- [Narrator] Legislators passed new hurricane relief funding legislation.

And in that bill, major changes to gubernatorial attorney general and state auditor powers.

This is "State Lines."

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[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to State Lines.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, great panel starting with Don Vaughn of the News and observer, Senator Natalie Murdoch of Chatham and Durham Counties.

To her right, Senator Benton Sawrey of Johnston County joins us and new NCAWA Skye David in seat number four.

Hello everyone, welcome back.

Good to see some of you again.

It's been a few weeks.

- Been a little while, - And we got election now.

Now all this great work's going on.

It's busy and it's controversial, Senator Sawrey.

And Dawn, I wanna start with you because you're the one covering all this action.

House and Senate Republicans overrode Governor Cooper's veto to enact increased opportunity scholarship funding this week.

And that veto override also requires all county sheriffs to collaborate with immigrations requests, but to the funding of the school vouchers.

The opportunity scholarships law releases over $460 million and it will clear a 55,000 student waiting list for the 2024 25 school year with the scholarship funding automatically increasing by state law in future years.

Democrats say that money should have funded hurricane recovery.

Republicans say the funds benefit children through greater educational choice.

Here's the debate.

- It'll be nearly impossible to stop this funder, this voucher system going into the future, which will take over $6 billion out of the budget that could go to storm recovery.

- We should not try to set up a war on public schools, school choice and charter schools.

They can all work together.

It's not an either or situation.

- Dawn one very large bill with lots of money and overrides.

We gotta separate all this what happened this week, but for the veto override for opportunity scholarships for school vouchers.

Your take on the politics of this in Raleigh?

- It's been a long time coming.

This was actually one of the least controversial things considering what we're gonna talk about next.

So it was almost a formality, but it's been over and over and over the debate on these two issues that are like really along party lines.

For the most part, the sheriff's cooperating with ICE detainers has been really something that rules chair and now speaker designate Dustin Hall has been pushing for for years.

And that came together with the deal with funding the backlog of private school vouchers, which I know everyone's discussed on this show and everywhere else for a long time, and I think that this week it was just everybody is in their same lane as far as what they think, and then it's finally gone through what we kind of all thought would eventually happen that the HB10, this version of it would end up becoming law.

So it was, yeah, I mean I kind of, not a lot of surprises I guess as far as that went.

- Senator Murdoch, from the Democratic Caucus perspective, Republicans basically rolled a lot of provisions into one bill.

If anything strategically or logistically, it was efficient.

One override covered a lot of policy.

- It did, and also they're looking at the calendar, you know, they knew that they would have to wait and see what happened with the elections.

Luckily we were able to get outta the super minority in the house, so they wanted to go ahead, and move that legislation forward, but definitely agree with my colleagues in the house I'm very proud graduate of public schools and parents have a right to educate their students however they like.

- But to publicly fund private school vouchers is just really, really concerning.

People can do whatever they want with their money, but we know that there's so much more we need to do for our public schools.

I'm proud of the public magnet school I went to as young child and all the different folks that I got to know at a very young age.

And I don't think any student should be deprived of the opportunity to do that if we're gonna continue to strip our public schools of the funding that they so desperately need.

- What do you make a 55,000 family signing up and having to wait for that funding if it's an unpopular idea with half the state?

That's tens of thousands of people.

With the ICE bill, you're targeting 10 sheriffs, 10 versus 55,000.

Your take on the numbers of that.

- Yeah, the take on the numbers is I think we still need to look deeper into a lot of the folks that are able to afford the ability to do that.

They're gonna do that anyway.

So I still go back to, when it's public money, you have to shine a brighter light on that.

But there are so many households that have the ability to do it on their own.

They're gonna continue to do that.

And I would add a lot of the folks that I serve in Durham, even if they wanted to, actually the state funding wouldn't be enough because they don't make enough money even with that assistance to do that.

So I don't think it's really targeted at the families that would really need it and utilize it the most.

- Senator Sawrey, there's private school voucher funding out there, Opportunity Scholarships.

Now, what can Republicans do to actually promote school choice in a way that there is a choice to go to a private school if you're a low-income family, and you want to choose to leave public?

- You know, with the programs out there, it's clearly popular.

I mean, there were 60,000 new applicants, over 60,000 new applicants this past year.

The demand is there.

I think following 2020, people saw what was going on, and they wanted to make sure that...

I mean, and it's in the name.

It's all about an opportunity.

If you like your public school, you can continue to go there.

I'm a proud graduate of public schools all the way from kindergarten through law school, went to public college, public law school, public K-12.

I had a great experience and a great education there, but there are some places where you should not be trapped by your zip code.

