Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So what else is going on up in Raleigh? Well,
a lot they are, you know, they're they're looking towards
a three I think it's a three week break. So
it's just been a mad dash. You got legislators and
all of their aids and assistants and all the staff
just you know, working round the clock trying to get
all the legislation through that they can, and you know,
and all of the negotiating that that entails. And so
there's a lot of stuff, a flurry of activity occurring,
and so it's kind of difficult to keep track of
all the pieces of legislation. But as I said, they'll
be on vacation for three weeks and so we'll have
a lot of time to hash out all of the
stuff that they did do while they're gone over the
next three weeks. But here are a couple of things
that moved. This is according to Brionna Kramer's piece at
the Carolina Journal Carolina Journal dot com. House Bill sixty
seven that passed unanimously. The bill combined healthcare provisions from
about ten different bills put it all together. The bill
tackles various healthcare issues, including updating the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact,
preventing surgical smoke exposure for workers. I guess they're finally
going to ban smoking in the operating room, I guess,
and developing a healthcare workforce enhancement program in community colleges.
So sports fans, you may be interested in this one.
House Bill three seventy eight passed one hundred eleven to one.
This bill updates education laws, boosts protections for education savings accounts,
and also allows Name, Image and Likeness Agency contracts for
student athletes or the NA Image and Likeness or NIL.
This is the way that student athletes get to reap
some of the financial benefits of becoming household names because
they're very good at their sports right Instead of the
colleges controlling the NIL. This gives the athletes the individual
control to monetize their athletic abilities. And it also and
so this would allow for agency contracts. I don't know
what all that means, but if it's anything like the
world I work in, I assume it would mean like
you could have an agency that signs a bunch of
the student athletes rather than just like individual attorneys. You
could have agents and stuff. You could create a boiler
plate contract essentially. And maybe this works like a school
could have an agency. I don't know, Maybe a school
contracts with an agency and they deal with all of
the NIL stuff for the students. I don't know, but
that that passed and it exempts NIL deals from public records,
so we will not know how much the kids are
making with their NIL deal. And it's a contract, so
contracts are usually private as well. So but on the
other hand, I can see an argument that if it's
a public university, we should probably know what the terms
of the contracts are so they're not just like wasting
taxpayer money. So yeah, unintended consequences. As the economist Thomas
Sole said, there are no solutions. There are only trade offs.
Next up, House Bill five thirty seven passed one oh
eight to zero. The first part of the bill aims
to expedite death declarations for missing disaster victims. So this
enables families to legally declared loved one dead sooner if
they are declared missing after a natural disaster. The second
part deals with streamlining administrative processes vital records, allowing the
adoption of birth certificates to come back to the local
Register of deeds in order to be distributed. Next up,
I'm just giving you a couple of the ones that
I think are probably the most important EMS personnel provisions.
This was interesting. House Bill nine seventy five also passed unanimously.
It would allow EMS workers to carry pepper spray on
duty and allow them to give emergency care to injured
police or rescue dogs without needing a veterinary license. Once again,
I'm amazed that we have to pass a law in
order to do this. You're an EMT, You show up
on a scene and there's a police canine that's injured
on the ground, and you want to be able to
try to help it, And like, it's not like there's
an emergency vet that's going to be responding with blue
lights or something. So, yeah, if the EMT is there
and you can try to help out, try to help out.
But no, no, we couldn't do that because I don't
have a veterinary license. So now they'll be able to
administer AID. Now, if it's not a police if it's
not a law enforcement dog, then your dog is going
to die. AMT won't be able to help your dog,
but they will be able to help a police dog.
So then there's this. A bill to expand the investigative
powers of the State Auditor is headed to the Governor's desk.
This according to wral Paul spect the Reporter, state law
already empowers the auditor to investigate state and local government agencies.
The House voted to approve Housepill five forty nine, which
allows the state auditor to investigate any entity that receives
state funding. Why would Democrats oppose this except for what
that the auditor is a Republican or maybe is it
because now some of your nonprofits quote unquote are going
to be subject to inspection.
