32 AM
sarah.ovaska@newsobser ver.com or 919-829-4622
2010 Senate Budget Rules
Senate Appropriations Subcommittees are rolling out their individual budgets as I write. Rumors are the Senate Full Appropriations Committee and Finance Committee will be meeting tomorrow to vote on the budget and it could be to the floor as soon as tomorrow afternoon. Amendments were not allowed in subcommittees but will be allowed in the full committee tomorrow. Here are the Senate Rules for introducing amendments to the bill which were just released.
2010 Justice and Public Safety Budget
Click below for a link to the Senate Justice and Public Safety subcommittee budget proposal
He keeps safety on track (News and Observer) (profile of Pat Simmons)
He keeps safety on track (News and Observer)
RALEIGH — Pat Simmons is a bit of a safety nut.
When he rides his red 1986 BMW Airhead motorcycle downtown to the state Highway Building to work or to the Cary depot to catch a train, he’s all about accident prevention.
He wears a padded-fishbowl safety helmet that must be the fattest one you can buy. He cloaks his suit and tie with a dazzling yellow jacket so car drivers won’t stare through him on the highway.
And when he passes a driver engrossed in telephone chatter, he announces his presence with a toot of his 134-decibel air horn.
“So I watch for that,” Simmons says, grinning as he holds a fist to his ear to imitate a glassy-eyed driver on the phone. “And I’ll just touch the horn, to let people know I’m here.”
Safety is part of Simmons’ success at the state Department of Transportation, where he became the Rail Division’s first director in 1994.
The toll of deadly car-train crashes has been cut in half since then by a North Carolina innovation called the Sealed Corridor Program, a systematic approach to upgrading safety features at dangerous rail crossings – or closing them altogether.
The Federal Railroad Administration adopted the program as the safety standard for a planned national high-speed and intercity passenger rail network. And Simmons helped North Carolina join that initiative this year with a whopping $545 million share of President Barack Obama’s first investment in fast trains.
North Carolina won more rail money than all but six other states nationwide, and even more than the seven states in the train-intensive Northeast combined.
Karen Rae, deputy administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, says North Carolina beat out more urban states because it has built one of the two best state rail programs in the country. (California’s is the other.)
She credits Simmons and calls him “very focused and frugal.”
“A huge part of our decision on choosing which programs went forward was not only how good the projects were but how good the management teams behind those projects were,” Rae said. “One of the tipping points was the proven record of strong management and the team that Pat has assembled in North Carolina.”
Simmons, 58, is a Hickory native who grew up mostly in Wilmington. His father worked for the telephone company then known as Southern Bell. During his early childhood years in rural Tobaccoville, Pat picked up an interest in reading from a bookmobile that stopped at a country store.
Varied interests
After earning double degrees in psychology and marine biology at UNC-Wilmington, he spent a few years in Louisiana. He did marine archaeology work for an offshore drilling firm and learned about politics by writing grant applications for the parish government in Baton Rouge.
He returned to North Carolina and served as the first director for a rural transit agency in Boone before finding bus and train work at DOT.
Asked to explain his approach to railroading, Simmons recalls the first grant proposal he ever wrote. It was not about transportation, but about getting juvenile offenders back on track.
Between exams during his junior year at UNC-W, he applied for and won a research grant to find out whether family counseling for troubled teens and their parents could make a difference in changing their outlook and mending their ways.
The answer was yes.
“You observe human behavior, then you introduce changes and see how they change the behavior,” Simmons said. “It was the same scientific technique we used to establish the sealed corridor.”
That effort started with video cameras at a Charlotte rail crossing. Cars, trucks and even school buses ignored warning signals and drove around the crossing gates, to beat approaching trains.
DOT workers experimented with different devices including longer gates, quadruple gates and median barriers. They documented how effective each approach was in keeping drivers from straying into trouble on the tracks.
Sometimes when Simmons uses the scientific approach to test a pet theory about how to improve North Carolina’s railroads, the answer is no.
He thought there would be a demand for passenger trains from Charlotte to Wilmington, but marketing studies found none. He thought about building a depot between High Point and Greensboro, but passengers wanted to keep the stations downtown.
Expanding service
In 1994 North Carolina forged a pact with Virginia to develop fast train service from Charlotte to Washington, D.C., as part of a Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor that eventually could reach Georgia and Florida.
“Pat was the one that made that a reality,” said Rae. “He framed it up and got the details behind the idea together. He engaged Virginia and continues to try to help South Carolina.”
