DURHAM, N.C. – On Nov. 12, State Representatives Paul Luebke and Mickey Michaux and State Senator Robert Atwater will visit Durham Technical Community College for a panel discussion about how the state budget is developed and the challenges faced in the 2009 legislative session.

The legislators will discuss the difficulties of plunging revenues during the recession and the compromises that were made to develop a balanced budget. The legislators will also speak about the role of advocacy groups in the process.

The event is sponsored by Durham Tech and the League of Women Voters of the Orange-Durham-Chatham Unit. The event will take place in the Multi-Purpose Room of the Phail Wynn, Jr. Student Services Center from 3 to 4:30 p.m. A reception after the discussion will offer those attending an opportunity to meet the legislators.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Several dozen legislators are back in Raleigh to discuss North Carolina’s tax structure and whether an overhaul can be approved as soon as next spring.

A joint House-Senate finance committee met for the first time Tuesday to hear from experts on the state’s sales tax and its exemptions.

Democratic leaders at the General Assembly worked unsuccessfully during this year’s session to fashion a plan to lower tax rates and increase the number of items subject to taxation. The Legislature instead raised the sales tax rate and placed a surcharge on the highest wage earners.

House finance leader Rep. Paul Luebke of Durham County said the meeting is a sign lawmakers are committed to address tax issues.

RALEIGH, N.C. – As the deadline for passing a new budget nears one month overdue, a new poll released today by the Civitas Institute shows that an overwhelming majority of voters think legislators should stop getting paid until they complete their work on the state’s budget.

According to the live caller poll of 600 voters, 65 percent of voters thought that NC legislators should forego their paychecks if they miss the deadline of passing a budget by the end of the fiscal year.  27 percent said they should continue to get paid.  8 percent of voters were unsure.

“As budget negotiations drag on into the dog days of summer, voters obviously feel elected officials should complete the job they were sent to Raleigh to do,” said Civitas Institute Senior Legislative Analyst Chris Hayes.  “The only job required of the General Assembly is to adopt a state budget, if legislators are not going to do that on time, then they should not be compensated for a job they aren’t doing.”

The proposal is supported across all ages, races and political parties, and receives the highest support (75 percent) from government employees.

Full text of questions:

NC Legislators are supposed to pass a state budget by July 1st.  Do you think legislators should stop getting paid if they miss this deadline until they pass a budget?

Yes – 65%
No – 27%
Not Sure – 8%

The study of 600 registered voters was conducted July14-17, 2009 by Tel Opinion Research of Alexandria, Virginia.  All respondents were part of a fully representative sample of registered voters in North Carolina. For purposes of this study, voters we interviewed had to have voted in either the 2004, 2006 or 2008 general elections or were newly registered voters since 2008.

The confidence interval associated with a sample of this size is such that: 95 percent of the time, results from 600 interviews (registered voters) will be within +-4% of the “True Values.” True Values refer to the results obtained if it were possible to interview every person in North Carolina who had voted in either the 2004, 2006 or 2008 general elections or were newly registered voters since 2008.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – The number of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) representatives in the national legislatures of 18 countries around the world has tripled since 1998.

That finding is among those in research by political scientist Andrew Reynolds, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His paper, “The Presence and Impact of Openly Gay and Lesbian Politicians in the Parliaments of the World,” finds that although these representatives are in the minority in the legislatures in which they serve, their presence correlates with passage of more gay-friendly laws.

Reynolds, who teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences, said that openly gay representatives must build coalitions with heterosexual colleagues to succeed in passing gay-friendly laws in such areas as same-sex marriage and partnership, adoption rights and hate-crime law.

“Gay members of parliaments have never been numerous enough to act as a voting block with leverage, but they can be legislative entrepreneurs who help set agendas and educate their colleagues on related issues,” said Reynolds, associate professor of political science and chair of the international and area studies curriculum. Familiarity appears to breed tolerance.

“When the gay person becomes a person with a name, human talents and foibles, aging parents and young children, sport team obsessions and opinions about the latest TV show, it becomes more difficult for their parliamentary colleagues to overtly discriminate against or fail to protect them through legislation,” Reynolds said.

The study identified 67 openly gay legislators or members of parliaments (MPs) in the 18 countries at the end of 2008, compared with 22 in 1998.  “The current crop of 67 is undoubtedly the largest collection of openly gay MPs in history,” Reynolds said.

Of the 67, 50 identified themselves as gay men, 14 as lesbians, two as bisexual and one as transgendered. The largest number per legislature was 14 in the British House of Commons; the largest percentage was six percent, in the Netherlands.

Reynolds found that legislatures with the most LGBT members – 60 of the 67 – were in established democracies of Western Europe, North America or Australia and New Zealand. There were two each in Africa and Latin America and one each in the Middle East and Asia.

Reynolds’ cited the American-based Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which looks at local, state and national elected bodies. The fund reported last August that there were about 20 out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians in elected office in the United States in 1987. By 2003, the fund noted, 218 of the roughly 511,000 Americans in elective office were openly LBGT – less than .05 percent. Three served in Congress, 47 in state legislatures and the rest in local government. As of 2008, the total number of LGBT officeholders had tripled to 602, including 79 state legislators and 28 mayors.