Speaker 2: This was.
Speaker 1: Housepill five forty nine that that passed. Allows the auditor
to dig into records of state agencies and groups using
state or federal money in order to search for fraud, waste,
or mismanagement. There's another bill known as the Dave Act.
And by the way, the auditor's name is Dave Bullock,
so it's like Doge, but it's Dave. It would encourage
Dave Bullock the auditor to suggest slashing state government jobs
and spending, similar to the Doge efforts. Right, So I
think this is a completely valuable piece off of a legislation.
It's a good idea to be on the hunt for
ways to cut waste, look for spending that can be cut. Look,
if we started from a zero based budget, all of
this would be different. But they start with continuation budgets, right,
they say, what did you get last year, that's the baseline.
We continue that over to this year. And if we
start from zero, okay, well, now let's put stuff in
come and make your budget requests. Like I want to
see what you're spending your money on, what are your
programs and all of that. But we're not on a
zero based budget system. We are in a continuation budget system.
And so therefore it's helpful to have somebody dedicated or
an office in this case dedicated to looking for ways
to cut government spending Senate Bill four seventy four. This
would instruct the auditor to produce a report by the
end of the year identifying which state agencies and state
positions can be dissolved. The program would create the State
Division of Accountability, Value and Deficiency or DAVE. The DAVE
similar to the DOGE. That bill, which the Senate passed
back in April, just came up for a vote in
the House. Proposals from the DAVE Act are now incorporated
into another House bill, which is a smaller budget proposal
that seeks to fund various state operations while they hammer
out the budget, which actually passed. I think it was
like five billion dollars or something, just in the sort
of like an interim budget deal. So so there's that
state auditor. Oh, also state election Board. They're moving forward
with a plan to collect missing identification numbers of voters,
as they should, as the Department of Justice has told them,
you guys need to clean this up, and now with
Republicans in control of the State Board of Elections, they
are actually doing so. You know, stories are powerful. They
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have messages I will get to from the first two
hours discussion on the s Exploitation Bill and then the
I don't even know what to call up, but the
you know the definitions and the school. Well, here, hang
on a second, I'll give you the actual name of it,
the actual name of the bill, which we spent the
first two hours going over and playing ridiculous audio from Democrats.
An act to officially recognize two sexes in North Carolina,
to prevent the sexual exploitation of women and miners. To
limit the use of state funding. To modify the law
related to birth certificates, to modify the law related to
civil remedies for gender transition procedures on non miners. To
allow students with religious objections to be excused from certain
classroom discussions or activities, and to allow parent access to
library books. And to provide for restrictions on school sleeping quarters.
And this is anti trans according to the Democrats. So
I do in fact, you know what, I'll just read
the messages that I got on that. Now, it's all
a distraction. In a PEAT tweet says kids are going
to learn that druggies exist, but they don't need the
K twelve schools encouraging and teaching them to become one. Right,
that was the argument one of the Democrats made, Like
they're going to find out that there are gay people anyway. Yeah,
so once again it's about age appropriateness. And Seth points
this out in an email. Why do we have explicit
ratings for music and movies but nothing for books?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And when you read the writings and the interviews and
podcasts performances from the people who are leading the American
Librarians Association, you realize that these are gender queer activists.
That's what they are. They are left wing activists. And again,
always remember the issue is never the issue. It's not
about LGBT. The issue is never the issue. The issue
is always the revolution. And what is the revolution in
leftist ideology, you know, in the Marxist religion, what is it?
