The State Board of Elections said cybersecurity worries prompted a delay in certifying election system vendors to sell voting machines to counties. In her first state board meeting Thursday, June 13, new Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell urged the board to require vendors seeking certification to…
State Treasurer Dale Folwell has reeled in a big fish. With a deadline just 13 days away, Community Care Physician Network, North Carolina’s largest network of independent physician clinics, announced Monday, June 17, it signed on to the State Health Plan’s…
Andrew Ross, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, in January was working private security for a cross-country delivery of hemp. Ross’s task was simple: Guard a truckload of state-approved industrial hemp, grown in Kentucky, and bound for Colorado. Ross was pulled over…
School may be out of session but the halls of Creech Road Elementary were buzzing with life. Volunteers from AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company, partnered with Heart of America Foundation, a…
Ten years ago, the passage of Obamacare vastly increased the federal government’s role in our health–care system. The health care overhaul was sold to the American people as a solution for skyrocketing costs and high uninsured rates. While some uninsured gained coverage, the law…
A Senate bill establishing a disposal plan for solar energy panels cleared its first hurdle. The Senate Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources voted Thursday, June 13, to send Senate Bill 568 to the Finance Committee amid protests from…
If all the solar panels from industrial-scale electric plants in North Carolina were laid end to end, they would stretch from Raleigh to San Francisco and back nearly four times. Yet the state has no plan to handle the 475,000 tons of panels once they wear out and…
The Map Act’s days may be numbered. State senators voted June 12 to repeal the Map Act, the law allowing the N.C. Department of Transportation to freeze development on property within a highway corridor. The vote was unanimous. “This act has been a…
Benefit or boondoggle? That’s the billion-dollar question. North Carolina surpassed the $1 billion mark in renewable energy investment tax credits issued in 2018 — three years after the lucrative subsidy program to stimulate solar development expired. Taxpayers have picked up the bill, and could be on…
Lawmakers have offered several proposals to repair the broken, outdated way the state governs alcohol through the N.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control system. About a dozen bills, in fact, are moving through the General Assembly, and one, House Bill 363, the Craft Beer Distribution and Modernization Act, is now law.
