The Southern Highland Reader

STATEWIDE–When the state of North Carolina announced a new online reservation system for its state park campgrounds late last year, there was uncertainty about how the system would be received, and about how well it would work.

The Raleigh News and Observer reports that all is well. In fact, all is very well.

Over 1,300 reservations have been made for 2,000 available campsites for 2010, the paper reports.

An excerpt:

The new system was launched in July, making it easier for people to reserve spots up to 11 months in advance at any park. Reservations can be made for stays as short as one night or as long as two weeks.

The new system should eliminate what used to be long lines starting New Year’s Day at popular parks such as Kerr, Jordan and Falls lakes. Under the old system, about 2,000 campsites could only be reserved by paying in person at the park or taking the chance on the U.S. Postal Service. Visitors were permitted to reserve spots only up to a week in duration.

Read the story here.

STATEWIDE-The Raleigh News and Observer reports that the state of North Carolina will urge 78,000 state residents whose unemployment benefits recently expired to re-apply for extended benefits recently approved by congress.

An excerpt:

The N.C. Security Employment Commission is preparing to send out the letters this month as it begins administering the extension, which increases benefits by up to 20weeks. Congress boosted maximum jobless benefits five weeks ago from 79 weeks to 99 weeks in the midst of the nation’s most severe economic recession in decades.

Read the story here.

STATEWIDE–North Carolina’s charter school law is weak, according to the Center for Education Reform, a national organization based in Maryland that promotes charter schools.

Lynn Bonner at the Raleigh News and Observer blogs that the organization criticizes North Carolina for limiting the state’s number of charter schools to 100, and for failing to help existing schools with facilities costs. The Center ranks North Carolina 29th of 40 states that have charter school laws.

View state-by-state rankings here.

Raleigh News and Observer editorializes on this subject here.

STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer’s Mark Johnson reports today that the state of North Carolina will pay a half-billion dollars to clean up some 6,500 deteriorating underground storage tanks across the state.

The state maintains a fund to help take care of such tanks, which often hold fuel, leak as they age, and contaminate groundwater. Property owners are taking advantage of the fund in increasing numbers, and the state is looking for ways to mitigate the cost.

Among the possibilities: raising the motor fuel and kerosene inspection tax from 1/4-cent to 7/16-cent per gallon to generate more money for the cleanup fund, requiring commercial tank owners to buy insurance to cover cleanup costs, and requiring noncommercial tank owners to pay 20 percent of cleanup costs up to $5,000.

Jackson County residents became familiar with this problem two-and-a-half years ago, when an old tank alongside US 23/74 east of Sylva leaked and contaminated drinking water in the nearby residential neighborhood in Racking Cove.

The Tuckasegee Water and Sewer Authority eventually ran a line from Sylva to the community to provide clean water.

Read Johnson’s story here.

Note: This post was made in August of 2008, but has been read consistently since then. Here it is again, with comments, and this new link to a story from National Public Radio.

An excerpt from the NPR story:

“People fear roundabouts in America — they’ve been called ‘Circles of Death,’ Vanderbilt says. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”

The geometry of a roundabout eliminates one of the most dangerous moves you can make in driving: a left turn against fast-moving oncoming traffic. Also, since traffic circles involve a lot of other drivers and a driver is not relying on signs and symbols, drivers must make their own decisions and be aware of other traffic.

If that sounds stressful for drivers, Vanderbilt says a little stress might not be a bad thing. “I think they tend to act more cautiously, which is a positive result,” Vanderbilt says.

Here’s the original post:

RALEIGH/STATEWIDE-I lived in Waynesville for a while a little less than a decade ago, and during that time residents were pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to build more thoughtfully planned roads.

That was when the first roundabout intersection that I’d seen anywhere near my native state first came up. It’s long since been installed and works well, and another one or two have been added, but at the time, you’d have thought by the uproar that the DOT was asking us all to give up cars and ride kangaroos to work.