What is the revolution? It is the tearing down of
the structures, the institutions that Western civilization has built, specifically
around God, the family, governance. You rip all of that away,
you pit people against themselves, and you rip it away
in order to create a more perfected society. You keep
only the perfected elements of the society. You rip everything
else down, you start over build a new and Marxist
Marxism coming from the Hegelian school of thought that the
state was the highest power. That's it. So everything is
about how do you get there. And there are people
that are inside these movements, these activists, and they are
unaware of this. They are unaware of the animating philosophies
underneath that's driving whatever project they're working on. But make
no mistake, that ideology is there and the people who
do know it are using you to drive it. And
they are capitalizing on your suicidal empathy, right, your politeness,
your niceness, your kindness. They weaponize that in order to
advance their project. So there was that. I mentioned the
changes to the name, image and likeness deals, and I
did get a message on that that this is from
Andy who says, I don't think NIL contracts or the
money is allowed to be funded with taxpayer money. Athletic
departments get most money from boosters and ticket sales. All right,
well that's good to know, so the auditor will be
able to Yeah, so its like, okay, well maybe the
auditor needs to look into that stuff whatever, but they're
going to be the NIL deals are exempt from public records.
They're not public records. And I said, on the one hand, okay,
their contracts, so I could see why that would be
not a public record. But on the other hand, if
it is using any kind of taxpayer funds, then we
probably should have somebody monitoring that stuff. But if they
are not to be funded with taxpayer money, then okay,
boost away boosters, do your thing. Also, the state Board
of Elections unanimously approved a three part plan to collect
missing identification numbers from one hundred and ninety five thousand
voters that are on the state's voter rolls. A piece
by Teresa Opeka at Carolina Journal dot com, the executive
director Sam Hayes of the Board of Elections said he
came up with a plan that would work to obtain
driver's license numbers or the last four digits of social
Security numbers for registered state voters who lack either number
in their voter records. You're supposed to have one of
those two numbers in your voter file, and we have
one hundred nine voters that are missing either of those numbers.
The missing information has been a requirement of the Help
America Vote Act or have A which took effect twenty
one years ago, which apparently is just not enough time
for the state Board of Elections under Democrat control to
have fixed this problem. Now we have a plan to
fix it, all right, If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app, and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place, so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground, dot news, slash pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground News a few months ago and more recently chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check
dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. A lot is happening in Raleigh at the
state legislature this week, they're getting ready to go on break,
so they're just trying to plow through as many pieces
of legislation as possible before the break so they can
wrap it up as well, wrap up as much as
they can. They still got the budget to hammer out
as well. So one of the things the State Board
of Elections came up with is this three part plan,
and the purpose of the plan is to finally get
into compliance with federal law passed twenty years ago to
get identification numbers for all voters. One hundred and ninety
five thousand voters in our state do not have the
numbers either a driver's license number or the last four
digits of your Social Security number the choice. Again. This
is from Teresa Opeka her article at carolinajournal dot com.
The choice to provide either form of identification was marked
as optional on our state's voter registration form until Carol
Snow filed a complaint with the state Board of Elections
in twenty twenty three. The registration application was then corrected
about two months later, so we had an improper form,
I guess for twenty years. The US Department of Justice
filed the law lawsuit against the state and the Board
of Elections last month over this missing information. State election
officials hope that this plan will resolve the lawsuit and
others and then bring the state into compliance with a
recent North Carolina Court of Appeals order. So first part
of the plan, they're going to send out a bunch
of mailings, first wave in July to ninety eight thousand
registered voters who registered after the HAVA the HAVEA Help
America Vote Act became effective in two thousand and four
who apparently lack a driver's license number or social Security
number and who have not otherwise complied with HAVEA. Those
voters will vote provisionally until they provide the information. Then
they'll do a second mailing over the summer to ninety
seven thousand voters who have complied with have but for
whom they don't have the numbers. Second part of the
plan review slash correction by county boards of Elections. So
starting now through August, all county boards of elections in
every county, all one hundred county boards will review records
in the voter registration database for active voters who may
have missing ID numbers and correct records where the voter
provided the info but it somehow didn't get entered at
the county board level. Okay, so you may be getting
contacted by the local board if you don't have the numbers,
but you are an active voter. County boards will also
correct records where the voter registered before have it took effect.
So if you were registered prior to two thousand and four,
but for some reason the database shows the wrong registration date. Okay.
