There’s been ambiguous talk popping up in media reports concerning possible moves by CMS to do something with its learning community outposts, those pricey offices scattered around the district that debuted as CMS’ answer to decentralization. By most counts the district offices have been a flop, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and doing […]
Charlotte and Mecklenburg County’s largess with your money gets special notice this week from the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law’s Corporate Welfare Weekly newsletter. The Queen City and the state took top honors in partnering to hand out about $80 million in promised incentives – read government-speak for bribes – to lure Siemens Energy […]
News from over the weekend has Jake Delhomme headed to Cleveland to live out his glory days. Best of luck to Jake; he’s going to need all he can get. I grew up close enough to the shadows of Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium to see firsthand how unrelentingly brutal and demanding Browns fans can be. […]
Let the sun shine in? It’s a nice thought; but with our local government cloudy with a chance of rain is more likely, making the uptown paper of record’s headline that Commissioners Chairperson Jennifer Roberts endorses an open system of transparency all the more painfully ironic. This from the chairperson of a board that thumps its […]
The Charlotte City Council earlier this week approved nabbing $7.4 million from the city’s capital reserve account to help balance its current-year general fund budget, which city staff estimates is light about $8.5 million. Declining revenues – what policy wonks euphemistically call “economic deterioration” – are being blamed for the budget shortfall. City staff assured […]
Hey, it works in Amsterdam to turn some decent coin, why not Charlotte? Intriguing piece here from “Financial Armageddon” on how cash-strapped municipalities are ramping up collection of enforcement taxes to help fill empty coffers: For example, a federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia resulted in a total of 6996 traffic tickets […]
Let me get this straight: Police Chief Rodney Monroe has steadfastly refused to release the personnel files of a rogue cop accused of committing numerous sexual assaults while on duty, but the chief is more than ready and willing to bare the inner workings of his department’s homicide division on national TV? That’s the story […]
Despite cherry talk from Gov. Bev Perdue about government-driven, job creation plans and the deployment of new small business commissions, committees and sub-committees feverishly spinning bureaucratic wheels to put North Carolina back to work, the state’s unemployment rate took another hit in January, increasing from 10.9 to 11.1 percent with more than a half-million residents […]
The city council earlier this week approved renewing a contract with PetData Company to handle animal registration and pet licensing for the city. That might not seem like a big deal, but there’s plenty of bite behind the contract’s bark. PetData is paid a fee for each license sold, receiving $3.50 of the $10 charged […]
Faced with a bruising debt crisis that is bringing new borrowing to fund capital projects to all but a screeching halt, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education this week started a process of prioritizing school construction plans. Or maybe that should be re-prioritizing. When voters approved a record-high $516-million school bond in 2007, the board of […]