(Story continues below)

Learn more about Roundabout intersections

Examples:

A wikipedia overview
Distracting Miss Daisy: Why stop signs and speed limits endanger Americans; The Atlantic Monthly
Roundabouts USA

(Continued from above)

Meanwhile, the smart roads folks — myself included — would argue ad nauseam — mostly to people who already agreed with us — that skinny roads don’t cause traffic, bad intersections do, and so intersections that require full stops must by nature be bad intersections. When we were really on our high horses, we’d wonder how people who spent their weekends watching a sequence of hundreds of left turns on some racetrack or another couldn’t handle the prospect of a simple roundabout.

Lift quote from an article in the Raleigh News and Observer:

How a roundabout works:

In place of a red light or a stop sign to hold some drivers while others turn left or drive through the intersection, a roundabout pulls everybody into a circle.

When traffic is heavy, you pause at a yield sign until you can enter the counterclockwise flow. When the circle is clear, drivers on each street can move through the intersection without stopping.

It’s a little slower than moving through a green light — but a lot faster than stopping for a red one. That little slowdown is one reason roundabouts reduce crashes.

Here’s another lift quote from the same article:

North Carolina has built about 60 roundabouts in the past decade — not counting all the little ones in subdivisions and shopping centers, says Jim H. Dunlop, DOT state congestion management engineer. He said we could see 600 more in the next 10 years.

And here’s the article itself, written by staff writer Bruce Siceloff.

ASHEVILLE–11th District Rep. Heath Shuler said mildly nice things about Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a speech yesterday in Asheville, and the result was a comical fit of pique by a Republican National Committee spokesman.

In general, Shuler suggested that the criticism of Pelosi might be, oh, shall we say, exaggerated.

In response, RNC spokesman Andy Seré said:

“Heath Shuler is the one who’s ‘misunderstood’. He may call himself a Blue Dog, but Shuler’s lavish Pelosi-praise has revealed him to be little more than a lap dog for the most liberal speaker in U.S. history. She may have let him off the leash this weekend in a vain attempt to salvage his re-election bid, but his political affair with Nancy Pelosi is destined to land him in the doghouse with Western North Carolinians.”

Story from the Asheville Citizen-Times
Story from the Raleigh News and Observer

STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer’s Mark Johnson writes today that North Carolina’s community college system is seeing a huge jump in enrollment.

We posted here, earlier, about increases in enrollment at Southwestern Community College in Sylva, and also noted a substantial increase at Western Carolina University. The WCU jump bucks a trend of more-or-less steady enrollment at four year schools statewide.

Here’s an excerpt from the N&O story:

College enrollment nationally hit an all-time high last October of 11.5 million, or 40 percent of young adults from age 18 to 24, according to a Pew Center study released Thursday. Enrollment has been rising for years, but the recent spike was entirely at community colleges, according to the report.

While enrollment at four-year institutions was flat from 2007 to 2008, community college student ranks jumped from 3.1 million to 3.4 million young adults. The schools have seen that uptick continue this year.

“That’s the community college story,” said Scott Ralls, president of the state system. “The worse the economy is, the more likely we are to grow.”

Read the entire N&O piece here.

RALEIGH–Avram Friedman, Sylva resident and Executive Director of the clean air activist organization the Canary Coalition was one of six protestors arrested last weekend at the North Carolina governor’s mansion in Raleigh.

Here’s a brief piece from the Raleigh News and Observer.

Below is an essay from Friedman titled “Why I chose to be arrested”:

On Saturday, October 24 there were thousands of demonstrations around the world, in more than 130 nations, millions of people, gathering to focus attention on the climate catastrophe unfolding in our lifetimes. About two hundred years ago, prior to the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere contained roughly 270 parts per million of carbon dioxide. The worldwide scientific community has reached virtual consensus that to avoid major disruption to life-support systems there needs to be a sustained level of less than 350 parts per million of C02. But, today, due largely to the burning of fossil fuels in industrial processes and transportation, the level of C02 has risen to 390. If we don’t act quickly to change our methods and our habits, we are risking the viability of life as we know it on this earth.