Virginia cared mainly about faster trains north of Petersburg and Richmond. North Carolina shouldered the big task of rebuilding a rail line, partly abandoned since 1980, that follows U.S. 1 from Raleigh to Petersburg.
Federal agencies last week signed off on DOT’s draft environmental statement for a Raleigh-to-Petersburg route. The action moves Simmons a big step forward in his effort to win more federal money – more than $3 billion for this 168-mi. segment alone – to build this key rail link between Southern states and the Northeast.
Travel time from Raleigh to Washington would drop by 2 hours, to just over 4 hours.
The planned top speed between Charlotte and Raleigh, for now, is 90 mph. That’s not “high-speed rail,” but Simmons says it will be a good investment for the state. The travel time from Raleigh to Charlotte will shrink by an hour to just over two hours – even with seven stops along the way.
“In the mid-90s we looked at speed, and speed costs money,” Simmons explained recently to a class of engineering students at N.C. State University. “The faster you go, the more it costs. We reckoned there is a sweet spot where you can offer frequent, reliable, time-competitive service, and you will have good patronage.”
David King was the deputy transportation secretary who put Simmons in charge of North Carolina’s rail ambitions in 1994. He watched Simmons deal patiently with critics who thought DOT should stick with highways.
“I think Pat’s greatest asset is perseverance,” said King, now general manager of Triangle Transit. “Long-term projects you’re investing in today for benefits tomorrow are sometimes hard to defend, but Pat’s been able to do that.”
Simmons pursues his rail mission with an air of quiet jollity. He says skeptics make him better at his job.
“People ask a lot of questions, because it’s different from what we’ve done for the last 30 or 40 years,” he told the NCSU students. “And that’s cool.
“One thing I find beneficial is for people to ask the critical questions. Because either I’ve got a good answer, or it ain’t worth doing.”
[email protected] or 919-829-4527
BY BRUCE SICELOFF – Staff Writer
Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/05/16/484699/he-keeps-safety-on-track.html#ixzz0oCPBmaxH
Oberstar stymied on transit bill (Politico)
Oberstar stymied on transit bill (Politico)
It was supposed to be a career-defining moment for Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.). He finally held the gavel of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, after four decades of waiting and had a like-minded president in office to help enact his sweeping vision for highways and public works.
But Oberstar was cut down before he even got started. Hours after he began circulating his plan last spring for a six-year, $500 billion investment in roads and rail, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood simply called for an extension of the 2005 highway bill — effectively cutting off long-term expansion plans.
“That was the beginning of a less-than-good working relationship,” said John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
The relationship soured from there, as a frustrated Oberstar slammed White House economic advisers “who never had a shovel in their hands or a callus on their fingers.”
So, while the nation’s infrastructure continues to age and crumble, Washington is stuck with a neutered transportation chairman, a White House distracted by more pressing issues and congressional leaders who lack the political will to raise gas taxes for a new $500 billion measure. And Oberstar is left without the incredible power that once came with a Transportation chairmanship — picking and choosing where to send billions in highway pork.
“I don’t know why they
For the Obama administration, deep-sixing the bill was a political necessity, because raising the gas tax is a nonstarter in an election year. And until Oberstar or another lawmaker can find a viable alternative method to raise the $200 billion plus needed to fully fund his legislation, it is likely to stay stuck in no man’s land.
That leaves the entire transportation industry, from bridge builders to bike boosters, waiting in vain for a breakthrough that might jump-start Oberstar’s efforts. Meanwhile, stimulus infrastructure dollars have not stopped construction unemployment from topping 20 percent, and some insiders are bracing for a funding impasse that lingers indefinitely.
“There has to be some way for all of the disparate interests to get together and try to motivate action on this,” said Janet Kavinoky, chief infrastructure lobbyist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Because regardless of what you’re looking for, you won’t be able to achieve that until the priority is put on transportation.”
Despite his complaints about the administration’s lack of attention to his main issue, Oberstar remains at a loss for how to pay for his bill without a gas-tax hike.
“Right now, we’re looking at bake sales,” quipped his spokesman, Jim Berard.
Oberstar explained in an interview that his broadsides at the administration were intended “to push them” toward a deal on a long-term bill. He’s gotten nowhere.
“They’ve sat down to talk with us, but they don’t have a plan for financing the future of transportation,” he said.
Some of Oberstar’s biggest K Street allies are also having trouble lining up support for the legislation. Rank-and-file lawmakers still do not know how much transportation money their states would get under Oberstar’s plan, and while the Senate recently has made progress on its version, the upper chamber is no closer than the House to finding new funding.
