This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Roy Cordato, vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation.
This has been the year for unrepaired potholes in North Carolina. Almost everyone has slammed into one of these craters over the last few months. And the media has taken notice. A headline in the April 7 Raleigh News and Observer read “Recession may help delay pot hole repairs.” And WRAL-TV reported back in January that the Department of Transportation could not meet its obligations. DOT is attributing the problem, in part, to a 4 percent decline in gas tax revenues. WRAL reports DOT head Gene Conti as saying that “relying on the gas tax simply does not work.”
But what has gone unnoticed by most of the media are two stories by my colleague David Bass in Carolina Journal exposing the destination for at least some of the gas taxes that drivers are paying — it’s not for fixing potholes or building roads.
Back in the March issue of Carolina Journal, Bass reported on a decision by North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality (DAQ) to give a boost to a little-known California-based nonprofit advocacy group called the Climate Registry (CR). What most people don’t realize is that the DAQ, which is the arm of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) that handles the implementation of North Carolina’s air pollution regulations, is partially financed with gasoline tax revenues. And, to some extent, this makes sense given that automobiles emit pollutants that the DAQ is charged with regulating.
But the Climate Registry’s mission has nothing to do with the emissions regulated by the state. As reported by Bass, the Climate Registry’s “goal is to persuade companies, organizations, and state and local governments to report their greenhouse gas emissions in hopes of curbing climate change.” On its Web site, CR states that “the Registry supports both voluntary and mandatory reporting programs.”
In other words, part of the registry’s goal is to have carbon dioxide, which supporters believe is causing global warming, declared a pollutant by state and federal governments. As an aside, there has been no net warming since 1998. What Carolina Journal has uncovered is that DAQ allocated $100,000 simply as a donation to CR’s activities. Half of this money was from DAQ’s gasoline tax allocation, i.e., from the pockets of drivers who are slamming into potholes across the state because DOT cannot find the resources to have them filled.
None of this should be surprising. For most of the last decade the N.C. DAQ has taken the role of an environmental advocacy group within the state government, particularly on issues related to global warming. Again, as was reported exclusively in Carolina Journal back in 2007, DAQ founded the North Carolina Climate Action Plan Advisory Group (CAPAG). This was done at the urging of and in cooperation with a Pennsylvania environmental pressure group called the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS). CCS was ultimately hired by DAQ to be the facilitator of all of the CAPAG meetings and to devise all of the policy proposals presented by CAPAG to the state’s Legislative Commission on Climate Change.
DAQ and CCS jointly set as a condition of CAPAG’s procedures that its participants had to, in effect, accept the proposition that global warming was not only occurring but that it was being caused by human activity. At least implicitly, and for purposes of being a participant in CAPAG deliberations, members had to reject any explanations that were centered around natural causes such as solar variability. CCS, with the support of DAQ, also would not allow the examination of any actual climate data by CAPAG. In fact, one of the rules that CCS and DAQ established for CAPAG was that its members could not discuss or even bring up any of the scientific questions related to global warming. The fact that DAQ is now using gas tax money to further this agenda is consistent with this history.
Bass’ second story focuses on a much greater sum — $1 million. This also came from DAQ’s allocation of gasoline taxes, but apparently with some resistance. In the April issue of Carolina Journal, Bass reports on $1 million of gas tax money that was transferred to Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office. The purpose of this transfer was to help fund the AG’s lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federal government agency that produces electricity from coal-fired power plants, as do most power plants in North Carolina. The state was suing the TVA for pollution problems in North Carolina that are allegedly being caused by emissions from the TVA plants.
As Bass reported, this rather large sum of gas tax money ultimately went to pay the cost of very high-priced law firms. The Ayres Law Group and the Resolution Law Group were hired by the AG’s office at rates of up to $515 per hour with work by paralegals (nonlawyers typically trained at community colleges) being billed at $100 per hour. Among the extravagant expenses reported was a bill for almost $7,000 by the Resolution Law Group for a one-month stay by a paralegal in a king suite at the Embassy Suites Hotel at the Chevy Chase Pavilion in Washington, D.C. This is a high-end luxury resort hotel. Bass reports that rooms in comfortable hotels convenient to Resolution’s offices where the paralegal was working during her stay in Washington could have been obtained easily for less than half the rate paid at the Embassy Suites.
The million-dollar transfer of gas tax money from DAQ to the AG’s office was mandated by an unnoticed provision in the 2007-08 state budget. There seems to be no way of tracing which legislator or legislators placed this mandate into the budget or what kind of coordination there may have been between the AG’s office, DENR, and the legislators whose efforts resulted in the transfer. It does appear that DAQ was not happy about the transfer. As Bass reports, in a memo to DENR Secretary Bill Ross, DAQ director Keith Overcash stated that the transfer would “cut some dramatic funding for the state’s air quality program.” But Overcash’s protestations ring hollow in light of the $100,000 he let flow from DAQ coffers to the Climate Registry with no benefits at all to air quality in the state.
In general, there needs to be a thorough examination of how taxes that flow to the state every time a motorist pumps gas are being spent. More specifically, Bass’ investigations show that there needs to be an audit of how DAQ is using its allocations of those funds and how the legislature is manipulating the use of these funds for nontransportation and even politically motivated purposes. Bass’ discoveries may simply be anomalies. On the other hand, they may be the tip of an iceberg where gas tax money is flowing to purposes that probably would not be supported by the motorists who pay them.