In North Carolina, we have a special mission because this state is the home of Duke Energy, one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases in the world. And while more than 100 new coal-burning power plants have been canceled over the past three years in the United States of America, due to climate, pollution and economic concerns, Duke Energy is going full-steam ahead with construction of its mammoth 800 megawatt Unit 6 at Cliffside, in Rutherford County, about 50 miles west of Charlotte.

We have to be working on a plan to phase out all 14 existing utility-owned coal-burning power plants in North Carolina in the next decade or less, along with all coal plants everywhere. But, to begin construction on a new coal plant at this late hour is a form of extreme psychological denial.

Flying in the face of logic and reason, almost like a spiteful and willful child, Jim Rogers and Duke Energy continue construction at Cliffside. Construction at Cliffside continues even though energy consumption in North Carolina is declining and will continue to decline into the foreseeable future due to advancements in energy efficiency and due to conservation efforts.

Even though the latest report by the U.S. Geological Survey reveals that national retrievable coal reserves are diminishing rapidly and the cost of coal will inevitably soon rise beyond practical economical thresholds, construction at Cliffside continues.

Despite the fact that North Carolina has vast wind energy resources and the cost of building large-scale wind projects is lower per megawatt than building coal plants, with far fewer health, environmental and economic liabilities, construction at Cliffside continues.

Despite the fact that North Carolina has tremendous solar energy potential with the cost of solar technology diminishing on almost a daily basis, Duke Energy continues to feed precious financial resources into an outdated and horribly polluting technology at Cliffside.

Despite the fact that burning coal has saturated the environment with mercury, causing fetal brain damage, autism and learning disabilities in children; burning coal is causing acid rain, killing the biodiversity of our mountainous, forested and agricultural regions; burning coal is responsible for deadly high ozone levels causing asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease and early death for tens of thousands of people each year, Duke energy continues construction at Cliffside.

Despite diminishing fresh water supplies to feed a growing population in the region, Duke Energy continues to build a power plant that will use millions of gallons of water each day, and alter the temperature of water used for cooling, threatening habitat and life-support systems downstream of the plant.

Despite wind-blown coal-burning waste ash piles, failed slurry pond dams, massive and catastrophic toxic spills, despite the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining, construction at Cliffside has relentlessly continued.

Despite federal law and court decisions regulating carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant, and despite the fact that Cliffside Unit 6 will produce 6 million tons of CO2 each year, for the next fifty years, as much as a million cars, yet construction at Cliffside continues.

Like an undisciplined and spoiled child, used to getting whatever it wants, despite the deepest recession since the Great Depression, when people are having to make choices between paying rent, buying food or buying medicine, Duke Energy stamps its feet and demands that the Utilities Commission raise electrical rates to pay for an utterly unnecessary and wasteful power plant at Cliffside so it can sell more energy to increase its profits by expanding its area of monopoly into new territories.

One would think that given the weight of all these reasons to stop Cliffside that our public servants in the state government would rise to the occasion to protect the citizenry from this destructive, childish behavior. That’s their job, isn’t it? After all, Beverley Perdue, during her campaign to be elected Governor of North Carolina spoke out against the construction of the Cliffside power plant.

But, something happened between then and now. About three-quarters of a million dollars in campaign contributions made its way into the electoral process from the utility industry. In 2008, Beverly Purdue’s campaign alone received about $26,000 from The Duke Energy Political Action Committee and donations directly from Duke Energy executive officers. Since then, Governor Perdue has dropped her opposition to Cliffside. Business-as-usual politics, I suppose.