And we have an opportunity now in North Carolina to promote that choice and provide those opportunities for families.

And I mean, look, let's face it, there are plenty of private schools out there that charge seven, 8,000, $9,000 per student.

They're providing those opportunities for those kids.

And if you are a middle-class family, an $8,000 expenditure, it's a burden on you.

And this really, really bridges the gap.

We wanna make sure that we are investing in our students and not necessarily a system.

- Skye, you worked in the halls of legislature as much as anyone in Raleigh.

What are you hearing about the debate about school vouchers when it comes to the funding of it, the philosophy behind it?

'Cause everyone comes on this show, whether they're for or against it, they're proud public school graduates.

But some of those public school graduates are now proud supporters of vouchers.

- I actually think that Representative Cotham's speech that she gave the other day was one of her strongest speeches on this, talking about maybe you have a child that benefits from the public school system, but maybe you have another child that needs something different.

And I think that clicks with parents to say, "Oh, that makes sense."

But I think from what you just heard from both of the senators here, you can see both sides of this argument.

- Senator, Sawrey, back to the immigration issue.

I didn't ask you or follow up with you on that.

Did those 10 county sheriffs get the message by passing a state law supposedly requiring them to cooperate with the feds?

And should they choose not to under state law, what happens?

- I sure hope so.

I mean, and candidly, it's a shame that we had to pass the law in the first place.

I mean, it's clear what they should do and how they should operate.

And for us to need to take this step I think is indicative of what's happening in our counties.

So I think they got the message.

I'd like to point out, too, because I heard something about superminority earlier, the House override was bipartisan.

Democrats crossed party lines.

I heard a great speech on the floor by Representative Cunningham defending the ICE provisions and what's happening in their communities.

I know that this program is popular.

I know that this program beat Opportunity Scholarships, and cooperation immigrations officials resonates with voters in North Carolina.

These are common sense, practical, you know, provisions within law that I think are gonna resonate over the next several years.

- Senator Murdoch, what is it about GOP is omnibus builds where Democrats can like pieces of it, but you have to vote for all of it or against all of it.

And it, I've seen it can be risky for people to cross party lines, whether they're going from dem to Republican, or Republican to dem.

- Well, I mean, honestly as far as strategy, I'll give it to the GOP, it is brilliant to say, "We're gonna go and put all of it in there."

And it puts us in a rough spot.

But for folks like me, being such a huge proponent of public schools, that is a non-starter for me.

And I would look at the other things that we should be funding.

We are in the midst of a childcare crisis.

We are in the midst of needing a lot of funding for hurricane relief.

There are so many other priorities that we have that she will be balancing.

So to come back and to continue to be laser focused on a program that just has continued to grow year after year after year, no one is disputing the merit of it, we're disputing how much money is being put into it when we know that so many children in our public schools are falling behind.

- You may, you may have set me up.

I know you had a comment about that, but there's another little bill out there that funded some of these, among.

- Sure.

And I mean that that was gonna be a little bit of the segue is that it is being portrayed as an either/or choice, and that's not the case at all.

We have funded childcare, and we have continued to fund childcare at the levels the federal government has, and we're making that commitment going forward.

We funded enrollment growth, we funded community college enrollment growth, we funded Medicaid rebates, we are continuing to increase funding in our public school choice.

We can have opportunity scholarships, and fund K-12 education in North Carolina.

We can fund childcare.

We have a $5 billion rainy day fund, because of Republican leadership over the past 14 years.

So we are prepared for this disaster.

- But money, [clears throat] money can run out eventually, as you know, the state is using the rainy day funds.

So I think the argument took a different turn this week, because half a billion dollars is a lot of money.

And if that's recurring- - It is.

- and you look, you know, down range, like, how are you gonna spend everything?

- Yeah.

And since we are saying we're focusing on children, have to go back to the childcare piece.

And the senator knows more than anyone, he has two young children.

He knows how expensive childcare cost is.

And depending on who you ask, it is still not enough.

I don't think we will have the support under a new federal administration, for childcare and a lot of those services.

My mom was a childcare nursing supervisor.

That's something near and dear to my heart.

I have daycares who have closed in my district, who are struggling.

So I don't think that we should just wipe away all the money that went to opportunity scholarships that still could have gone to childcare and other things for our children.

- We've discussed childcare months and weeks ago, and the COVID funding to increase childcare services was always temporary.

- Yep.

- Even under a democratic administration.

- Yep.

- Why did the local daycares- - Yep.

- Permanently expand their operations with temporary federal dollars, on the assumption that government would just keep it going at the federal level?

- Instead of blaming the daycares, I think the demand is there.