“We have to get out of the expectation that there’s going to be some magic moment where there’s an epiphany about financing,” said Dave Bauer, senior lobbyist for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. If the political will to pass a transportation bill depends on finding the funding, Bauer warned that the result could be “a circular, never-ending process.”
Oberstar is hardly the first transportation committee chairman to face stop signs from his own party. The late Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.) mounted a PR campaign to help pass his 1998 highway bill over the objections of House Republican leaders, and GOP Rep. Don Young of Alaska was forced to relent on the size of his 2005 bill after the Bush administration rejected his call to raise gas taxes.
But Oberstar lacks the bare-knuckled political instincts of Shuster and Young, relying instead on his famous policy acumen to get things done.
“He’s not a wheeler-dealer kind of guy,” a veteran transportation advocate said of Oberstar.
For now, Oberstar — and the entire transportation industry — is in limbo wondering whether the $500 billion bill will get a serious look this year.
“Not over the indifference and even opposition of an administration,” said former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), co-chairman of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s infrastructure reform project.
The White House, while aligning with Oberstar’s policy reforms, is still looking to put off the new bill until spring 2011. LaHood “shares Chairman Oberstar’s goal,” spokesman Olivia Alair wrote in an e-mail and is working on “a set of principles that we hope will bring us closer” to a new bill.
But with Democrats expected to lose a significant number of seats in the midterm election, Oberstar will have a diminished committee — or may even be forced to hand over the gavel to ranking Republican Rep. John Mica of Florida.
For his part, Mica is sympathetic to the administration’s reluctance to engage on a six-year bill until supporters of a tax increase — whom he described as “smoking the funny weed” — find an alternative.
“They are probably politically correct in not moving forward,” Mica said in an interview. “Probably Mr. Oberstar needs to be a little more flexible.”
By: Elana Schor
May 17, 2010 05:23 AM EDT
2010 Transportation Budget
April 20
The Governor released her proposed adjustments to the state’s 2010-2011 budget on April 20. Joint House and Senate Appropriations met on April 21 to hear the details from her staff. Sen. Garrou, co-chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, outlined the Senate’s timetable for the budget process. Here is a link to more information about the Mobility Fund.
Appropriations sub-committees have already begun meeting and will continue to meet through the opening of session on May 12th. The Senate plans to vote on the budget bill on May 20. It will then go to the House. The House has not announced a specific timetable, but has said they plan to vote on the budget bill around the middle of June. The budget bill will then to go a conference committee made up of both House and Senate members who will negotiate a final budget with the goal of having it in place by July 1.
May 14
The Senate Transportation Committee released their draft budget today for discussion. They plan to meet early next week to vote.
City planners track cyclists, pedestrians to measure trail needs (USA Today)
City planners track cyclists, pedestrians to measure trail needs (USA Today)
By Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Rain or shine, summer or winter, Hartford, Conn., attorney Ben Bare rides his bike for the 4-mile commute to work.
“It wakes me up in the morning and blows out the stress of workday on the way home,” says Bare, 35. He says the ride is just as fast as driving a car.
Bare is one growing number of people turning to bicycles for transportation. According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, the number of adults who bicycled to work in 2008 was 786,098, up 26% from 2006. That number continues to grow, says Wiley Norvell, spokesman for the New York City-based Transportation Alternatives advocacy group.
“It has just exploded,” Norvell says.
Mindful of that growth, transportation planners in states and municipalities across the USA are increasingly deploying high-tech sensors along bicycle and pedestrian paths to map trail, sidewalk and bike-lane use and assess future needs.
MAP: Participation in 2010 Census
FULL COVERAGE: Census 2010
VIDEO: 10 strange facts about the Census
Planners have long collected data about the number of vehicles on major roads by placing rubber-strip counters across travel lanes, but those counters are generally unable to detect passing cyclists, says David Patton, a bicycle and pedestrian planner for Arlington County, Va.
Some of the new counters, which can cost $500-$8,000, are triggered by the weight of passing trail users, while others rely on heat emitted by their bodies or bounce radar off them, Patton says. He says recent advances in technology have made the counters more affordable, which means more communities are buying them to supplement labor-intensive tallies conducted by human volunteers.
“You build a Walmart and we can tell you how many car trips it will generate, on which roads, and at which times of day,” Norvell says. “We know next to nothing about how and where people bike and walk in this country.”
