Another editorial about Titan America’s plan to rebuild a former cement plant in Castle Hayne rekindles the smoldering embers of the Stop Titan bonfire. The latest effort to delay plant construction comes from a state regulator’s recommendation: Before issuing an air quality permit to the company he wants to know “…how it plans to meet strict new federal mercury emissions standards.”

A Star-News editor says it would be helpful “if Titan officials were open about how they plan to meet the new standards.” To whom would it be helpful? To their competitors that would be delighted to learn about Titan’s innovative technology? To the general public confused about arbitrary and unreasonably restrictive government standards? To the organized environmentalists grasping for another straw with which to flail the company?

Why must Titan officials be “open about how they plan,” and the activists that oppose them are not called on to be open about their plans to prevent the company from operating its plant?

Editors bring up another issue raised to discredit Titan America. The State Bureau of Investigation is reviewing allegations (Can we guess who made them?) that “undue political pressure influenced state legislators.” Why isn’t the SBI also investigating the N. C. Coastal Federation, the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Southern Environmental Law Center to determine whether they used undue political pressure to stall the permitting process?

Finally, I’m not aware that any other developers of land must publicly show how they will meet the rules and standards set by government before they build. To my knowledge permits are issued with assumptions that people will comply. Inspections and evidence determine compliance—if that doesn’t happen, an enforcement process takes place.

Those opposed to Titan’s plan persist in using any tactic they can to deny the right of this company to build and operate a cement plant. Their defiance against property rights, the permitting process and the company’s agreement to comply with government mandates is contemptuous behavior. It reflects badly on the character of the people trying to subvert the best interests of all of us who will benefit from Titan’s contribution to the regional economy.

After he lost the race for Bald Head Island mayor by three votes, Larry Lammert started checking into an issue that has challenged coastal Carolina communities for years: improper voter registration by people who maintain domiciles and voter registrations elsewhere. Lammert was convinced that at least three voters in Bald Head were illegally registered, and he was right:

On Monday, the Brunswick County Board of Elections upheld Lammert’s voter residency challenge and removed 37 voters from the county’s voter registration rolls— another two will be heard April 20.

“I just believe we should have honest election rolls. We should have people voting where they reside, and not someplace else. And it influences the outcome of elections; it influences what happens in towns like Bald Head. I think it’s important that we clean up the rolls,” Lammert said after Monday’s hearing.

But it took months of work and thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees for Lammert to receive the outcome for which he had hoped.

In a related story, the Brunswick Beacon reported the results of its own investigation of the voter rolls in Holden Beach and nearby neighborhoods. Out of more than 1,000 records audited, the paper found a number of questionable registrations, including more than 100 voters with out-of-county or out-of-state mailing addresses and some deceased individuals, including former Brunswick County Commission Chairman David Sandifer, who died two years ago.

The issue of questionable voter rolls has previously come up in Pender County, too.

The Jacksonville Daily News cites two recent North Carolina examples to make the case for strong public records laws — the recent Kathy Taft homicide in Raleigh and another homicide that occurred in a nearby community the previous year. In both cases, law enforcement sought to withhold calls, warrants, or other records:

Police have great powers. They can come into our homes, conduct searches, question us and if they find probably cause, arrest us. While law enforcement officers generally go to great lengths to make sure they aren’t abusing those powers, there are times when abuse does occur.

One means of exposing and preventing such abuse is by keeping records such as search and arrest warrants, along with 911 emergency call recordings, available to the public.

Police and prosecutors often use the same old refrain when trying to keep public records sealed. They warn that if the information is made public, it will harm their investigation or prevent the accused from receiving a fair trial.

What keeping the information under wraps often does, however, is cover up actions of police and prosecutors.

People who have been arrested or who have had their homes searched already have that information. They are given copies of search warrants or arrest warrants when their homes are searched or when they are taken into custody.

There’s really nothing left for them to learn by making these documents public. The only ones who don’t know what is going on are members of the public, the people from whom the authorities derive their power and the people who pay their salaries.

