I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about former Gov. Jim Hunt.
Not that I had ever claimed any special knowledge of the man. I’ve met and talked with him a couple of times. I haven’t exactly made it my life’s work to study his career. But as a public figure in North Carolina for the past three decades, Jim Hunt has built up a long record of legislative initiatives, accomplishments, scandals, praise, and criticism. You can’t spend much time in political circles without absorbing much of this through osmosis, whether you want to or not.
I mean, the man has been governor or lieutenant governor of our state for more than half of my life.
Today, though, I learned something new about Hunt. And, as it turns out, I learned a little more about a long-standing political and economic issue I thought I understood, at least in part: the staggering, multi-billion-dollar debts that North Carolina’s municipal power utilities have built up over the past two decades.
Much of it is attributable to a business decision that dozens of localities made in the mid-1970s, when Duke Power and CP&L were in the process of construction nuclear power plants. The municipalities with their own electrical systems decided to form compacts and buy shares of the new plants, rather than simply being large-scale customers of the plants or getting out of the power business altogether to let individual households and businesses buy directly from the for-profit utilities.
Here’s what I didn’t know, though, and what was reported in a story today by the Free Press in Kinston. Part of the motivation for the municipalities to invest in Duke and CP&L was apparently to force out North Carolina Power, the unit of Virginia Power that served Northeastern North Carolina. And a prime mover in this effort was none other than Jim Hunt.
If true, then the citizens of North Carolina have yet another fiscal problem to deal with, courtesy of their longtime (and, judging by their repeated votes, esteemed) governor. The billions of dollars in debt that municipal power agencies have racked up since the mid-1970s serve as a major barrier to any future restructuring of our state’s electricity market. They present complex and possibly deleterious connections to our state’s bond rating. And the relatively high electric rates in these communities serve as disincentives to economic development.
Thanks, guv.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.