Transportation Alternatives recently estimated that 201,000 people bike daily in New York City. City-conducted sample counts showed a 26% increase in bike ridership from 2008 to 2009, Norvell says. He says other large cities are seeing — and counting — similar increases.
The increased use of high-tech sensors supplements a push for expanded counts by the National Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Project, which this September is overseeing censuses in about 150 cities, including Kansas City, San Francisco and New York City, Michael Jones says.
Jones, a planner and principal with the Portland, Ore.-based Alta Planning and Design, says he founded the count in 2004 after growing frustrated by the lack of consistently collected pedestrian and bicycle use data. He says about 10 groups conducted counts that first year.
Under the project’s census, trained volunteers record the direction of each passing biker and pedestrian for two hours each on a weekday and weekend day in multiple locations, and then use around-the-clock tallies from automated devices placed on other nearby trails and roads to account for seasonal and daily weather variations, Jones says. He says it’s easy to find volunteers to monitor riders on sunny days, but hard to find people willing to stand in the rain at night, even though cyclists are still out.
“It’s a great relief to have robots out there counting … rain or shine,” Patton says
Betsy Jacobsen, a transportation planner with the Colorado Department of Transportation, says planners believe riders and walkers represent a “significant” number of commuters daily regardless of weather conditions, but need the data to track whether adding bike lanes and paths, for instance, encourages more people to ride.
Colorado has installed two of the high-tech counters and is preparing to buy more, she says, in part because the federal Department of Transportation is requiring the data collection.
In March, federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized” and urged state and local planners to better accommodate and track pedestrians and riders.
“Without those numbers, you’re leaning on intuition and assumption, which don’t carry a lot of weight when you’re deciding budgets in a recession,” Norvell says. “The way we change concrete and asphalt is to start counting people.”
Bike commuter Nick Hurtado of Seattle says he struggles to find a route that’s both efficient and safe when riding to his job as a teaching assistant at an elementary school 6 miles from home.
“I really feel like that cars are king on the road,” Hurtado says. “Bike commuters are not given enough voice. We have the same rights as anyone on the road, and I don’t feel like that’s the reality.”
Hughes reports for the Fort CollinsColoradoan
Wake mayors unite behind common wants (The Cary News)
Wake mayors unite behind common wants (The Cary News)
Officials hope state legislators will grant their towns new powers.
In politics, allies often can be one’s biggest asset. Which is why the mayors of Wake County’s 12 municipalities joined forces in advance of the 2010 short session of the state legislature, which begins today, to lobby for local bills that would grant each of their towns new powers.
Some want the authority, for example, to exempt citizen e-mail addresses from public records law. Others wish to retain the right to expand their borders when necessary.
All of them want the General Assembly to avoid usurping local tax dollars to fill in gaps in the state’s budget.
But accomplishing those and other goals can be difficult in a session in which legislators are focused primarily on balancing the state’s budget, said Mayor Harold Weinbrecht of Cary, president of the Wake County Mayors Association.
So he and other Wake County mayors are hoping to better the odds by speaking in unison; at least on issues where they find common ground.
“We thought that as a group, if we had more mayors asking for something in a session that has to be limited to noncontroversial issues, we’d have a better chance of seeing them address those issues,” Weinbrecht said.
It’s the first time in the Wake County Mayors Association’s history that the chief town officials have signed off on – and unanimously at that – a common legislative wish list. And if it bears positive results, Weinbrecht said, it probably won’t be the last time.
Their agenda this year includes the following eight requests.
Keep all local revenues intact through the upcoming budget session.
Maintaining all sources of local revenues is a perpetual concern for town governments. That’s especially important this year, when many local governments, including Cary, are facing shrinking budgets. “They shouldn’t balance their budget on the backs of municipalities across the state,” said Lana Hygh, assistant to the town manager in Cary.
Western Wake County towns have taken their lumps in recent years as state officials have often withheld large sums of money – from taxes on wine and beer, wireless communications sales and utilities franchises – from municipalities.
In the case of wine and beer taxes, for example, the state levies this tax on alcoholic beverages and a municipality may share in the revenues if beer or wine is sold legally within its jurisdiction. The proceeds are distributed based on the town’s population as recorded by the North Carolina Office of State Planning.
Former Gov. Mike Easley withheld $400,000 of this revenue from Cary alone in fiscal year 2002 to help balance the state budget. Gov. Bev Perdue followed suit last year, also withholding hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue from the town.
Exempt lists of citizen e-mail addresses from disclosure under the Public Records Act.
Towns want legislators to make the change in order to keep residents’ e-mail addresses from advertisers who request them en masse from the town’s virtual Rolodex.