That's part two. Part three Provisional voting for voters who
don't have the numbers. So going forward, then in future
elections in person, voters who do not have the ID
number are going to have to vote with a provisional ballot,
which will count only as long as the voter provides
the required information. So you fill out a provisional ballot,
you give it at the time that you're voting, but
then you have a certain amount of time to go
in there and cure the deficiency. You've got to go
back to the Board of Elections, show them your idea
or something. The state board is going to create sort
of a flag to appear on the records in their
electronic or paper polling books. The poll books, so you
will be flagged if you do not have this data.
And then that will allow the Board of Elections people
to say you got to vote provisional and you've got
to come back in and give us your numbers. So
it's a three part plan and they hope that this
will you get the FEDS off their back. What else?
What else? Oh, we're going to get to vote on
more trains. Everybody, well, end roads too, but we're going
to get devoted more trains here in Mecklinberg County. Joe
Bruno at WSOC reporting that Mecklenburg County's transit plan bill
was approved. It is now headed to Governor Josh Stein.
Both the House and the Senate gave final approval. I
expect Josh Stein will vote to approve this today. Now
there is a there's an interesting tidbit in all of
this because this thing almost got derailed. No pun intended,
but it almost got derailed. And if you read the
Charlotte Observer story you would not know this. This is
why I always say get your news from multiple sources.
I highly recommend you sign up for Business NC Business
NC dot com. They have a thing called the Daily
Digest and they say it comes right to your inbox
and so I get this daily digest, this rite up
by Ray Gronberg. Senators voted Wednesday in favor of this
bill that would give Mecklenburgers permission to vote on referendum
for a one cent sales tax surcharge to pay for
transit and road projects. Okay, so keep in mind there
was a road funding component in it, and this is
the interesting tidbit. It has to do with the road
funding to pass before the General Assembly is upcoming summer break,
it had to undergo a third reading in the Senate House.
That occurred, but they had some last minute changes though,
so this was kind of in doubt. This morning. Senators
in committee and on the floor had added provisions they
said are designed to head off the possibility that Charlotte
officials would use part of the sales tax revenue to
reduce their general fund spending on roadwork. What does that
mean they would supplant the funding. Yeah, this was a
little bit of a loophole that was in the original
version of the bill, which was to say, yeah, we're
going to collect an extra one cent sales tax, and
we have to break it down like if we make
let's say we make ten million dollars annually off of
the one cent sales tax increase, forty percent of that
would have to be used for roads, forty percent of
it rail projects, and twenty percent for bus service. Right,
that was the breakdown, and that's in the legislation, so
they would have to follow that. But that's see, that's
what that's just for the one cent sales tax revenue.
So let's say so it's a ten million dollar revenue
from the one cent sales tax, and let's say that
forty percent, then is what four million dollars? Well, let's
say the city has a road budget of four million dollars.
They could just say, well, let's just swap it out.
Let's just take the four million from the sales tax revenue,
and then we can take the four million that we're
already funding from our property taxes and whatever, and we'll
take that out and we'll just supplant it, sort of
like Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Arc. We's got
the bag of sand and he swaps it out for
the idol. You know, opening scene. I'm not spoiling anything.
Why would the state lawmakers all of a sudden last
minute have this concern, well, you can thank the Charlotte
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at Business North Carolina Business NC dot com. You can
sign up for their daily newsletter at the website, the
Daily Digest their Business NC dot com. So the legislature
has approved this plan, this transit plan, it's going to
go to the governor for his signature, I suspse Beck,
you'll sign it, and then it'll be up to the
Mecklenburg County Commissioners to decide whether we all get to
vote to raise our sales tax by another penny to
pay for this new transit plan. And that penny, as
I understand it, it will not sunset. It will be
used then to continue to fund these things. But before
the vote was finalized today, there was some last minute
changes made because there was this fear that the City
of Charlotte would supplant current road dollars with road dollars
that are legislatively prescribed in this bill. So whatever revenue
comes in from the one sent sales tax, forty percent
of it has to be used for Mecklenburg cities to
use on their roads. It's Charlotte and all the six towns.
