Fitzsimon File

More money for troubled DOT?

The 21st Century Transportation Committee made more news this week and it’s not as promising as former DOT Secretary Sam Hunt’s proposal to spend $1.6 billion on transit in the state’s urban areas.

Committee Chair Brad Wilson said he thinks the committee will ask lawmakers to pass a $2 billion highway bond issue this summer to put before voters in November. Wilson also thinks the committee will recommend that the General Assembly end the $172 million annual transfer from the Highway Trust Fund to the General Fund and come up with money to build two toll roads and speed up efforts to repair deteriorating roads and unsafe bridges.

That’s a pretty ambitious list and would give billions of new dollars to spend to a Department of Transportation that the public has lost faith in as a result of both mismanagement and the continuing influence of political donors on transportation decisions.

A much wiser course would be to bring recommendations to the 2009 General Assembly and let the new DOT Secretary be part of the debate. And this is no year to end the transfer and create a $172 million hole in the General Fund that pays for education, human services, public safety, and other essential state services.

It is shaping up as a tight budget year and the demand for human services will only increase as the national economy continues its slide and many state needs like affordable housing and child care are already dramatically underfunded.

Are they following the news?

This week’s candidate forum on mental health, developmental disabilities and substance abuse is still causing a buzz in policy circles, though the event received far less media coverage than it deserved, especially in light of the series currently appearing in the News & Observer.

Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory was the only major candidate for governor that didn’t appear and all the major candidates for Lieutenant Governor came too, with the exception of Senator Robert Pittenger.

The candidates appeared separately and each was given 40 minutes to address the 100 or so advocates in the room and then had the chance to respond to questions, both from the event organizers and the audience.

The biggest surprise of the day was that so many candidates seemed unfamiliar with the issues, the difference between developmental disabilities and mental illness, the responsibilities of Local Management Entities, the role of private providers, etc.

Virtually every candidate said they were not experts on the issues and nobody expected a nuanced critique of mental health reform, but keeping up with news accounts in the last few years would have provided a basic knowledge of the problems.

And you’d think that the campaigns would have assigned a staff member to prepare some policy background for the candidates, given the notice they received of the forum.  These people want to run state government. The least we can expect is that they take an interest in what government does. 
 

Two views of substance abuse from the GOP

Despite the lack of preparation, the forum did provide some thought-provoking comments and exchanges.  Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Orr reflected on his experience on the North Carolina Supreme Court and said that every death penalty case that he saw involved some form of substance abuse.

Orr said “you take an 18 year old with a drug addiction and consuming alcohol and committed a terrible murder…and ten years down the road, you are dealing with an entirely different human being.”

Sounds like argument for more funding for substance abuse services and something that a governor should take into account when considering clemency in death penalty cases, if the state starts killing people again in Central Prison in the middle of the night.

A much different point of view came from Orr’s fellow Republican candidate Bill Graham, who was asked if he supported alternatives to prison for drug offenders. Graham said no he didn’t, that he “was pretty tough in this area.”

That prompted a response from Wesley Warlick, one of several patients in the audience of TROSA, a highly successful residential substance abuse treatment program in Durham. Warlick told Graham that he had served almost seven years in prison for crimes related to his addiction to crack cocaine. After he was arrested again 15 months ago, a judge sentenced him to treatment instead of prison and he hasn’t used drugs since.

Graham was not persuaded, saying that he thought offenders should be sent to prison and maybe the Department of Correction could provide drug treatment.  Graham also complained that the state “has spent billions and billions of dollars prosecuting the same people over and over.”

There’s no question about that and many of the repeat offenders are addicts like Warlick who prison doesn’t help. Treating addictions does far more to keep people from ending up back in the criminal justice system than simply locking up every drug offender.
 

Expanding parity this summer?

There was surprisingly little discussion of the state’s mental health parity law, passed last session to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against people with mental illness. The law doesn’t cover substance abuse treatment or all mental illnesses, but it was an important victory for the mental health community.

Two Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor were asked about parity. Hampton Dellinger said he had been advocating for it for years. Senator Walter Dalton was asked if he supported expanding it to include substance abuse and said yes.

Dalton is a powerful member of the Senate and serves as Co-Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a post that ought to help him make good on that promise this session if was serious about his answer.
 

Selectively quoting Reagan

Finally, Senator Elizabeth Dole was invoking the name of Ronald Reagan recently when talking about her support of making President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. Dole said there was no question that Reagan would support the tax cuts and current deregulation efforts.

Dole has spent much of this campaign railing against illegal immigration, meeting with sheriffs and encouraging more crackdowns on undocumented citizens. Odd that she never invokes Reagan’s name on that issue or mentions his quote from the 1984 campaign, when he said “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally.”

Reagan is clearly one of Dole’s heroes. It’s probably just an oversight that she hasn’t mentioned that immigration quote.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.