Legislative weather report: Storm clouds, high winds, cold front

Published March 30, 2015

by Mark Barrett, Asheville Citizen-Times, March 28, 2015.

Here is today's legislative weather report: Storm clouds and increasingly higher winds between the Legislative Building and the governor's office with waves of cold air emanating to the state's cities.

It's also last year's weather report, last week's and probably next week's and next month's.

Even casual observers have noticed the growing policy differences between Gov. Pat McCrory and the state Senate and the continuation of a trend in both chambers of legislation urban areas see as hostile to their interests.

It shouldn't have been shocking to urban residents that Republicans took several steps cities didn't like after gaining majorities in the House and Senate in 2010. The state Republican Party's power base is in rural counties and suburban areas that ring the state's larger cities. There are genuine philosophical differences between GOP legislators and those who hold office -- mostly Democrats -- in places like Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh and Wilmington or who held power in Raleigh before the Republican sweep.

It's hard to sift out how much of the motivation behind changes in laws affecting cities that the General Assembly adopted has been a belief in smaller government, how much might be a desire to get even after decades of being in the minority and how much stems from disagreement over a specific issue. Ending involuntary annexation and curbing cities' ability to impose land-use controls on areas just outside their limits, for instance, are steps certainly consistent with mainstream Republican thinking.

Other moves that cities opposed do not fit in so well: Undoing specific annexations that had already taken effect, changing the way public bodies like the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners are elected, taking control of Charlotte's airport away from that city, doing the the same with the Asheville water system and Asheville Regional Airport and trying to block a deal to turn much of the former campus of a state mental hospital in Raleigh into a grand city park. That's not to say the moves are good or bad, just that they don't necessarily follow from what people understand Republicans stand for in general.

http://www.citizen-times.com/story/elections/2015/03/27/weather-report/70537562/