Boone's Former ETJ: Watauga County Left Stomping the Flaming Bag of Legislative Feces

The clock is ticking down to January 1, 2015, when some 1,500 different property owners in the former Boone Extraterritorial Jurisdiction will suddenly be without the zoning protections that many of them have depended on for years.

With a 3-2 Republican (and virulently anti-zoning) majority on the County Commission, we don't feel any urgency on the parts of Nathan Miller, David Blust, and Perry Yates to reinflate the ship that Sen. Dan Soucek and Rep. Jonathan Jordan have generously sunk for the benefit of a handful of developers.

It'll be a huge job for the County Planning Board to come up with a recommendation -- something that's probably going to take more than the three months left in this quickly waning year. Which means the 1,500 property owners get thrown to the wolves on January 1st, or the County Commission enacts a moratorium on development until regs are written, debated, and enacted.

It's a fine mess that Soucek and Jordan left us.

I attended the meeting last night of the Watauga County Planning Board. They took up for the first time what to do about the former ETJ. Some of their members weren't present, but I detected mainly good will on the part of those who did bother to show up. They want to help the neighborhoods, and as a first step they're scheduling a series of community meetings to understand the problems and gather opinions on what to do.

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking. The ideological make-up of the guys with the power to do something, anything -- the County Commission -- isn't guaranteed to support a moratorium on development while the Planning Board completes its work.

Except … except … there'll be an election before the first of the year, and new Commission members will take their seats early in December, so things could turn around suddenly. Or not. Depends on what county voters want: the cronyism and corruption of Raleigh office-holders who'll sell you out to the highest bidder, or patient regs meant to protect property values and the quality of life for all residents.

What to do to protect homeowners in the former ETJ becomes a campaign issue for County Commission candidates this fall. Do you know where they stand? Do they know where they stand?

U.S. Crude

The oil & gas lobby that's been so successful pushing fracking through the NC General Assembly has been exposed for busing in homeless people to pack the public hearing in Cullowhee last Friday.

Another, Higher Court Finds Moral Monday Arrest Unconstitutional

Judge Donald Stephens, the chief resident Superior Court judge of Wake County, has now joined two lower Wake County District Court judges in throwing out the arrests of Moral Monday protesters from last summer.

The Wake County prosecutor will probably soon see this writing on the wall and dismiss all the remaining 900 arrests.

The
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/09/15/4153798/first-moral-monday-case-heard.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1#storylink=cpy

Tea Party Advice We Wish Tillis Would Adopt

Brant Clifton, our favorite scenery-chewer on the far right who always finds plenty of fault with Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Thom Tillis, is out with some advice on how Mr. Tillis should get off defense and on offense against Sen. Kay Hagan:

Tillis also appears to be buying into Hagan’s war on women nonsense. He’s sending his wife out to make campaign appearances for him. He’s hauling in South Carolina Nikki Haley to Fayetteville this week. If he even tried to look and sound conservative, he could have attack-babes like Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin out there rallying the troops for him. (But no, he’s getting Chris Christie.)

Well, he's "getting" Chris Christie into the state for a private fundraiser. If there are any firm plans to show Christie off to ordinary voters, it hasn't surfaced yet.

But by all means, yes, let's get some Republican female-brand furniture stripper like Laura Ingraham in to rigidify Mr. Tillis's anemic conservative credentials. And Sarah Palin. Oh, especially Sarah Palin! How could Tillis go wrong with the woman recently made famous by a dog-pile fracas that erupted at a snowmobilers party in Alaska? The quote I loved from that: "The party was peaceable until the Palins arrived."

Other advice from Clifton? Hammer Obamacare, sez he ... when every poll we've been seeing suggests strongly that the general voting public has moved on. Too, too many formerly uninsured Americans have now gotten some insurance coverage, to their considerable relief, so, yes again, by all means, Mr. Tillis, you should start harping all over again about how insurance coverage for all Americans is a dangerous idea. (Attacks on Obamacare had already pretty much disappeared from TV ads supporting Mr. Tillis, as though some people had a clue.)

We can feel Mr. Clifton's pain. After tens of millions of $$ expended to tout Thom Tillis and to attack Kay Hagan, millions by Karl Rove and other third-party interlopers, Tillis has zero traction ... largely because he's dragging around a very unpopular NC General Assembly as a major anchor on his hopes.

Watauga GOP Planning to "One-Shot" Jason Cornett for School Board

It's pretty clear from the Watauga Republican Party Facebook page that the administrators are endorsing Jason Cornette and throwing the other two Republican candidates, Ron Henries and Adam L. Trivette, under the bus.

