The Friday Follies
Published October 17, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, October 16, 2015.
The GOP’s handpicked and dysfunctional Board of Governors
The award for most dysfunctional state agency these days has to go to the UNC Board of Governors as it continues its search for a new president to replace Tom Ross, who was fired for a reason that no one has yet explained.
The News & Observer reported Friday, in advance of an emergency meeting, that former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling was the leading candidate and would meet with the board Friday afternoon.
That came as news to many members of the board and to leaders of the General Assembly, who recently passed legislation ordering the committee leading the search to bring three candidates to the full board for consideration.
That bill is currently on the desk of Governor Pat McCrory awaiting his signature. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore sent a letter to the board saying that meeting to consider only one candidate would be viewed as an “effort to circumvent the will ill of the elected people of the State of North Carolina prior to the bill becoming law.”
New board member and former state senator Thom Goolsby was one of two members who demanded that Board Chair John Fennebresque resign because of the way the search has been handled. Several other members complained about the way Friday meeting was scheduled.
Not exactly going smoothly over there at UNC.
But if Berger and Moore and other lawmakers are upset, they only have themselves to blame. Every single member of the current Board of Governors, including Fennebresque, was handpicked by the Republican leaders of the General Assembly, 16 of them in 2013 and 16 more in 2015. House and Senate Republican caucuses met to go over the names and to decide who to support.
This is not some distant, independent board that Berger and Moore are upset with. This is the board that Berger and Moore and their fellow Republicans selected to oversee the university system.
Erskine Bowles laments the firing of Tom Ross
The swirling controversy about the selection process comes the same week that former UNC President Erskine Bowles weighed in on the UNC job in an interview with the Charlotte Business Journal.
Bowles enjoyed support from Democrats and Republican during his tenure and many Republicans have cited him as an example of the kind of business leader the Board of Governors should select as the new president.
Bowles had some especially interesting comments about the firing of Tom Ross, saying it was certainly the new board’s right to put its person in charge. But then he added this:
“…just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. I think Tom was doing a fabulous job. I think if he had been allowed to stay he could have clearly been the best leader we’ve had at the university since Bill Friday.”
Bowles is not the only one who thinks Ross has done a fabulous job. Board Chair John Fennebresque does too, as he bizarrely made clear the day he fired him.
It’s a reminder of the absurdity of the search itself, not just the way it is being handled.
The right person to run the university is running it right now, Tom Ross.
Another firestorm about a secret budget provision
It has now been more than two weeks since the General Assembly session adjourned but the stories continue about little discussed but controversial provisions stuffed into the budget.
This time it’s about part of the spending bill that eliminated the job of a top official in the Department of Public Safety, a move that did not please Secretary Frank Perry who promptly fired two other employees as a result—one of them the wife of House Appropriations Chair Nelson Dollar—and gave the employee the General Assembly targeted their job responsibilities.
It’s not only the latest skirmish between legislative leaders and the McCrory Administration, it is the latest example of the absurd way the budget is put together.
One sentence in Friday’s News & Observer story makes that point rather succinctly.
“The provision was not publicly known until the proposed final budget was released on Sept. 14.”
The story also quotes legislators saying that Dollar was not responsible for putting the provision firing the DPS official in the budget but the real questions are why these sorts of provisions are included in the budget at all, and why they are being slipped in behind closed doors where no one can have any say about them?
And stay tuned. There are almost certainly more stories about more secret provisions to come as fallout continues from one of the most non-transparent General Assembly sessions in history.
