Tag search result

The old Jim Hunt crowd gathered in Raleigh on Friday for the groundbreaking of the library that will bear the former governor's name and for lunch at the Park Alumni Center at N.C. State University, Rob Christensen reports.

The crowd included a who's who from Hunt's 16 years as governor, including Jim Phillips, former chairman of the UNC Board of Governors; former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Burley Mitchell; Norris Tolson, a transportation secretary under Hunt; former Ambassador Jeanette Hyde; Hunt's former spokeman and strategist Gary Pearce; former Human Resources secretary Lucy Bode; former Cultural Resources secretary Betty McCain; former aide Ed Turlington, and former state Democratic chairwoman Barbara Allen.

Just to name a few. 

And what would a gathering of politicians be without a little fund raising? 

At the lunch, Hunt announced a $20 million fund raising campaign to help cover some of the costs of the library that will also serve as headquarters for the Institute for Emerging Issues, the think tank Hunt created.

"This is a marvelous opportunity," Hunt said. "It really is."

State Sen. Kay Hagan was not as bipartisan in the previous session.

With the Democratic Senate nominee touting her bipartisanship in the legislature, Dome decided to take a closer look at the number of Republicans who signed on to her bills.

In the 2005-06 session, the Greensboro Democrat was the primary sponsor of 37 bills. Of them, 16 had no cosponsors, eight had only Democratic cosponsors and 13 had Republican cosponsors.

A few of the Republican-cosponsored bills had more than one GOP senator on board. Overall, her 76 cosponsors included 56 Democrats and 26 Republicans, or about a three-to-one ratio.

The most frequent Republican cosponsor was Sen. Stan Bingham of neighboring Davidson County, who signed on to seven Hagan bills on funding for the ACC Hall of Champions, the Natural Science Center and the N.C. Science Competitions center; phasing out video poker; amending wine-making laws; building an addition at Guilford Community College; and boosting grants to public libraries.

Hagan also had Republican cosponsors on a pilot program on teaching new foreign languages in school, special licenses plates for the N.C. Wildlife Habitat Foundation and the Guilford Battleground, more library grants, training for 911 call centers, and making technical corrections on state laws on nonprofits.

Previously: Hagan's 2007-08 track record. 

The Triangle's representatives in Congress are tackling some bureaucratic giants today.

As previously noted, U.S. Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill is using his chairmanship of a homeland security subcommittee to take on FEMA.

U.S. Rep. Brad Miller of Raleigh is using his chairmanship of a science subcommittee to take on the EPA.

Miller today criticized the environmental agency for closing regional and research libraries around the county. He said the actions have reduced public access to environmental information.

"The most generous possible explanation is that EPA managers were stunningly incompetent," Miller said in a statement. "But it is possible that the explanation is more sinister.

"The EPA ignored their own careful plans and abruptly closed libraries, limited access to the public and EPA employees, and just threw away documents that may be irreplaceable. The EPA's ability to protect the environment and public health is badly compromised as a result."