Interesting.

Currently, there's a 3-2 Republican majority on the School Board: Dr. Lee Warren, Delora Hodges, and Ron Henries. Warren and Hodges chose not to run for reelection this year. Henries is in hot water with the Republican Party because he didn't side with the book banners over the Isabel Allende novel.

Rather than adopting a strategy of trying to win all three of their Republican candidates and thus continue a majority on the Board, the local Party leaders appear to be resigned to Jason Cornett alone.

He was the only real bright spot for Republican hopes on the May primary ballot, coming in third with 14% of the vote.

No to Fracking in Western North Carolina

Photo Mark Barrett, Asheville Citizen-Times

A very large crowd came out against fracking at Western Carolina University.

But, naturally, the members of the General Assembly had plugs in their ears and gas corporation money in their pockets.

Smart Kids, Dumb Government

Headline in this morning's Asheville Citizen-Times: "Fewer NC College Students Aspire to Teach."

Gosh, wonder why that might be so? Just because North Carolina state government and especially the General Assembly have worked overtime to destroy public schooling and to disrespect public school teachers?

"I think people are saying I don't want that job because it has a reputation of being a job that doesn't pay well and doesn't pay well enough to be able to support you for just an average living," said Dawn Rookey, an Owen High School teacher. "I think also there's been a lot of low teacher morale over the past three years with a lot of the legislative changes that have impacted the profession."

Our Republican masters have set a time bomb that is going to produce a big teacher shortage in a short little while. But I'm sure the private school corporations that support Senator Dan Soucek will step right in and solve that problem.

How Republicans Are Winning at Voter Suppression

We've certainly observed -- and closely -- the shenanigans of Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") and his minions on the Watauga County Board of Elections -- his poor brother Luke, putative chair of the BOE, and Bill Aceto, putative secretary -- and we know that Aceto bragged to a Democratic office-holder in August of 2013 that they were "going to take the gloves off" -- particularly with reference to "fixing" the ASU student vote so that it wouldn't plague Republican hopes in Watauga County any longer.

They did their best (worst), even though their scheme to turn Boone 1, 2 & 3 precincts into one voting "mega-precinct" was rejected at the state level. They succeeded in getting Early Voting off the ASU campus, and now they've moved one majority urban precinct (New River 3) to the Far Side of the Moon and put it into a mega-church engaged in well known partisan Republican activities (and possibly staffed now by a Democratic Demon Swat Team and Exorcism Unit to pray the devil out of any left-leaning voters who venture out there to cast a ballot).

But the worst damage that's been done (lately) to ballot access is that provision in the 2013 voter law passed by the NC General Assembly which disallows provisional ballots cast "out of precinct." People move frequently in this culture, especially young people, and they forget to update their voter information. So they go to their new precinct polling place on election day, only they're not on the rolls for that precinct, so they request a provisional ballot, because they ARE properly registered in the county, but the Republicans' new law sez "NO, you LOSE!" College students are disproportionately singled out for that treatment.

Bob Hall, executive director of the voter rights org DemocracyNC, has done research on hundreds of the provisional ballots that were thrown out in the May primary, and he has found evidence that 454 of those ballots would have been counted under election rules prior to the Big Republican Re-Write.

While black voters make up just 22 percent of the state’s electorate, they accounted for 39 percent of the rejected ballots. Fifty-seven percent of the ballots were cast by registered Democrats, who make up only 42 percent of North Carolina voters.

“It proves, really, what has been said about the discriminatory nature of the new law,” Hall said, noting that the people affected include a veteran, students and even a precinct judge.

We have to defeat these bastards (to use the scientifically precise term for them).

Raleigh: Where the One-Eyed Man Is King and the "No-Bid Contract" Is Queen

So there's the ineffable Aldona Wos, Governor McCrory's Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), who takes only $1 a year in salary but who more than makes up for that frugality by hiring outside contractors in sweetheart deals who are costing millions just to do the work that DHHS is mandated to do.

The "no-bid" contract that got the spotlight yesterday went to Washington "turn-around" firm Alvarez & Marsal, whose team of "experts" are earning salaries that would choke a South Carolina mule. The lowest paid Alvarez & Marsal "analyst" -- and there are nine of these cats -- make $242 an hour -- an hour -- and the "principals" of the firm are pulling in between $473 and $394 a freakin' hour.

So, thanks, Aldona Wos, for saving us that money on your salary. We're obviously getting what we pay for.