As a former lobbyist, Elizabeth Biser is accustomed to corralling the lions and the lambs. Those diplomatic skills helped Biser win over the Senate Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee, which today voted to confirm her as the new secretary of the NC Department of Environmental Quality. She will be the first woman to lead the department.
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Veteran epidemiologist and ethicist is fearful university leaders have not learned vital lessons from last year As students return for the fall semester at UNC-Chapel Hill Wednesday, Dr. Jim Thomas is having an uneasy sense of déjà vu. “I’m very uneasy about what I’m seeing,” said Thomas, a professor emeritus in the Epidemiology department at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. “Or what I’m seeing again.”
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Just when schools were getting ready to reopen for the new school year, cases of COVID-19 started surging in the United States, driven in large part by the more contagious delta variant. School administrators around the country are working to bring students back into the classroom safely, while still providing kids an enriching learning environment.
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The NC Utilities Commission closed several, but not all, loopholes in rules prohibiting public utilities, notably Duke Energy, from passing along lobbying and advertising expenses to ratepayers, according to a ruling issued last week. This "discretionary spending" includes advertising that appears on social media, as well as promotional materials that serve only to burnish a utility’s image, compete with other utilities for customers, and are unrelated to providing service to the public.
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Last week Charlotte became the latest — and, by far, largest — North Carolina community to pass new LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination protections. The new protections come five years after state lawmakers and then-Gov. Pat McCrory passed HB 2, preventing local governments from introducing new non-discrimination ordinances.
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State lawmakers in the House and Senate have unveiled the rules for drawing new voting maps, as a new round of redistricting begins. As Policy Watch previously reported, the U.S. Census Bureau released new population and racial data on Thursday. Shifts in population require new district maps for local and state elections that will be held in 2022.
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GREENSBORO -- Lightning flashed across the Greensboro sky just outside the Guilford County Schools’ administration building. None of the 50 or so parents, politicians, and school children standing under a clump of trees ran for cover, a fact cheered by a speaker revving up sign-toting, anti-maskers before the start of a school board meeting.
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House Democrats during a committee meeting Tuesday questioned the lack of full funding for programs needed to comply with a consent order in the long-running court case on public education. The questions arose as the House budget committee went through details of the $25.7 billion proposal unveiled by the body's Republican majority. More debate is expected Wednesday and Thursday before the House votes on the plan.
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Differences in HHS proposals indicate House and Senate negotiators have much work ahead House budget subcommittee leaders released big pieces of their spending proposal Thursday, as the chamber began speeding toward passage of its full budget. Still to come are salary increases or bonuses the House will propose for teachers and state employees.
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WASHINGTON — The months-long, Republican-led investigation in Arizona into the results of last year’s presidential election has cost millions of dollars and produced no evidence yet of major issues in tallying Maricopa County ballots. Yet supporters of former President Donald Trump are still attempting to follow Arizona’s lead by pushing for so-called audits in several other states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
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The Delta variant of COVID-19 is “several-fold” more transmissible than the Alpha variant, making mask mandates in schools more important than ever, a Duke University professor of pediatrics said Wednesday. Dr. Danny Benjamin’s advice comes as most of North Carolina’s 1.5 million school children prepare to return to classrooms and school boards wrestle with whether to adopt mask mandates amid surging COVID infections.
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Experts call for feds to adopt anti-racist policy redesign WASHINGTON — A new research paper reviewed how each state implemented a federal program that has provided cash assistance to low income families over the last 25 years—and found that Black women with children repeatedly were excluded. On a call with reporters Wednesday, policy experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...
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The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year helped instigate a new wave of interest in changing policing in the U.S., including new ways to respond to calls that involve people experiencing mental health crises. The issue gained additional prominence after officer bodycam footage was released that showed Rochester, N.Y., police handcuffing Daniel Prude, a Black man in a mental health crisis, putting a spit hood over his head and pressing his face onto the pavement.
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