What has Gov. Beverly Perdue signed into law?

As of mid-week in crossover, the governor has signed 14 bills into law:

* S.B. 287: Reduces benefits to State Health Plan in effort to keep it solvent.

* S.B. 89: Designates Grandfather Mountain as a state park.

* H.B. 494: Allows Superior Court judges to perform weddings.

* H.B. 613: Says state does not approve of building a Navy landing field in a county that does not already have a military base.

* S.B. 198: Allows the governor to name another public school employee to the State Board of Education.

* S.B. 127: Restricts state management of institutional funds.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly included local bills and resolutions that do not require the governor's signature. 

More after the jump.

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Daniel Johnson raised $123,000 in a few weeks.

The former Navy officer decided last year to run for the Democratic nomination to face U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Cherryville Republican.

"My wife and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, praying about it," Johnson said. "We decided the country was facing some very serious challenges ahead of it, and that I could use my experience to help find some effective solutions."

He faces a May primary against Hickory businessman Steve Ivester.

Johnson lost both legs in an accident on board his ship in August of 1999. He left the Navy to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill and worked as a prosecutor in Raleigh. (Char-O)

Gov. Mike Easley said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole is letting down North Carolinians.

In an unusually sharp exchange, the Democratic governor attacked the Republican senator for not listening to local opposition to a proposed outlying landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

"The people in Gates and Camden Counties do not want the OLF, therefore I do not want the OLF in Gates and Camden," Easley said in a prepared statement. "It is time for Elizabeth Dole to learn that she represents the people of North Carolina, including those counties."

The Easley administration has worked with the Navy to develop a list of six alternative sites, but on Wednesday he asked the Navy to look at more alternatives.

Sens. Dole and Richard Burr responded by saying that they do not think the Navy should look at any more sites, but should make a decision from the ones it has already considered. (N&O)

Clarification: Sens. Dole and Burr were responding to a letter Easley sent earlier in the day, not his statement about Dole. 

The U.S. Senate has approved a measure that would require the Marines to notify thousands of former workers at Camp Lejeune Marine Base about toxins in its drinking water.

Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a Salisbury Republican, sponsored the amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill. It would require the Secretary of the Navy to notify all Marines, dependents and civilian employees assigned to the base between 1958 and 1987 about contaminated drinking wells, Barb Barrett reports.

Recipients would be told they were exposed to toxic drinking water, and asked to fill out a voluntary health survey, the amendment says.

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has found that babies exposed in utero to the drinking water developed leukemia and other cancers, as well as birth defects, such as spina bifida and cleft palate.

Government estimates show that over three decades, as many as one million people living and working at Camp Lejeune may have been exposed to drinking water contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), dichloroethylene (DCE) tetrachloroethylence (PCE), and in their degraded forms, benzene, methyl chloride and vinyl chloride, according to Dole's office.

These chemicals are found primarily in industrial degreasing solvents, dry cleaning solvents and fuels.

The amendment was co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican. The Senate version of the defense authorization bill must be reconciled with the House version.

The Navy has agreed to look at six alternative sites in North Carolina for a practice airfield it has been wanting to build near a wildlife refuge in the eastern part of the state.

The sites, which state officials asked the Navy to consider, include two in Gates County and two in Camden County in northeastern North Carolina. Those sites are near the Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Va., where most of the squadrons using the landing field would be based, reports Wade Rawlins.

Also on the list: a site at the Angola Bay gameland, on the border of Pender and Duplin counties, and a site at Hofmann Forest, on the border of Jones and Onslow counties. Those two sites are in southeastern North Carolina.

State environmental officials and Navy representatives made a joint presentation today regarding the sites to an advisory committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley.

Navy officials plan to review the alternatives and decide within the next 60 days whether to do in- depth environmental studies of any of them.

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Beverly Perdue's campaign manager grew up in Wake County.

Zach Ambrose was raised in Garner and Raleigh and graduated from Enloe High School in 1986. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning degrees in electrical engineering and Russian.

After graduation, he spent five years in the U.S. Navy, serving most of that time on the USS Halyburton, a guided missile frigate.

Ambrose has previously served as director of the state Senate Caucus in the 2002 and 2004 elections. He worked as Perdue's chief of staff from 2005 to 2007. Last week, Perdue announced he would head up her campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

His wife, Jill, is a pediatrician, and they have two young children, Catherine and John.

The Navy is considering a number of alternative sites in North Carolina and Virginia for a new landing field.

The Fleet Forces Command plans to submit a report to the Secretary of the Navy today for review. The sites are being considered as alternatives to a controversial location near a wildlife refuge Washington and Beaufort counties.

Meantime, Gov. Mike Easley announced Thursday that he is reactivating a panel to examine the economic and environmnetal aspects of the sites under consideration. The group will meet Tuesday.

"I expect the group to help the Navy in its effort to assess sites under consideration," Easley said in a prepared statement. (N&O)

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole is trying to force military officials to inform hundreds of thousands of Marine families and workers that they drank and washed in toxin-contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, The Associated Press is reporting.

Dole wants to force the secretary of the Navy to locate and notify Marines and civilians who were exposed to the water up until the mid-1980s when the base shut down contaminated wells.

The notification requirement was in an amendment she offered Wednesday to a broad military money bill before the legislation was pulled from the floor in a showdown over Iraq. The larger bill may be back as soon as September.

Government health officials have estimated as many as 1 million people may have been exposed during three decades of water contamination going back to 1957, a situation that was examined in a recent Associated Press investigation. The numbers include Marines in barracks and military families living on the sprawling Atlantic training and deployment base, as well as civilians who worked there.

Politicians usually don’t look for kudos from the nonpartisan Field & Stream magazine.

But the sportsman’s magazine’s blog labels Gov. Mike Easley a hero for opposing Navy plans for a carrier-landing practice field near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, reports Rob Christensen.

U.S. Rep. David Price thinks that the Navy will not build a landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

During a meeting with the N&O editorial board, the Chapel Hill Democrat said that the Navy has not officially said it will look for an alternative site.

"But we've had a lot of conversations," he said.

Price helped insert language into the 2008 military appropriations bill that would prohibit the Navy from spending any money on a landing strip in Washington County, but the bill has not passed the Senate yet.

He said he believes the Navy will consider an alternative site in North Carolina. He said that there are five or six on the "short list," but that's not necessarily a good thing.

"There's one site in Hyde County that's probably worse," he said.