But, these are not business-as-usual times and we can’t allow a set of disproportionate campaign contributions destroy our children’s future. So, on October 24, 2009, about 150 demonstrators delivered a message to the Perdue Administration that she has a greater obligation than fulfilling the every wish and dream of Duke Energy. She has a responsibility to the people of North Carolina to protect public health and the environment by beginning to phase out all coal plants in this state, starting with Cliffside. She has an obligation to stand up to Duke Energy and say “This madness stops now!” She has an obligation to come out of hiding and meet with members of the environmental community to discuss steps to effectively address climate change and energy issues. She has an obligation to exercise vision and work with others to plan a future that is sustainable, replete with high-paying green technology jobs, clean air and water, renewable energy deployment, wind farms, solar roofs, economic incentives for investment in efficiency. She has an obligation to dramatically reduce North Carolina’s carbon footprint. She has an obligation to stop Cliffside. She has an obligation to represent the public interest.

The demonstration in Raleigh, on October 24, was coordinated by Greenpeace and NC WARN with support from the Canary Coalition, Clean Air Carolina, Clean Water for NC, NC Green Party, NC Fair Share, NC Progressive Democrats and Southern Energy Network.

Six people, Dick Paddock of Chapel Hill; Jean Larson of Asheville, Keval Kaur Khalsa of Durham; John Allen, a UNC-Chapel Hill student from Winston-Salem, Jim Warren of Efland and myself, Avram Friedman, of Sylva, with the support of 150 demonstrators across the street, chose to deliver this message through non-violent civil disobedience, by crossing a police line in front of the Governor’s mansion, on Blount Street, in Raleigh. For some of us it was the second arrest this year. I want to thank the Capital Police for their professional behavior in peacefully and respectfully arresting us. I guess many of them have children too.

Series: cliffside, Duke rate hikes

STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer’s Brooke Cain blogs today about Saturday Night Live’s send-up of John Edwards.

Writes Cain’s colleague Mark Johnson: “Who says John Edwards no longer has influence? He’s still providing fodder for Saturday Night Live.”

An excerpt:

[In the skit] The panel is comprised of media experts played by Drew Barrymore, Kristin Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis. The group astutely decides that the trouble occurs when  weiners want to go someplace where they shouldn’t, and that such news is so popular because men like knowing what other men do with their weiners, and women like seeing pictures of women who have touched famous weiners so that they can compare themselves physically to those women.

Also, the proliferation of weiners on the internet is hurting “weiner print media.”

In the Edwards bit, Kristin Wiig’s character says: “If you’re a celebrity and you’ve done something embarrassing with your weiner, that’s all people remember. Like John Edwards. He was a distinguished Senator, but  I mostly remember him for his weiner.”

Read Cain’s piece here.

View the sketch on Saturday Night Live here.

STATEWIDE–We noted last week that The Center for Science in the Public Interest thinks it’s a good idea to tax soda pop.

Along the same lines, the Raleigh News and Observer noted over the weekend that the NC Medical Society might recommend taxation of nutritionally worthless foodstuffs.
An excerpt from the story:

“Obesity is our number one health issue, as far as chronic issues are concerned,” said Scott Donaldson, a Hendersonville urologist who supports the resolution. The resolution includes a series of “whereases” that discuss the rise of obesity in the state (rank – 12th in a recent report), the costs of treating it and its link to various ailments such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

The N&O adds that the NC Medical Society resolution is expected to be discussed in committee on Saturday, Oct. 31. If the committee sends it to the society’s House of Delegates, they’ll vote the next day.

More reading:

Read the N&O blog post here.
Report on obesity (mentioned in excerpt above) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

STATEWIDE–From the Raleigh News and Observer:

North Carolina’s air quality this summer was the best it’s been in more than three decades — the combined result of environmental laws, balmy weather and the recession.

The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources said Monday that the state had just six “code orange” days in which ground-level ozone levels exceeded federal clean air standards. That’s the lowest number since some local governments began tracking air quality in the state in the early 1970s. In the summer of 2008, the state had 36 days of unhealthy ozone levels, and 66 the year before that.

The primary reason for the decline in ozone levels is lower emissions from coal-fired power plants and automobiles, according to DENR. The state’s Clean Smokestacks Act of 2002 required the state’s 14 coal-burning plants to cut ozone-forming emissions by three-fourths by 2012. Coal is used to generate more than half the state’s electricity.

