North Carolina Gets a "D" Grade for Openness, Honesty in Government

North Carolina government got an overall grade of "D" on the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, "a data-driven assessment of state government by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity."

Our state government -- particularly Governor McCrory's office -- is fighting lawsuits from multiple media outlets for failing to turn over public records in a timely manner -- and as provided for by state law.

The report points out that the State Board of Elections (SBOE) "is years behind in auditing campaign finance reports. That means it could be months or years before a violation, such as a candidate spending campaign funds for personal use, is discovered."

For example, just this past summer the SBOE "called Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, on the carpet for inappropriate expenditures of campaign funds on personal expenses. The inquiry marked the first time a full audit had ever been done of his campaign committee, despite his serving more than two decades in office. A pair of state laws require the State Board of Elections to give each report filed a once-over within 30 days and a complete audit within four months." But that's not happening.

Most alarming, perhaps (considering the recent arrest of a Superior Court judge for attempting to bribe an FBI agent), in 2013, "the Republican-controlled legislature limited the power of the State Judicial Standards Commission to discipline judges."

That 2013 bill stripped the Judicial Standards Commission of its authority to issue public reprimands and placed all forms of public discipline in the hands of the North Carolina Supreme Court. All disciplinary hearings are now private, and case records are confidential unless the Supreme Court decides to take disciplinary action.

Secrecy is always the fertilizer for corruption.

Some of the lack of openness is the result of budget cuts, a specialty of our Republican General Assembly. And isn't it nice for them that saving government money coincides so nicely with blocking public access to what they're doing behind the scenes?

NC House GOP Caucus Behind Closed Doors with Gambling Lobbyists

Highly unprecedented, they say.

Partisan political party caucuses in the NC General Assembly are exempt from the open meeting requirements.

But inviting in lobbyists from the gambling industry for an "educational" seminar, even if they also invited in a hellfire preacher too, raises eyebrows.

Why not debate the legalization of video gambling out in the open? It's not as though the gambling industry has ever corrupted any NC politicians or other fiduciary agents of the state!

But Republican Speaker of the NC House Thom Tillis 'splained the secret meeting quite clearly: "There are people that we want to hear from who may or may not feel as comfortable under your lights" -- the "your" in that sentence referring to the media.

Oh. Okay. We certainly wouldn't want to participate in making what is by nature shady feel uncomfortable in the sun.

Potentially, an Even Bigger Disaster for the American People

To wit ... the loss of journalism, the demise of the newspaper industry, the disappearance of investigative minds that ask sometimes obvious but oh-so-necessary questions: "What did you just decide behind those closed doors?" "Who gave you all that money?" "Who's been tickling your ribs and diddling your nether regions?"

Laura Leslie, who works the hallways of the NC State Capitol for lowly Public Radio and may be the best reporter on state government that we've got, just wrote on her blog a pretty devastating jeremiad about the current sorry state of journalism in our state. She says that when she started covering the General Assembly, there were 20 in the press corps, all jostling each other for the bragging rights of getting the story first of what was really going on. This year, at the wee-morning-hour adjournment of the General Assembly, there were only eight reporters present. That's not good for our democracy. It may be ever bit as bad as The Supremes' recent official unleashing of the Kraken of Corporate America.

The NC General Assembly bears watching. But so do all local governments in North Carolina, maybe even more desperately, because many small-town newspapers are much more into stroking local egos than they are into turning over rocks and seeing what scurries away. Somebody might get mad. It's been some years since we could depend on a blow-by-blow public accounting of what went down at every meeting of every governing body in Watauga, from the County Commission to town councils. When nobody watches -- and washes all that dirty linen in public -- then democracy suffers.