Newly anointed North Carolina State University Chancellor Randy Woodson will take a “risk averse” tack in steering the cumbersome state ship through perilous academic waters. The “bold academic risks,” he says, will be to identify “colleges, schools and departments that will get more funding, even at the expense of others.” Notice he didn’t say anything about reduced spending for or eliminating meaningless instructional areas. Chancellor Woodson wants NCSU to be a leading institution in science and technology.
We have no problem with that.

However, it’s my guess that the chancellor will be fighting all the entrenched, diverse interests, including tenured faculty and social-engineers now firmly in control of the academic ship. Woodson wants Big U to be strong in engineering, physical sciences and mathematics; a worthy objective.

Prof. Woodson faces the gale force winds of “social leveling.” Rather than seeking students with motivation and high ability, many student bodies that are ill-prepared and uninspired get lured to the academy.

George Leef, director of research at the Pope Center for Higher Education in Raleigh has described the results: “(T)hey’ll spend a lot of time and money getting a credential that may very well prove worthless.” Mr. Leef and many others believe that this misguided effort does not help these individuals.

Further, Leef argues, we have a surplus of college graduates in the work force. Other, more productive, career paths exist—for example, internships and vocational courses. Precious resources are wasted on higher education that starves funding for more worthwhile education.

Chancellor Woodson candidly admits his dilemma. It will be difficult to “step up in front of your colleagues, and put a stake on the ground and say, at the risk of offending another discipline, we’re going to the next level” in engineering and sciences, he says.

Why? Because the goals of his “colleagues” don’t square with improving academic quality. Some will fight him to increase low-achieving student bodies and to retain watered-down and meaningless curricula.

I predict that administrators and tenured social-activist faculty will mutiny; choosing to scuttle the academic ship on the rocks of mediocrity rather than lose control to this captain who plans to steer the floundering vessel to deeper waters.

The race for Pender County Sheriff doesn’t appear to be about issues of crime and law enforcement. It’s a personal dispute gone political. From the WECT coverage:

Although the race is between Adam Dillon and Carson Smith, the focus has been taken off the incumbent. It seems like the race is between Adam Dillon and Mark Sloan, who’s a captain with the Pender County Sheriff’s Office.

“We have a very long history together,” said Dillon. “It’s been a very heated relationship in the past, and he does not want to see me get into that office because he knows he won’t have a job.”

Dillon requested a restraining order against Sloan, but later dropped it because he didn’t have the money to keep going to court. Dillon said he has the ability to defend his family and that the mention of a restraining order has decreased the amount of bashing in the campaign.

The order was originally filed because Sloan was trying to solicit information from former deputies about Dillon to post online.

U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, the Democrat who has long represented the 7th District, has issued a statement about the upcoming ObamaCare vote in the House, just in case anyone was in doubt about his position. It’s a strong no:

“Health care reform is needed, but the bill before us is too expensive, does not adequately address rising medical costs and skyrocketing insurance premiums, and tries to do too much too soon. We simply cannot afford to create a new federal bureaucracy that costs nearly $1 trillion when our national debt is $12 trillion and there is no plan in place to address it. I will not vote for it.”

Now I hope he goes one step further to announce that, if ObamaCare is “passed” through an unconstitutional process, he will not comply with its provisions. I certainly will not comply.

I hope I didn’t give the New Hanover Board of County Commissioners any ideas when I wrote a recent Carolina Journal column about how local politicians are trying to convince voters to approve sales-tax hikes. I argued that after a string of initial defeats, county commissioners around the state concocted a strategy to present voters with a rhetorical choice: say yes in a sales-tax referendum or pay higher property taxes. It’s based on a careful reading of opinion polls:

The key to understanding the strategy is to recognize why the most unpopular taxes are those levied on income and property. These taxes make the most-reliable voters in the electorate particularly furious for two reasons: 1) they get an annual bill showing how much income and property tax they pay, and 2) they know that some of their fellow residents do not.

These voters see the sales tax in a very different light. For one thing, because they pay it in dribs and drabs throughout the year, they usually have no idea how much sales tax they surrender to government. It doesn’t register the way a property-tax notice or 1040 does. Voters are also (wrongly) convinced that poor people and illegal aliens, who are less likely to own homes or reach income-tax thresholds, will only pay their “fair share” if the tax system is weighted more heavily towards sales.