More here from the N&O.

STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer editorializes on the recent, near unanimous decision of the State Board of Community Colleges to allow undocumented immigrants into state community colleges.

Here’s the N&O’s lead:

You might think such a move would be easy and popular, but it wasn’t easy and this particular change may not be widely supported, at least right away. Opposition to admitting illegal immigrants to community colleges has become a flashpoint issue in North Carolina, and Republican officials, joined by Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue and Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, immediately criticized the 18-member State Board of Community Colleges for its near-unanimous decision. (Dalton, who has a seat on the board, was the lone “no” vote.)

Here’s hoping, however, that the logic of the board’s action and its carefully crafted nature will cool the most overheated of the opposition. North Carolinians are fair-minded people, and the decision the community college board has taken is fair to all. If anything, it is tougher on the young people involved than are the policies of most states.

Here’s the rest of the column.

NATIONAL-The Raleigh News and Observer follows up today on the impact of a Raleigh basketball player’s refusal to honor her letter of intent to attend Western Carolina University.

Evans changed her mind about Western after the coach who recruited her left. The university at first refused to release her from her letter of intent, and Evans’s family initiated legal action.

The N&O’s lead:

Many of the best high school senior basketball players in the country will sign national letters of intent with colleges beginning Nov. 11.

But for those under the age of 18 who sign, the letters might not be legally binding, at least in North Carolina.

Read the entire piece here.

NATIONAL–An article in the Raleigh News and Observer touches on North Carolina blue dog congressmen Heath Shuler and Mike McIntyre today, two right-leaning Dems who have made things difficult for President Obama and his health plan.

Shuler represents the southern mountains in Washington.

An excerpt from the piece:

“Some of the commentary coming out of the White House has ratcheted up the pressure on the Blue Dogs in this sense: They’re being told the whole party will be hurt if the Democrats don’t succeed,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“There’s a pull for them to be party loyalists,” he said.

Read the whole article here.

REGIONAL–My family’s recent visit with friends in a Cincinnati neighborhood brought to mind all the clothesline conversations that took place down in Raleigh this summer.

NC state legislator Pricey Harrison, of Greensboro, introduced legislation that would have forbidden municipalities from outlawing clotheslines (although homeowners associations would’ve been able to continue doing so).

Her attempt died in the senate, but it got plenty of press. What goes around comes around, you see, and air-drying laundry has sort of become a thing.

From a Raleigh News and Observer editorial:

We’re not sure how the notion arose that outdoor clotheslines are something akin to a public nuisance, appropriately banned in any self-respecting neighborhood. What we are sure of is that a natural process for drying clothes that avoids use of an electricity-hogging machine dryer is one that helps conserve energy and also saves money. (Not wanting to get bogged down in aesthetics, no judgment will be passed here on the relative touchy-feely-sniffy merits of clothes dried in the great outdoors by God’s own sun and wind versus clothes dried and shriveled in a hot, spinning tin can.)

State senators had a chance to stand tall for the venerable clothesline. But members of the Commerce Committee — were certain senators’ machine-dried knickers too tight? — decided that the state shouldn’t presume to override local anti-clothesline rules.

More recently, the Asheville Citizen-Times has picked up the ball and run with it, publishing this piece in today’s paper.

Here’s an excerpt:

Switching to low-tech drying saves energy but can get residents in hot water with associations, landlords or towns that see clotheslines as eyesores. Now states from Maine to Hawaii are stepping in to override local laws and rules.

“What we’re talking about here is a cultural shift,” said Alexander Lee, founder of pro-clothesline group Project Laundry List. “It would be nice to go from community association to community association to have this discussion and change the rules, but there are 300,000 of them, and we need to hurry along now if we’re going to cope with climate change.”

Vermont, Maine and Hawaii this year joined Florida, Utah and Colorado in passing laws with varying levels of protections for clotheslines.

