RALEIGH — A group of Lake Norman-area business leaders traveled by chartered bus to Raleigh on Tuesday to urge state legislators to support a bill that would cancel the state’s contract with a private company to build and operate toll lanes on Interstate 77 between Charlotte and Mooresville. Sen. Jeff Tarte, R-Mecklenburg, hosted a press conference at which he reiterated his pledge to introduce legislation doing just that.
RALEIGH — Despite widespread vocal opposition from area business leaders and residents, Gov. Pat McCrory and North Carolina Department of Transportation officials maintain it is too late for the state to scrap the controversial 26-mile Interstate 77 tolling project between Charlotte and Mooresville in favor of nontolled alternatives.
RALEIGH — While John H. Hurst and Harriet Hurst Turner say that news stories Carolina Journal published of the family’s struggles beginning in 2011 helped persuade others that they were entitled to the property, the election of Republican Pat McCrory as governor in 2012 appears to have played a significant role. Officials working under Attorney General Roy Cooper and former Gov. Beverly Perdue, both Democrats, tried to acquire the property from the Hurst heirs without paying for it.
RALEIGH — Alcoa Power Generating Inc. scored a victory in federal court May 6 when U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle ruled that the state of North Carolina failed to prove that a 45-mile segment of the Yadkin River where Alcoa operates four hydroelectric dams was navigable for commerce in 1789. Alcoa continues to assert that the deeds it has to property all along the contested area are valid.
RALEIGH — Dare County landscaper Bill Boykin thinks neither politically connected man who acquired property he once owned known as Island L on state maps — nor the state of North Carolina, which claims partial ownership — had clear title to the property when a boundary line agreement was drafted in 2011. Boykin thinks there are "clouds on the title," signaling potential irregularities in the chain of ownership.
RALEIGH — A Charlotte-area tax preparer who conducted an undercover operation with a friend, found that tax preparers catering to Hispanic customers are urging clients — typically using federal taxpayer identification numbers rather than Social Security numbers on IRS documents — to pocket fraudulent refunds by claiming on their income tax returns children as dependents who may not exist or who live outside the United States.
RALEIGH — Although the Spirit AeroSystems facility at the Global TransPark will not receive all the incentives it could have, critics call any purported "savings" beside the point. They say it's impossible to predict how a company will perform, calling into question whether economic incentives really are the key to landing out-of-state companies.
RALEIGH — As a candidate for president in 2008, Barack Obama said he would create 5 million green jobs, and in 2009 the U.S. Department of Labor had developed plans to define and count them. Officials in the N.C. Department of Commerce received nearly $1 million allocated by the federal government to survey companies across North Carolina. But the BLS programs measuring green jobs and reporting on green-job activities ended in March 2013.
RALEIGH — Officials at two state agencies are reviewing issues raised by news reports on federal stimulus grants made to a Yancey County resident and to relatives of U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan. Following news stories in various media, in October DENR Secretary John Skvarla and Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker asking state Auditor Beth Wood for help auditing the treatment of all funding from the federal stimulus law that was awarded through the State Energy Office.
MICAVILLE — Yancey County resident Melissa Graham’s stimulus-funded project converting a former blue jean factory into a mixed-use commercial facility failed, and Graham did not pay tens of thousands of dollars to a subcontractor, but a report from the N.C. Department of Commerce viewed the project as a success, and Commerce says it “met its responsibilities in evaluating the satisfactory completion of all projects and the awarding of the associated grant.”
RALEIGH — U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan’s husband Charles “Chip” Hagan, a Greensboro attorney, certified to the North Carolina licensing board for electrical contractors that their son Tilden Hagan worked 3,500 hours installing electrical wiring and equipment over a period of 324 days in 2012 — requiring Tilden to work consecutive 76-hour weeks over that period.