- Okay.

- I think the real question is the demand is there, and it's a model that needs to be re-evaluated.

It is just difficult to run a daycare without government subsidies.

If you don't charge a lot of money, if you wanna make it affordable for a lot of parents that just don't have a lot of money, it is a very difficult business to be in, especially if you are a childcare facility that doesn't care for a lot of children.

It's also based on the volume.

So there are a number of issues that are just, that are plagued with the system as a whole.

But it doesn't mean that as a government, we just back off when we know that it's an economic issue.

It's difficult to work if you don't have that assistance with the childcare.

- And to that point, we are, you know, we have enacted, [clears throat] we've been one of the most pro-family legislatures in history this past session, with making our commitment to childcare.

And I agree with you.

It's a budgeting challenge to backfill the federal government obligations.

We see that with the ESSER funds, with local school administrations, we see that with the cost of us going to assisted care facilities for nursing.

So I mean, it's a struggle, because when that money runs out, they look to state government.

And fortunately, we are in a position that we can continue to support these organizations and we're putting childcare and our neediest citizens as a priority here.

- There's a vouchers increase funding in future years.

We need daycare increased funding future years.

Public schools need future...

Okay, well, welcome to 2025 about eight weeks early.

Lawmakers approved $227 million for additional Hurricane Helene recovery this week, and our state leaders went to DC as well to ask for funding.

State lawmakers have approved just over $1 billion at this point out of Raleigh.

The Governor, Roy Cooper, met President Joe Biden.

He asked their administration for $25 billion for a variety of projects.

Senator Thom Tillis went to Capitol Hill, testified before the US Senate Appropriations Committee, and in Raleigh, Skye, hearings were held into the operational issues at the State's Office of Recovery and Resilience.

The executive director is now gone, she's left.

That manages our disaster recovery efforts, which are rebuilding houses and things of that nature.

But projects are unfinished from 2016 and 2018.

Why is all of a sudden money's coming in and now legislators care about how well that office was functioning, at least to the degree they would raise it to the hearings level?

Now the public knows it wasn't working well.

- Yeah, I think that that has been something that legislators have been looking into for a couple of years and really trying to dig into.

It's tough for legislators who are hearing from their constituents, "for six years, I have been without a home," "for two years, I have been trying to get this contractor to come back to my house."

And that's a heartbreaking story to hear day after day after day and year after year after year.

And then to come into a hearing and hear from the folks that are supposed to be in charge of this, "hey, actually we don't have enough money, we need more money from you, and that'll fix the problem," it's tough to say, "okay, we'll give you more money" at that point.

Especially when we have this problem in western North Carolina, how do we know that they're gonna spend the money efficiently?

- Dawn, when you go to the hearings level, they're public and folks like you and I can cover it, can record, it can get sound bites.

What difference does that make in solving a state policy problem that folks like you and the press corps can get on it and then the public can see?

A, legislators are addressing it, but, B, there's a major problem here.

Now it's gonna be nine years old by the time the session gets underway next year.

- Well, it shines a brighter light on it, right?

It gets more attention.

And I think that, y'know, the News and Observer and other news organizations have covered that it's taken so long, that this has been a problem for a while.

And it's sort of reached that critical mass where gov ops is like, "we're having this now."

And then, of course, y'know, someone ended up losing their job over it.

But it also just became in sharper focus because of Helene, and if you're gonna spend more money and you haven't solved your last problem, you better get this right.

And Representative Hall and Senate Leader Berger, when myself and other reporters, we asked him about did you want to give this money after y'all had this hearing where you're unhappy with it, and they said, well, no, but they needed to give the money to make sure these houses are built, but they're still mad about it.

So sometimes you have to do something 'cause, like, you have to finish the job, even if you don't like the way that it has been operated thus far.

- How did Roy Cooper get from 2016 till eight weeks before he leaves office without having to deal with this or having someone ask him uncomfortable questions about it?

- Well... [group laughs] - I mean, I'm just saying from a political standpoint, it's pretty amazing because I don't think many people knew!

There's millions of dollars unspent.

Now they're in the hole and now there's still people with houses that are not built.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- [Kelly] And maybe you weren't engaged with it, but it's a bipartisan group putting this back together.

- It is a bipartisan group.

As legislators, that is our right to provide oversight.

And I think folks nailed it, we now are in the midst of, let's be honest, a decades-plus long recovery for western North Carolina.

Before we continue to push money out there, we have to have an account of where money went in the past, where we're going in the future so that the public will have faith and confidence in our ability to be good stewards of these taxpayer dollars, and in addition to Hurricane Helene, we are a state that is riddled with a lot of storms, a lot of recovery, especially out east, I've been out there a lot.