As for our Cincinnati friends, theirs is a pretty bungalow in a century-old neighborhood. All the lots on the street are about the same size, with small front yards and long, narrow back yards. And while most of the homeowners keep their back yards neat, they do so in a practical way.

The neighbors on one side, for instance, are into archery. The folks on the other side have let the woods grow back in.

Our friends’ yard, meanwhile, is home to a nice garden, a tree house, a hammock tree, and — you bet — a nice clothesline rig. It runs on its own made-for-the-purpose pulley right off the back porch, and its use has become part of daily household rituals that Tara and Dave enjoy — and profit from.

“There aren’t many appliances more expensive to run than a clothes dryer,” Dave says.

CULLOWHEE–Last year, Raleigh high school basketball star Kelsey Evans signed a national letter of intent to play womens basketball for dynamic coach Kellie Harper at Western Carolina.

But when Harper left for a job at NC State in late spring, Evans, who is very good, but presumably not good enough to play at State, decided to go to school closer to home, at Elon.

Here’s the catch, though: Western hasn’t released Evans from her letter of intent. And Evans, interestingly, has sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The implications for the NCAA could be far-reaching, because it is under growing pressure to reconcile its lofty ideals of student athleticism with the high-dollar, often tawdry realities of college athletics.

The impact at Western could be substantial … Both the Raleigh and Asheville daily newspapers have taken Western to task for making things difficult for this young athlete. Keith Jarrett, the senior sportswriter at the Asheville Citizen-Times, was apoplectic yesterday, winding up his opinion piece with a rhetorical question that shouldn’t have made it past any editor who’d ever even met a lawyer.

The impact at Western could be substantial, too. Both the Raleigh and Asheville daily newspapers have taken Western to task for making things difficult for this young athlete. Keith Jarrett, the senior sportswriter at the Asheville Citizen-Times, was apoplectic yesterday, winding up his opinion piece with a rhetorical question that shouldn’t have made it past any editor who’d ever even met a lawyer.

My first take on the subject was this: why on earth would WCU risk the bad publicity of playing tug-of-war with a kid who was obviously never going to attend Western Carolina? It wouldn’t be good for the young woman (who should be the priority) and certainly nothing good could come of it for the school. I wrote as much.

Well, nothing good will come of it for the school, that’s for sure, but the story is a little more nuanced than it might seem.

Here’s a simplified version: when a scholarship student-athlete wants to leave one college for another, that athlete must petition his or her current school for a release. When a student is enrolled, this is a relatively straightforward process. The athlete petitions the athletics department for a release, and if the department says no, she makes her case to a school committee, and ultimately a final decision is reached. It’s been implied by other sources that these releases are most often a formality, but apparently not so.

Complications, one of them being that a transfer to a rival school is a no-no, can interfere.

Things are a little more murky when a student — like Evans — signs a national letter of intent, but has a change of heart before she enrolls. She’s free to go to school wherever she chooses, of course, but unless WCU gives her a release, and if she goes to another NCAA Div. 1 school, she has to wait a year to play basketball. And she loses a year of eligibility. This is a NCAA rule.

Evans, her attorney and her parents are taking exception to this rule, saying, in essence, that if coach Kellie Harper can break her contract, Evans should have the right to do the same. Evans’ lawyer says the rules are geared to protect college athletics departments, not kids. This point of law is where the NCAA has its work cut out for it.

Meanwhile, WCU Athletics Director Chip Smith would argue that a lot of time and money is spent recruiting players, and that the letter of intent is a contract, reserving the student a place on the team and a desk in the classroom.

Evans asked to be released from her obligation to Western because the coach she wanted to play for was gone. But she wants to play for Elon — in fact is already enrolled there — and the Phoenix are in the Southern Conference along with WCU.

That’s why Western said no.

Newspaper coverage has implied that Western more or less forced the frustrated Evans family to sue. It is possible, though, that after the initial “no”, the family’s contact with the university has been minimal — the appeals process for non-enrolled students is through the NCAA, not the school. This being the case, it is clear that the newspapers are taking the student’s family’s word that Western is being difficult.