Legislatures are not the only offices in which LGBTs have made gains, Reynolds’ paper noted. Last year, there were nine openly gay cabinet ministers in the countries Reynolds studied. And last February, Iceland elected the world’s first openly gay prime minister, Jóhanna Siguróardóttir.

Reynolds assigned numeric values ranging from minus two to two for the presence or absence of gay-friendly policies in each of seven areas:

* legal relationships
* marriage
* civil unions
* adoption rights
* laws against discrimination
* sexual orientation as part of a hate-crime law
* gays not banned from military service

“Each variable represents a distinct legal right or denial of a right,” he said.

Reynolds then used these values to determine combined scores for all seven areas for each of 76 countries – 18 with openly gay legislators and 58 without. He notes now that this year, six nations have begun offering same-sex marriage: Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa and Spain.

Three states of the United States had gay marriage laws in 2008: Massachusetts, California and Connecticut. California’s was struck down by referendum in November 2008, but Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire passed gay marriage legislation in 2009.

Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and Spain were the highest-scoring in Reynolds’ tallies for the most gay-friendly nations, each with five out of a possible six points. The least tolerant of gays, scoring minus two each, were Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. The average score was .96 and the standard deviation was 1.73.

The highest-scoring nations tended to have the most LGBT legislators, Reynolds found:
“Having even a few openly gay legislators is linked with a significant improvement in the legal rights of gay people.” Advocacy by LGBT groups also is influential, as is the level of social acceptance of LGBTs in each country.

“The presence of minority members in a legislature aids in breaking down intolerance and in building alliances that cut across pre-existing cleavages within society,” Reynolds said. “Globally the trajectory is clear. More and more openly gay candidates are winning office, and legal equality, across a variety of domains, is gathering momentum.”

A deadline looms this week for lawmakers to get moving on scores of bills. The result: a week’s worth of cram sessions for the state House and Senate, the N&o reports.

RALEIGH, N.C.  – North Carolina legislators were facing a narrow vote on a proposed law that would ban smoking at indoor restaurants, bars and any other places people are working.
  
The House was scheduled to vote Wednesday on legislation that advocates say aims to eliminate the dangers of secondhand smoking. Opponents said it takes away a business owner’s choice.

Similar efforts failed in the House twice in the past two years.
 
The smoking ban is a personal quest for its lead sponsor, lung cancer survivor and House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman. The Davidson County Democrat said he could delay consideration beyond Wednesday based on whether he counts more supporters or opponents on hand when the roll is called.

E-mail messages to a most government officials are public records, available for anyone to view, but for state legislators there are exemptions to the state’s public records law, the N&O reports.

RALEIGH, N.C. – The recently formed and self-described “broad and diverse collection of non-profit organizations, service providers, and professional associations” calling itself Together NC is cherry-picking state spending data in an attempt to mislead lawmakers and North Carolinians that increased state spending “isn’t the problem” causing the current budget deficit.

The collection of special interest groups was formed in Raleigh to lobby legislators for a “balanced approach” to solve the state’s current budget deficit.  In other words, they want to make sure any reductions in state spending are kept to a minimum and revenue increases are implemented to help fill the budget hole.

According to their  “Get the Facts” page:

“Spending isn’t the problem. The reality is that spending per person is actually down from eight years ago. This is a fiscally conservative state, and we don’t go on spending sprees.”

“The ‘spending per person is actually down from eight years ago’ is an embarrassingly misleading use of data. Legislators and citizens should not be fooled,” said Brian Balfour, a policy analyst for the Civitas Institute.  “Together NC cherry-picked this isolated outlier as some sort of ‘evidence’ that state spending is trending down in North Carolina, but the overwhelming amount of data indicates the opposite.”

A more complete summary of spending trends (as detailed here) reveals that overall spending trends are up dramatically:

Even after adjusting for inflation, per person budgeted spending in North Carolina is:

·         Up 13.2 percent over 5 years

·         Up 8 percent over 10 years

·         Up 25.7 percent over 15 years

·         Up 94 percent over 25 years

“Inflation-adjusted, per-person General Fund spending nearly doubled in the last 25 years, but according to Together NC, North Carolina doesn’t ‘go on spending sprees.’ Such claims are disingenuous and intended to blur reality,” said Balfour.

“Furthermore, North Carolina’s state debt more than doubled in just six years (2001-2007). Even Together NC would be hard pressed to honestly describe such a feat as ‘fiscally conservative.’ It is quite disappointing that Together NC would resort to such questionable tactics to garner attention for their agenda.”

RALEIGH, N.C.  – Lawmakers and lobbyists get another chance to discuss a broad smoking ban in North Carolina.

The House Health Committee scheduled debate Thursday on a measure that would prohibit smoking in restaurants and bars, public places and indoor work sites. A similar but watered-down bill failed in the House in both 2005 and 2007.

Democratic Rep. Hugh Holliman of Davidson County is one of the bill’s primary sponsors. He has said the health dangers from secondhand smoke can no longer be ignored, even in a state rich in tobacco heritage.

Some cigarette companies remain opposed to the idea, citing private property rights and the choice already provided to restaurants and other public places to go smoke-free.