In a political shell game of grand and devious proportions, state legislators this week hailed themselves as heroes for saving hundreds of schoolteacher jobs. Problem is, they did it using upwards of $64 million in lottery revenue that was plundered from counties across the state. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, for example, announced this week that the state […]
Birthday cake, that is. Recognizing that Mecklenburg County employees have gone two years without merit-pay raises, County Manager Harry Jones today delivered a surprise to help boost moral: an additional day of paid vacation for all county employees on their birthdays. The gesture won’t have any budgetary impact, said County Budget Director Hyong Yi, because […]
And not in a good way, according to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures. North Carolina ranks with Texas, New York and California as states that are projecting budget deficits larger than $1 billion next year, as federal stimulus handouts dry-up. And that doesn’t include a potential double-whammy facing North Carolina, when […]
And they don’t come any better or bigger than ultra-leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Case in point: spewing his liberal rhetoric across the screen with a movie that bashes corporate tax handouts, while pocketing a huge corporate tax handout for the movie. Moore received an estimated $650,000 to $1 million in state film tax credits from […]
Scrambling to find a way to pay the annual $1.5-million operating cost for the city’s streetcar, Councilmember Patrick “At the End of the Day, Per Se” Cannon reached back for an oldie but a goodie, suggesting a surcharge on uptown parking spaces. The tax was previously pitched as one of the scuttled funding options for […]
Just one of the myriad interesting items the federal government is spending your hard-earned money to study: $181,406 to be exact. That’s how much the National Institutes of Health shelled out for a researcher at the University of Kentucky to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail. Seriously. And that’s the least […]
The Charlotte City Council on Monday night delivered the first installment of a pricey political payoff, when it voted to accept a $25-million federal grant to help build the city’s coveted streetcar project. The total price tag for the route’s first leg, which will stretch all of 1.5 miles, from Time Warner Cable Arena to […]
What federal officials are calling a “technical error” could potentially slam the brakes on the city’s plan to extend the Lynx Blue Line to UNC-Charlotte. Local officials had applied for $40 million in federal money to fund the final piece of an engineering/design study required for the $1-billion light-rail extension project. Last week a U.S. […]
One of the bigger questions left hanging from the termination letter that the N.C. Department of Correction issued to Councilmember Warren Turner, who was fired this week from his job as a state probation officer, isn’t whether the action was justified, but rather why it hadn’t been taken earlier, or whether it would have been […]
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