Maybe, maybe not. WCU isn’t talking, playing once again its familiar role of an ostrich in the media headlights.

But if it is true that the Evans asked only once, the suggestion that WCU is going out of its way to make things difficult for Evans is a trumped-up charge. In fact, if it is true, and if Evans and her parents expected to be automatically released from their agreement no questions asked, then we’re left to wonder whether they were taking their obligation a little too lightly.

STATEWIDE–A recent study showed that the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina system is a little top-heavy.

An excerpt from a Raleigh News and Observer editorial:

A private consultant, funded by an anonymous donor, has found that the Chapel Hill campus spends more on administrative costs than it does on academics. The categories may be somewhat overlapping – the academic enterprise requires administrative support – but the strange balance suggests that something is out of whack.

The consultants, Bain & Company, cited findings showing that the university has too many layers in its bureaucracy, more than 100 academic centers and institutes without standard reporting structures — many with their own finance, human resources and technology staffs — and inadequate technology supporting its research projects.

At a time when North Carolina’s budget is a few billion dollars in the hole, and the public universities are fighting economic moves they say could affect classrooms and course offerings, the last thing that a flagship institution in the UNC system needs is a report indicating bloat at the top. The report says, for one example, that up to $6 million a year could be saved if those centers and institutes consolidated their support services.

There is no shortage of people who argue that higher education is falling away to simple commodity–this is a common theme these day–but when academically-renowned UNC Chapel Hill’s priorities are askew, how bad might the situation be at the sister campuses that are less in the spotlight?

STATEWIDE–When lawmakers in Raleigh yesterday tried to end a long impasse between the senate and house with a cobbled together budget proposal, Governor Bev Perdue said no.

The governor didn’t use the word “veto”, but it was implied, and lawmakers are now knocked back a notch or two in their efforts to solve North Carolina’s budget gap and to begin the state’s overdue fiscal year.

The Raleigh News and Observer’s lead:

RALEIGH — A plan to increase the income tax of all North Carolina taxpayers is apparently dead.

After Gov. Beverly Perdue upended budget deliberations by fellow Democrats in the legislature, however, virtually everything else about a solution to the budget deficit is back up for grabs.

Perdue, hinting at a veto, said she told legislative leaders Thursday that she would not support an income tax increase that hit anyone other than the wealthy. “Who in the world thinks, in these trying times for families, you can raise income tax for working families and middle class families?” Perdue said at a hastily called news conference outside the Capitol on Thursday evening.

The move sends lawmakers back to the drawing board, first to give themselves more time to come up with a budget, then to try to find common ground that the governor will accept. The process could take many weeks, and it further vexes state employees–especially educators, who are trying to begin a school year with no real idea how much money they have to work with.

STATEWIDE–Where do North Carolina’s senators stand on confirmation of the president’s supreme court nominee?

Predictably, Sen. Burr, a Republican, is dragging his feet.

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Burr spokesman David Ward said Monday that the Republican senator wants to ask Sotomayor a few more questions about her record. Burr is scheduled to meet with the Supreme Court nominee next week.

“Senator Burr is continuing to review Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record as well as her remarks at last week’s Judiciary Committee hearing,” Ward said in a prepared statement.  “He will be able to make a more thorough assessment of her qualifications after meeting with her next week and asking specific, substantive questions to ensure that she is committed to upholding the Constitution and the rights and freedoms it protects.”

Sen. Hagan, a Democrat, is supporting confirmation, and reached back to 1998 for the vote count in which the iconic Jesse Helms supported Sotomayor’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is based in New York.

STATEWIDE–We touched recently on part of NC Gov. Beverly Perdue’s effort to bridge the gap between the senate and house budget plans. Hers is a revenue plan that suggests, in part, that raising taxes on recreational activities might be a good idea.

The suggestion brought a chorus of I-don’t-think-sos from mountain tourism folks, but as the Raleigh News and Observer notes today, it isn’t exactly eliciting golf claps from this industry, either.