This morning, the StarNews reported on New Hanover’s dire fiscal straits, and passed along the county commissioners’ argument:

The budget hole in New Hanover County is so deep that officials could close every library, abandon every park, and cancel every other discretionary program and the county would still be short nearly $3 million.

Now the county commissioners say it’s up to the voters to determine how to deal with the massive shortage, projected at more than $13 million. They can either approve a one-fourth cent sales tax referendum in May or face “drastic cuts” in county services, a property tax increase or both.

In this case, commissioners are projecting a property-tax hike either way, only it would be much smaller if the sales tax referendum passes.

The Jacksonville Daily News doesn’t think much of the usual proposals for more government spending to respond to chronic unemployment, and offers a different prescription:

For decades, business owners have understood that an overtaxed, overregulated struggling public translates into fewer dollars spent on goods and services. They also know by bitter experience that the government is generally not their friend, and small business owners, in particular, are often subjected not only to heavy taxation, but fees, restrictions and laws that make turning a profit more difficult than it should be.

When individuals are taxed at rates that leave little to live on, they do what they’ve been taught to do and cut back on their spending in any way they can. Luxuries are the first to go, but often even critical needs are subrogated on stretched-thin budgets.

Obviously, government needs some money to survive, but it cannot and should not try to be all things to all people. Now, when budgets are in the formulation process, is the time to tighten belts from Washington, D.C., to Jacksonville, and recognize that the pool of employed workers and successful businesses that can pay taxes grows smaller by the day.

By giving taxpayers and small businesses more control of their own money, the golden goose government officials are trying to kill with taxes, fees and regulations just might live to see another day.

Here are some related thoughts of my own, focusing on the problem of North Carolina’s job-killing regulations:

The biggest tax on our economic development is North Carolina’s antiquated, unwieldy, and expensive system of regulation. It raises the cost of buying land, breaking ground, forming contracts, hiring labor, acquiring raw materials, buying energy, shipping goods, and retailing services. For many businesses – particularly start-ups without much hope of yielding an immediate, taxable profit – unwise regulation costs them more that the state’s high income-tax rates do.

These higher costs might be worth paying if North Carolinians received commensurate health and safety benefits for the higher prices and lower wages these state regulations impose on us. But such benefits often prove illusory.

There’s a good piece in the Brunswick Beacon today to kick off Sunshine Week. It examines the issue of public access to court documents and judicial proceedings, laying out what is available and when. What’s not available?

The following court documents are not public record: adoption records, civil discovery, commitment records, notes and records from criminal investigations while they are being conducted, juvenile records and medical reports.

As for the North Carolina court system itself, you might find the entry from NCTransparency.org of interest. Unfortunately, it gets an F for online transparency, making available few of the resources that other agencies and many local governments regularly post online.

Brian Freskos of Wrightsville’s Lumina News has been following Ilario Pantano as he seeks the GOP nomination in the 7th Congressional District. The result is an interesting piece with a sharp lede:

Ilario Pantano must’ve excelled in boot camp: his back is straight as a board. He talks fast, like a Gatling gun with infinite ammo (some of his buddies call him “Hurricane Ilario”). He’s quick, direct, articulate and approachable. His gaze is intense, leaving any audience tinged with his memory.

Pantano is one Republican contender attempting to unseat the seven-time North Carolina Democrat in the state’s 7th District, Congressman Mike McIntyre.

The Pantano campaign is now a full-time affair. And whether to his benefit or detriment, the retired Marine has name recognition: he gained the international spotlight when the government accused him of murder, and then later exonerated all charges for the shooting deaths of two Iraqis in Mahmudiya in 2004.

That experience left him scarred, Pantano says, but not broken. He has reshaped that baggage into a message that emphasizes his armed service. And he’s leveraged his experience as a former Goldman Sachs trader, small business owner and father, to underline a tough stance on greed, fiscal responsibility and conservatism.

His platform is comprised of three tiers: job creation and economic development, national security and conservative values.