RALEIGH — Incumbent state Rep. Tom Murry, R-Wake, is touting Republican advancements in the General Assembly as he seeks re-election to a third term representing House District 41, which encompasses the western end of Wake County, including Raleigh, Apex, and Cary.
His Republican seat is considered to be in a swing district, and he is facing a seasoned politician in Democrat Gale Adcock, who is in her second term as mayor pro tem on Cary Town Council, serving on the board since 2007. Adcock is a 59-year-old nurse practitioner, and the chief health officer overseeing 13,000 employees at SAS Institute.
Murry, a 37-year-old pharmacist and lawyer, was elected twice to the Morrisville Town Council. His second term was cut short when he resigned to run for state office. He spoke at length with Carolina Journal. Adcock did not respond to four e-mails and four phone messages, or attempts to contact her through the Wake County Democratic Party.
Among the electoral issues Murry discussed, he was particularly jazzed about regulatory reform, one of the key tenets of the Republican-controlled General Assembly.
“There are more than 20,000 regulations on the books that haven’t been reviewed in over 20 years,” Murry said. He contends that many weren’t thought through properly when passed into law, and others are technologically obsolete.
He says now is the time for the legislature to monitor the results of what they’ve done with tax reform, and tweak things as needed. By lowering corporate and personal income taxes, the state’s ranking in the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index made a “quantum leap” from 44th to 17th, he said.
“I’d like to be in the Top 10, but we don’t need to get there next year,” he said.
While Republican policies have been opposed in Moral Monday protests organized by the state NAACP, Murry doesn’t consider the demonstrations fact-based.
“North Carolina had the fastest drop in unemployment. More than 250,000 new jobs were created in the past four years. That’s progress,” Murry said.
“Just two years ago, the state’s Medicaid program was $600 million over budget. This is the first year it is in the black,” Murry said. “We improved the fiscal situation, and I can entertain conversations on services, and how to provide better treatment, but any reform is going to have to be provider-based and patient-centric.”
Murry argues it is time to wean green energy off lucrative tax credits and tax-paid subsidies.
“There isn’t a free market in energy. It’s a regulated monopoly, and we need as much domestic energy production as possible from as many sources as possible,” he said. He supported the expiration of the last renewable energy tax credit, saying it had “outlived its useful life.”
He opposed a push to extend certain renewable energy tax credits as part of the General Assembly’s tax reform bill. The credit program is set to expire in 2015, and has “outlived its useful life,” Murry said. The tax-funded credits for a specific industry run counter to the legislative majority’s intention to “treat all businesses as fairly as possible,” he said.
Murry expects his party will retain its majority in the legislature. Consequently, he argues he is in a position to do more for his constituents than his Democratic opponent, who will be new, sitting on the back row with no substantive committee appointments.
In campaign literature published by her campaign, Adcock faults her opponent for engaging in “extreme politics” instead of focusing on the “real big issues.”
“We cannot blindly cut our way to prosperity,” she said on her Web site. “There is more to health care access than carrying an insurance card,” the site says, and “We can’t take another three years with our main economic engine – public education – stuck in reverse.”
Both candidates say they are pro-education and pro-environment. The General Assembly has increased education spending by $1 billion over the past four years, and passed an average 7 percent teacher pay raise this year, but Adcock contends the legislature has shorted education.
“I will fight to raise teacher pay to the national average (as a start), give local school districts the resources they need to educate their students, and I will work to ensure that any testing requirements mandated by our legislature are data-driven and results-oriented for the benefit of the students and not just to simply test for testing’s sake,” she said on her Web site.
Denise Feriozzi of EMILY’s List, endorsed Adcock by vouching for her fiscal sense.
“As a member of the Cary Town Council, Gale has made critical investments in infrastructure, kept the property tax rate low, and maintained her town’s AAA bond rating.” EMILY’s List is a national Political Action Committee that supports pro-choice Democratic women.
In a YouTube candidate interview posted by the News and Observer, Adcock presents herself as being cautious.
She acknowledges the importance of considering how bills will be funded, and she supports long-term planning for education. She faults the current legislature as being inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive.
District 41 is considered a competitive district by the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation, which monitors and analyzes historic voting trends. Unaffiliated voters are the largest bloc, representing 39.6 percent of the district. Republicans outnumber Democrats, 32.3 to 27.6 percent, respectively.
In past campaigns, Murry has characterized his district as having an intelligent and informed constituency, many of whom vote candidate-by-candidate instead of on a strictly partisan level.
In his first election Murry captured 54 percent of the vote, defeating Democratic contender Chris Heagarty, who had been appointed by Gov. Beverly Perdue to complete the term of state Rep. Ty Harrell, who resigned after scandal tainted his political career.
During that first legislative term Murry sponsored several bills, including efforts to exempt the state from Obamacare, overhaul the state’s program for recruiting industry, and require large utility companies to double their investment in solar technology.
He actively sought out educators, spending time in classrooms, to find out what teachers, as opposed to Raleigh insiders, wanted. For his initiatives, the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation named him the most pro-business freshman legislator in the House, and the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research gave him the title of “Most Effective Freshman.”
Murry narrowly won a second term against Jim Messina, edging the Democrat by 1,489 votes.
Both Murry and Adcock have said they expect this contest, one of the most competitive in the state, will result in a close victory.
Leslee Kulba is a contributor to Carolina Journal.