There were just a huge ceremony even in areas like Princeville, North Carolina, they're still building back from hurricanes that happened before Katrina.

So folks have every right to ask these questions, and they have to be held accountable.

- Senator Sawrey, this office is less than 10 years old.

Does the state need this office with, after 10 years and three storms, you're hearing testimony about how they're in the hole and people in the East are saying, "Don't forget us before you go to the mountains."

- Look, I've got constituents in Johnston County.

They're still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt after Florence and Matthew.

I mean, it's really sad, it's tragic what's happened.

And I do think it's important to know that we have been on this.

There's been a series of hearings that have occurred about this office over the past several years.

Senator Danny Britt specifically called for Hogshead to resign at least two years ago now.

So it's been front of mind, but I think it's come back to the top of the public discourse because of Hurricane Helene.

And there are some regulatory reasons why this office must exist.

So the state needs to have somebody that receives federal money for rebuilding these homes, so we need to have somebody in charge of an agency doing so.

But other states around us are doing so much better at getting these funds deployed, rebuilding homes, and putting families back into their residences.

And we need to take lessons from where it is.

This is a good first step, and I agree with what Donald said a second ago about, you know, the begrudging nature of this appropriation.

You know, we have to finish a job.

We cannot lead these thousands of families out there, at the same time, we cannot make these same mistakes again with Hurricane Helene.

And I think that's a failure at the executive level, that we're going to need to take a long, hard look at how we got to this point and how we're continuing to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up errors that have occurred over the past six to eight years.

- But Republicans have been giving money to that office, so Republicans have a role in this, and you funded that office, no matter how you believe it operates.

- Well, our job is to appropriate money.

The executive job is to carry out the function.

We can't go out there and do the job that the executive branch needs to do.

We have a role as appropriators and oversight, and we've been carrying out that role.

It is our responsibility to provide funds so that we can get these families back in the houses, and we're doing that.

And then we're asking the tough questions and demanding people are resigned, demanding people are removed or resigned.

Finally, that has occurred.

And I hope that this is the first good step forward to helping the people in Western North Carolina recover.

- Skye, is this the job of the auditor to look into these kind of programs, this new auditor coming in, Dave Boliek?

Or should we rely on the legislative watchdog and oversight groups to get to the bottom of the situation to figure out how to best spend future hurricane relief dollars?

- I certainly think it's within the auditor's purview to do that.

Of course, if Senate Bill 382 goes into effect, he's gonna have more jobs.

But he can look into that.

And I think that there are a lot of folks with eyes on that particular office now, which is a good thing.

It's a good thing to have more transparency within something that impacts so many North Carolinians.

- Moving on, Helene Recovery Bill is also shifting power within the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

Now, while these changes are in the Helene Bill, they have nothing to do with hurricane relief.

The state auditor, not the governor, would begin appointing state election board members beginning in mid 2025, but the elections board would continue independent operations, but the auditor controls the appointments and oversees the state budget.

Senator Murdoch, this is a fundamental change.

Raleigh got frothed up about this, I'm not sure how much Main Street is dialed in on the auditor's role in the elections board.

However, that's a fundamental shift.

Republicans say things like this have happened before and the Democrats control the state.

- I would say Main Street is paying attention to this.

I think of everything that we have done, and I've been in the General Assembly since 2020, and I'll take a step back in saying I remember how they hastily also reconvened when Governor Cooper was elected to strip power away from him.

When I was at the Department of Justice, $10 million was removed from then AG Stein's office for no reason at all.

And so now to say you're gonna shift appointment of Board of Election officials to the state auditor, I would love to go back in time and see if we had an auditor homes and a treasurer Harris, would it be at Commissioner Steve Troxler, or I mean, what other Republican council state members would've been left to provide with this power?

We are the only state in the nation that is attempting to do anything like this.

In other states, it falls under the Secretary of State.

The governor won the election, but has a huge mandate and has every right to continue to make appointments and have that appointment power.

And just to make such a huge shift is highly disturbing.

And it is something that folks are paying attention to.

That is why you saw, as we were debating the bill in the Senate, the gallery was full.

So folks now see the consequences of those election.

We continue to erode what it means to be a Governor and Attorney General to try to strip them away of so much power to make them ceremonial figures, even though they overwhelmingly won their elections and they were not even close.

It's outrageous.

- The gallery was full because North Carolina Democrat cheer person Anderson Clayton sent out a call to action and rounded up a few dozen people to show up that particular day.

Every state does it differently.

And I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how North Carolina operates and its history.

We are distrustful of executive authority.

We vest our power in the legislature.