You got to use it for roadwork. And they changed
it today to codify that you cannot swap out any
existing road dollars for this new revenue. Where would they
have gotten this idea, the possibility? This is Ray Gronberg's
piece at Business nc dot com. The possibility crossed their
radar thanks to comments Charlotte City Manager Marcus Jones made
to the City Council in early May. So, first off,
thank you City Manager Marcus Jones, thank you very much.
I know the city council members are going to be
pretty upset with you, but I a taxpayer applaud you.
I thank you for letting this cat out of the
bag before the legislature finalize the legislation so they could
change it and they could prevent you guys from pulling
the old switcheroo and supplanting the funding council City Council
minutes of their May meeting one of their meetings in
May shows that Marcus Jones told the city council that
the added revenue from the sales tax would quote give
us more capacity to take some of the property tax
and put it back into the general fund. Right, so
we already fund road projects with property tax dollars in
north in Charlotte, So we're already funding that. And what
he was saying was, it's okay, we'll just take the
new revenue, stick it in the general fund, and we'll
reduce our road funding from the property tax revenue. That
would free money up to pay for salaries for police
officers and firefighters or for other uses. He said. This
is not mentioned in the Charlotte Observers story. So the
Senate added a provision that says cities that get road
money from the sales tax surcharge have to maintain local
expenditures for roadway systems at a level that meets or
exceeds the average of the last ten years of spending
on them. So we're gonna do a ten year look back.
What have you been spending on roads? Take the average,
and that's what you need to maintain. You cannot swap
this out. No supplanting Okay, let's go over and talk
to John. Hello, John, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hey Pete, thanks for dating my call. Right it's at
the end of the day. Hey, I wanted to I
wanted to come in and I used to another chapter
of life run a adminorist administ of city, and we
weren't rich, and we needed money for streets and for
a fire department. And when our city council came to
me with that crazy idea to go out and talk
to the taxpayer, I insisted, and I made it very
vocal because I'm on the right side of the aisle.
They were all on the left side of the aisle.
Speaker 1: How'd you get that job? How did you get hired?
Speaker 2: Well? It was it was interesting, Fete. It was interesting.
There was It was based on raw talent and ability.
There you go, I like, but they looked at me
like I was a horned frog. And I flied out
told him, and I had the newspaper there in the
local radio, and I told him, I said, listen, if
I go out and I generate this because our taxpayers,
these are the people that provide the money. I said,
you guys will not say, well, you just gave us
a million dollars in theory. So we're going to now
move from the general fund that million somewhere else. So
I said, you want your streets fixed, we need fire equipment,
then this is going to be in addition to And
I got a tape. It was I enjoyed the fights
I had in my political heyday. They were wonderful, and
I missed them dearly. But it was it was based
on principle. And that's where the reason it got etched
into this codified. And I love the word you used there,
was codified, because that's what it is. I said. The
reason it got caualified was because we don't trust you,
right because and it's all you got to do. You
just got to look back at how all these miscellaneous
revenues come in. The resource officers resource officers really fast.
That's one thing, you know. The federal government says, i'll
give you that fifty grand a year. Well, that's what
my officers cost back in the day. I'll give you
that fifty grand for three years. After that, you got
to figure it out. Well, the minute they get it
that first year, they say, well, I can reallogate this
fifty from the general fund or the police fund somewhere else. No,
you can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but if you don't get the grant next year.
Speaker 2: That's it. Yeah, so appreciates tenchn to call. I appreciate
that legislature. It's a Republican legislator, a conservative legislator that
probably wrote that in because he sees the writing on
the wall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it was. You're right, you're absolutely right. Thanks John,
I appreciate it. Thanks for the call. Yeah, good to
hear from you. Yeah, it's the sea of penny spend
a penny. It's why we ended up with structural deficits
for so long when Democrats ran the legislature. Here, that's
exactly what they used to do. All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
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patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.