Residents often volunteer their e-mail addresses when they sign up for town e-mail blasts about happenings such as public meetings, activities at the senior centers or concerts at public venues. When they sign up, their addresses become public record under North Carolina law.
In recent months, several advertisers have requested Cary’s 13,000-address list. The town was obligated to hand them over, no questions asked. As a result, town officials say, more than 1,000 subscribers to Cary’s mailing lists unsubscribed between December and March.
Critics of the request say that a change in the law would be unnecessary for a number of reasons, including that the town already notifies all subscribers to its e-mail lists that their e-mail addresses are public records. Opponents of the measure say a change also could create an unfair advantage for incumbent candidates during elections. Sitting council members are considered town employees and, therefore, would retain access to the records. Outsiders wouldn’t.
Retain municipal authority for annexation by supporting the N.C. League of Municipalities’ position.
Supporters of involuntary annexation say the law has allowed cities and towns to manage growth and avoid the urban decay that plagues other cities without the ability to annex. Opponents say that property owners chose to live outside a city and that government should not be able to force them to pay new taxes for services they don’t necessarily want.
The League of Municipalities, a nonpartisan association of municipalities in North Carolina, favors the rights of towns to annex land outside their borders. So do elected officials across Wake, who see the procedure as a cost-effective way to manage growth.
The organization last year opposed a state bill on annexations, in part because it would have allowed for a referendum on forced annexation if 15 percent of voters in the municipality and the area to be annexed signed a petition.
“It almost seems silly, though,” Weinbrecht said. “You’re holding a referendum to ask, ‘Do you want to be involuntarily annexed?’ ”
“In that case, their answer is obviously going to be, ‘No,'” he added.
Councilman Don Frantz of Cary, meanwhile, opposes the League’s stance. He was the lone dissenter in a vote last month in which the Cary Town Council joined other governing bodies in Wake in supporting a change in the law. “I would much rather that we grow voluntarily, 100 percent,” Frantz said.
Allow municipalities to order repairs or demolition of dwellings that have been declared unfit for human habitation.
Weinbrecht said his town already has authority to take action against homes that have been vacated or closed for a year. But the mayor said that he and other proponents of the measure want to speed up the process to six months.
“We’re basically just trying to protect property values and the aesthetics of the town,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than having property that is not kept up or maintained or even becomes a danger.”
Weinbrecht acknowledges critics’ argument that a change in the law might come at the expense of low-income families. “Some members of the
But he said the main objective, in his mind, remains improving the town. “Blight is like a disease,” Weinbrecht said. “You want to do anything you can to eradicate it.”
Provide Wake County municipalities authority to use debt to pay down past retirement obligations.
Among towns in western Wake, Morrisville is most in need of a new way to pay down its financial obligations to the state’s pension fund, said Town Manager John Whitson. “We’re different because we’re already paying a higher rate because we joined the system late,” he said. “Not many towns face this situation. We’re already paying more, and at the same time our rates will continue to increase by the same percentage as everyone else.”
The state retirement system, which includes local government employees, is supported by three sources: State employees account for 29 percent. The legislature provides the money to cover 11 percent of the fund. Revenue from the fund’s investments accounts for 60 percent.
Provide authority to Wake County municipalities to use electronic notice for public hearings.
Current laws require towns to advertise public hearings and other legal notices in a newspaper of general circulation. But officials say that print advertising is too expensive.
They want the authority to instead publish such notices on municipal Web sites.
Legislators already granted this authority to Cary and Apex in 2007. Now other Wake towns, including Holly Springs, Morrisville and Fuquay-Varina, want it too.
“We don’t want to leave anyone out,” Mayor Jackie Holcombe of Morrisville said. “… But putting it in the newspaper just isn’t a good use of our funds.”
Rep. Paul Stam of Apex unsuccessfully sponsored a bill last year that would have granted all cities and counties in North Carolina the authority to give electronic notice of public hearings. The bill never emerged from a legislative committee.
Eliminate the cap on charter schools.
State education leaders want to loosen the 100-school cap on charter schools to allow local school boards to free struggling schools of regulations. Allowing more would require a change in state law. It’s aimed at beefing up the state’s application for Race to the Top, a federal education competition for billions of dollars in grants.
“Other states have moved expeditiously to remove their cap on charter schools,” Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly said during a recent Town Council meeting. “Hopefully, North Carolina can move soon to do the same.”
But new charters in North Carolina likely would be a different brand, converted from established schools and started by school districts rather than independent groups. The local boards would still need permission to run the schools free of many state and local rules that govern traditional schools.
