Posted on 11/12/2008 4:18:10 PM PST by MitchellC
Governor-elect Beverly Perdue and her cronies at the state capital must have had a good laugh as the election results rolled in. I know I did. Perdue smacked Charlotte voters hard two weeks ago when she ran commercials across the state -- basically everywhere but the Charlotte and Raleigh television markets -- mocking her opponent, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, for wanting to spend state money in Charlotte.
The ads were a slap in the faces of Charlotte voters. They were also part of a clear calculation on Perdue's part that she could win by promising Charlotte-funded goodies to the rest of the state at our expense. That's been standard operating procedure for decades at the state legislature, which is controlled by rural Democrats.
The attitude in Raleigh has long been that Charlotte can afford to pay all the state's bills, plus the tab for the stuff that the state is supposed to fund in Charlotte. This same attitude was practically a campaign theme for Perdue.
Despite her best efforts to keep her anti-Charlotte commercials out of the Charlotte market, local news stations picked them up anyway and ran them again and again.
Yet amazingly, unfathomably, she won in the Charlotte area, barely beating out McCrory. The signal this sent to the down east cabal that runs the state was a powerful one. Screw Charlotte, win anyway. The repercussions will be felt for a long time, and they won't be pleasant.
For years, Charlotte motorists were forced to navigate the sudden curves of Interstate 277 in the dark. Newcomers and visitors regularly found the experience so harrowing they'd call city hall to complain, not realizing the state was to blame. It took more than a decade of begging and pleading by city officials and Mayor Pat McCrory to finally get state government to agree to fix the lights, which it was responsible for maintaining.
Piles of trash, meanwhile, litter state-owned roads and exit ramps around Charlotte. Sometimes, when it gets really bad along I-277, it looks like it rained garbage. The state is responsible for that mess, too, a situation you won't find in other North Carolina cities. Our urban roads, meanwhile, were recently ranked the third most congested in the nation in a national study. That too is the product of deliberate state neglect.
Charlotte can't seem to get Interstate 485 completed, and work that was scheduled to begin 20 years ago on Independence Boulevard still remains unfunded. Meanwhile, in Fayetteville, a $300 million interstate project sailed through the state funding process. It will carry 9,000 automobiles, fewer than Charlotte's Scaleybark Road carries, The Charlotte Observer recently reported. According to the same Observer article, there is no other instance of a loop being built for so few people anywhere along the East Coast.
Charlotte also has 20 percent of the state's crime, but gets just seven percent of the state's criminal justice funding. It's a pattern that, when combined with the fact that North Carolina has the highest state tax rates in the Southeast, is making it harder and harder for Charlotte to compete for business.
All this comes during a time when the banks, our twin economic engines, are faltering. Meanwhile, state politicians have doled out $60 million in cash incentives to Bridgestone and Goodyear tire plants in Fayetteville and Wilson in exchange for employing a couple thousand workers.
Last Tuesday, all that could have changed. Instead, state politicians learned they can starve Charlotte for state funding and still get elected anyway with Charlotte's help. They will commence doing so immediately with more fervor than in the past. A proposal is currently floating around the state capital to strip thousands of miles of state roads from the state maintenance rolls in urban areas like Charlotte. The plan is to dump what will likely add up to a large amount of the maintenance costs on Charlotte taxpayers. Given the election results, it will now no doubt go forward, as politicians will anticipate no fallout from voters.
That will likely leave Charlotte with hundreds of expensive new miles of former state roads and interstates to maintain during a time when city leaders aren't keeping up with the maintenance to current city roads. It will cost us tens of millions to hundreds of millions over the next decade. We can expect a similar attitude from state leaders toward other state responsibilities here.
Perdue counts among her mentors those who have been long been the architects of these policies.
It's going to be a long four years.
Pat McCrory waged a strong campaign and made a good showing. He’ll hopefully be heard from again.
does Charlott lean left?
He certainly did better than the previous Republican candidate.
What boggles my mind is that McCrory lost Mecklenburg county. For those who do not know NC, Mecklenburg is where Charlotte is and McCrory was a very popular mayor. But folks from Charlotte have often struggled to win statewide elections.
For those who don’t know NC there always has been a feeling that the Eastern half of the state dominates everyone else.
We can thank straight party voying.
McCrory lost Mecklenburg County by about 400 votes. Perdue had considerable help from Obama coattails in the county, as O won the county by about 100K, and so did Kay Hagan, who took Elizabeth Dole’s Senate seat. A good part of this was due to straight-ticket voting. About 118,000 Dems voted this way in the county, to about 44,000 Repubs. Also, the Dem majority on the County Commission was increased as all 3 at-large candidates were swept into office. So, yes, Charlotte is trending blue. Much of the red has moved out to the suburbs in NC and SC, to get away from high taxes and bad schools.
I never did understand NC voting. Great state NC and the people are wonderful that I have met.
Wait a second. Creative Loafing is actually criticizing and going after a DEMOCRAT?!?!?! Has hell frozen over?
I don’t live in Charlotte anymore, having left there last year, but McCrory was a pretty damn good mayor who did ALOT of things for the city. Shame on the people of Charlotte for not voting for him for governor to their own detriment (I’m assuming that Perdue’s platform of screwing over Charlotte was/is fairly well known).
LIBERALISM TRULY IS A DEGENERATIVE, SOCIETAL VIRUS.
Don't forget the out of control crime threatening to turn Charlotte into a Southern version of Detroit.
Tara Servatius is the lone conservative (and lone sane person) writing for Creative Loafing. Without her the magazine wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.
She now has her own show on WBT, weeknights 9-12. Best local show IMO, well worth listening to on the net. She covers local topics often.
Oh, that was stupid on my part. I didn’t see that Citizen Servatius wrote the article.
You’re right though about Creative Loafing. For the most part it reads like a communist comic book. The only thing it’s good for is to find out what’s going on at different bars in the area. And of course Servatius.
“I never did understand NC voting. Great state NC and the people are wonderful that I have met.”
Nobody understands us. We are a state that could send a Senate delegation that was Jesse Helms and John Edwards. How does that make sense?
“It really is a shame. McCrory ran a very good campaign (though some will say he could have used a couple of negative ads there at the end). Any other year and McCrory would have won. John McCain lost the race, not McCrory. “
Bush won the state by 12 last time. I agree with you that every single thing about the state campaign being equal those coattailes would have pulled him through.
One interesting thing is that there were probably lots of white Charlotteans who voted Obama/McCrory while many of the folks out east voted McCain/Perdue.
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