We elect more executive offices.

The Constitution is clear.

It enumerates the council of state offices, how they're elected.

And then the following section says their duty shall be prescribed by law.

And the person who writes that law is the General Assembly.

There's a long and storied histories of members of the Democrat party stripping away authority from Republican Governors and Republican Lieutenant Governors.

It's happened before.

This is, as my colleague noted, a lot of states use the Secretary of State.

We have an auditor.

An auditor counts things, an auditor verifies things.

I think it's perfectly reasonable and fair to let the auditor have oversight over the Board of Elections.

- What if it was not a Republican that was elected as auditor, I do not think those duties would've been- - [Host] The law would not be prescribed as such.

- I don't think it would've been written that way.

- Senator, about Dave Bullock's ability to pick, could he do a clean sweep all Republicans or is there some provision left in there from the state law that never took effect saying it will be bipartisan on an equal basis?

- It's bipartisan.

He is not going to pick a full board of Republicans.

I mean, the law was gonna be a bipartisan board.

And that's been one of the biggest complaints that we've had over the past years is that the State Board of Elections is heavily weighted in favor of the Governor's pick in that particular role.

We are simply asking that we have a bipartisan, non-politicized board of elections.

And I think generally we've seen that every years, but there have been some things that have crept up from time to time.

And I think this takes a further step in that direction towards getting to that goal.

- Sky, very quickly, is this a battle between Republicans and Democrats or the General assembly, the legislative branch, just taking as much power as it can from that executive branch?

- I think that this is a classic executive branch versus legislative branch fight.

You remember back when Governor McCrory was Governor, he had fights with the legislature even though they were of the same party.

So you're just seeing that continue.

- Dawn, I wanna come back to this next issue was part of all of this, the AG powers being limited, the 2024 campaign for Attorney General included debate over whether they should have flexibility to withhold legal support for state laws the Attorney General believes are unconstitutional.

And Mr. Stein had been on here as a candidate discussing this with me.

Legislative leaders will ban Attorney General Jeff Jackson's office from taking legal positions that run contrary to state laws or policies.

And if legislators hire attorneys for these big court fights, the Contract Attorneys or the Lead Counsel, not the State Attorneys and the Attorney General would also be forbidden from joining any out-of-state lawsuits, where the ruling outta state could overturn a law in North Carolina.

That smells like US Supreme Court to me.

What do you make of these restrictions as prescribed by law?

- Yeah, well this is another example of executive versus legislative and, you know, we tried to get down to like, why are you doing this specifically if, you know, as far as who won or not?

And Senate Leader Berger said that, you know, 'cause I asked if Dan Bishop, the Republican, had won Attorney General, would you be doing this?

You know?

And Berger said, obviously, they haven't been happy for a while.

The bill was, you know, very short notice.

But the issue that Republicans have been unhappy with, they've talked about for a long time and haven't liked Stein as Attorney General.

So what Berger said was, well, when Jackson won, they thought it would be more of the same of what they didn't like about Stein.

So that's essentially why they did it.

- Senator, sorry, I got about 75 seconds left.

I wanna get both of you in, your comments on limiting Jeff Jackson's powers beyond what Josh Stein has enjoyed as AG.

- It's simple.

You know, Jeff Jackson ran to be the Attorney General for the state of North Carolina.

The state of North Carolina is his client.

114-2 in General Statute says that his obligation is to defend the state of North Carolina.

We have a track record of not doing so.

It is the General Assembly's role to step in and make sure that does in fact happen.

You cannot take on a client and then actively work against them.

- Senator Murdoch, you've worked at DIJ, you've been there and done this before.

What do you make?

Very quickly.

- Yeah, the more things change, the more they say the same and unfortunately we saw it coming.

We knew they would continue to strip power away from the Attorney General that was elected by the people of North Carolina.

I'll continue to remind folks that they went to the ballot box and voted for an individual and now the legislator is saying, "You cannot do your job.

"We're gonna make it difficult for you to do that.

"We are going to prescribe how you do your job."

Even though we, you know, should have an AG that has the ability to say what it is that they think is right, what they think is constitutional, have the ability to compare notes with other AGs across the nation.

There's a reason that they all band together and file lawsuits, especially with what we know is coming on the federal side of things and so getting ready for another fight in the courts after the result of these, what I believe is an overreach.

- You got 10 seconds.

- If you want to do that run for judge, don't run to be the attorney for the state.

- All right, thank, thank you sir.

- Making a lot of changes with judges as well, unfortunately.

- Thank you so much.

Great debate, great discussion.

This is just a primer for 2025.

Thank you for watching.

Email me, statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

I'll see you next time.

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