Perdue has opposed lifting the cap, and the Democratic-controlled legislature has not approved any of the numerous proposals to break the 100-charter barrier.
Allow municipalities to use the design-build concept for capital projects.
Officials in Holly Springs initiated a request to seek authorization from the General Assembly to use the design-build method for construction for any and all infrastructure projects.
The design-build concept is a project delivery method in which design and construction contracts are combined. The method differs from the more common design-bid-build concept in which design and construction contracts are handled separately.
Town leaders in Holly Springs say the design-build method would save tax dollars and cut down on paperwork.
Staff Writers Lynn Bonner, Benjamin Niolet and Mark Johnson contributed to this report.
BY JORDAN COOKE, Staff Writer
[email protected] or 919-460-2609
Perdue wants authorities to collect DNA upon arrest (WRAL.com)
Perdue wants authorities to collect DNA upon arrest (WRAL.com)
Jamestown, N.C. — Gov. Beverly Perdue on Tuesday called on state lawmakers to pass legislation that would allow law enforcement officers to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested on felony charges.
Twenty-three states and the federal government already have laws authorizing DNA samples upon arrest. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation predicted that such a law would solve 100 cases in the state within a year.
“Safe communities are a critical part of ensuring North Carolina emerges from this recession poised to be the best place in the world to live and work,” Perdue said in a statement. “We can’t create jobs or grow businesses unless folks feel safe.”
“Many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, and catching them early after arrest can prevent crime,” Attorney General Roy Cooper said in a statement. “This proposal will save lives, prevent violent crime by repeat offenders, solve cold cases and exonerate those wrongly accused of a crime.”
Perdue also called for $10 million for the Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Data Services project to put all criminal records into one comprehensive system. The technology will help law enforcement communicate more efficiently and help catch criminals faster, she said.
Other elements of the Governor’s legislative crime package, which was announced at Guilford Technical Community College, include $5 million to expand the use of VIPER radios for communication between first responders, salary increases to recruit and retain probation officers and restoring funding for the North Carolina Victims Assistance Network.
Session Start (NC Insider)
Session Start (NC Insider)
Legislators will begin what they hope will be a short legislative short session on Wednesday, saying they are still on track to produce a state budget before the start of the new fiscal year. The legislature was set to convene amid budget talks, news conferences and a protest of federal health care legislation. Senate budget writers continued meeting behind closed doors Tuesday to try to quickly hammer out the chamber’s budget plan. Senate leader Marc Basnight, D-Dare, and the chamber’s chief budget writer, Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth, laid out a key difference with Gov. Beverly Perdue, saying their spending plan won’t contain pay increases for teachers or repay state employees for last year’s furlough. Basnight said it was difficult to justify raises for any state employees while private sector workers still face layoffs and furloughs. “You cannot give raises in that climate,” he said. Garrou said by eliminating pay raises and a furlough payback that legislators could largely restore an additional flexibility cut for local schools included in Perdue’s budget plan. Basnight did say that he believed the Senate plan would include $50 million to $100 million for Perdue initiatives, including tax credits, aimed at jump-starting small business hiring. Legislators were expected to be greeted by protesters who planned to “surround the Legislative Building” while calling for state lawmakers to support legislation aimed at blocking national health care reform. The “Take Back Our State Rally” was being organized by NCFreedom and various tea party groups. Basnight said he is not in favor of taking up any legislation to try to undo the federal health care law.
Session By the Numbers
A few numbers to consider as the General Assembly begins this year’s legislative short session:
• 1.5 billion: The amount, in dollars, of federal stimulus money that legislators expect to use to help balance the 2010-11 fiscal year budget.
• 499 million: The amount of that total, in dollars, that Congress has yet to approve.
• 2,767: The number of House and Senate bills filed since the two-year session began in January 2009.
• 13: Days remaining before all bills containing appropriations must be filed.
• 7.22, the cost, in dollars, of a sandwich, chips and drink from the legislative cafeteria.
• 6: Incumbent legislators, including a House member who lost a bid for a Senate seat, who return to Raleigh having lost their primary races.
• 5: Number of groups whose name includes the word “tea” listed as sponsors of a protest planned at the Legislative Building on Wednesday.
• 1: Number of times that the Revenue Laws Study Committee has recommended that cities get voter approval before incurring debt to build their own high-speed Internet systems.
• 0: Number of times that the General Assembly, since 2002, has asked for voter approval before incurring state debt.
