News-Record.com

Here are a couple of updates for you if you missed the weekend papers:

• My colleagues Tina Firesheets and Eric Collins penned this story on Stephen's Law, which closes a loophole in the hit and run statute. The bill was named for a Western Guilford High School graduate. Gov. Mike Easely signed it Sunday.

• Click here for a profile of the lottery commission. Charles Sanders at one time opposed the creation of a state game.

• The governor's press office kept itself busy over the weekend, letting me know that bills were signed. Click here for the release on Stephen's Law and Rachel's Law, which relates to handguns. The governor also signed a bill raising school nutrition standards.

President Bush has nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. Click here to find out more about her.

Now, regular readers know this blog hasn't been big on federal news here, especially if it doesn't relate to North Carolina in some way.

But one line on Miers resume did catch my eye: chair of the Texas Lottery Commission.

I have no idea if the Senate Judiciary Committee will query her on whether she has a judicial bias for pick-3 over pick-6 games or if she is a strict constructionist who believes the player must pick the numbers rather than letting the computer do it.

But I think Miers illustrates both how high-profile a job lottery commissioner is and how much political connections might matter.

Prior N.C. lottery coverage here and here.

This notice from the governor’s press office:

RALEIGH – The North Carolina Lottery Commission will meet THURSDAY (Oct. 6) from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the ABC Commission Room in the Administration Building (116 West Jones Street) in Raleigh.

I will post a link to my story on the race for NAACP president between Melvin "Skip" Alston of Greensboro and the Rev. William Barber of Goldsboro when I get a chance. However, there's a little box on the story directing readers here to discuss, and I wanted to make sure there was a thread for them to use.

(Update: Click here for the story.)

I've been calling around on this story for a few weeks and waited to write it until I could visit with both men in person. In the mean time, there has been other coverage.

The state lottery commission held its first meeting today. Mainly it was an organizational affair. Introductions were made, the lawyers told the commissioners how to stay out of trouble, the next meeting date was set...commission members ate sandwiches at the end (yes, really).

The most substantial pieces of business done today included:

• giving chairman Charles Sanders the authority to draft, circulate among board members and post a job description for the lottery's director. This will actually be the hired staff person whose job it is to run the daily operations.
• Naming the lottery the "North Carolina Education Lottery."

If you are among a very specific population, that news either makes you really happy or is disappointing. The population I'm talking about, of course, include the folks who buy up web domain names hoping they'll become valuable.

Folks have already bought up NCEDUECATIONLOTTERY.COM and NORTHCAROLINAEDUCATIONLOTTERY.COM. For that matter, a lot of the other permutations have also been bought, including the more generic NCLOTTERY.COM .

No word on how much, if any, money the commission might be willing to shell out for its domain.

In the mean time, officials are looking for temporary space in the real world and in cyber space.

I'm catching up on my e-mail from Friday. Only one appointment of local note from the governor's office:

Gov. Mike Easley has reappointed Barbara S. Moore of Reidsville to the Rockingham Community College Board of Trustees.

Moore is the owner of Town and Country Realty. She is a charter member of the Committee of 100, a member of the Reidsville Wachovia Bank Board of Directors and the Annie Penn Hospital Foundation. Moore is a past recipient of the Business Woman of the Year Award from the Reidsville Chamber of Commerce. She received her bachelor’s degree in primary education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Click here for the whole release.

If you haven't seen the paper yet, these stories concern topics you've been reading about here:

• The North Carolina NAACP has a new president following a vote Saturday night. The Rev. William Barber of Goldsboro replaces Melvin "Skip" Alston of Greensboro. More on this in a second.

• I know this will shock, just shock, all you hard bitten political types, but it turns out that the folks who tend to give to state political campaigns also have issues they are pursuing before the General Assembly.

• My colleague Tafe Wireback wieghs in on the lottery and what agencies are doing to prepare to police the game and deal with gambling addiction issues.

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A couple bits of after-matter on the NAACP election:

• There will still be a Guilford County Commissioner in a statewide position for the NAACP, even though Alston is now off the board. Carolyn Coleman is now the group's first vice president.

• Coleman had served on the state executive board before. But, she told me last night, when she tried to file to run two years ago Coleman was told that her application was late...by then-President Alston.

• Coleman was running against the current first vice presidnet, Gladys Shipman. Shipman is president of the Greensboro NAACP chapter.

• NAACP candidates do not run in slates, but I was told that Shipman and Alston are seen as closely allied. And indeed, it seems that people carrying around Alston for president fliers yesterday also had a re-elect Shipman flier in the same hand.

• Both Alston and Barber were concearned yesterday afternoon about irregularities surrounding the voting. The issue, as far as I understood it, involved whether some delegates were properly registered and should be allowed to vote.

  The issue was serious enough that it delayed the start of the election and the final result for a few hours. Both men were prepared to lodge a challenge against the results with the national NAACP.

  However, Alston said last night that Barber's margin of victory was sufficient that the issue at hand had not made a difference.

• Alston said that he will remain on the state board of president emeritus.

• In case a discussion breaks out there, I've also posted on this topic at Inside Scoop.

• More comments from Floyd, Sue, and Jerry.

• Barber's own blog here.

Hide the good china and beer, the legislature is headed back to town. We got this notice from the governor's office today:

RALEIGH – Gov. Mike Easley today issued a proclamation reconvening the legislative session for Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005 at 10:00 a.m. The special session is called for the sole purpose of reconsidering House Bill 706, which was vetoed by the Governor on Sept. 29, 2005.

According to the North Carolina Constitution, when a veto occurs after the General Assembly has adjourned, the Governor is required to reconvene the session within 10 days of the veto or the bill becomes law.

House Bill 706 is titled, "An act to amend the teacher certification law to facilitate the hiring of teachers."

For prior coverage, click here.

The General Assembly has been called back into session to consider over-riding Gov. Mike Easley’s veto of HB 706. But it looks like House Democrats are doing their best to avoid an actual vote though.

If you don't remember, this is the bill that would have made it easier for local school districts to recruit teachers from other states. Easley complained that it would lower North Carolina’s own standards. (For prior stories on this, click here.)

House Democrats emerging from a caucus meeting Tuesday morning said that Speaker Jim Black is trying to hammer out a compromise with the governor's office. That compromise will probably be something along the lines of granting automatic reciprocity to teachers from states with standards as high as North Carolinas. Teachers from other states would still have some hurdles to jump through.

One House member told me, "I don't think there's a desire for a political showdown with the governor."

Unless, of course, you're a Republican.

Republicans I talked to this morning were chomping at the bit to over-ride the veto, saying that the governor was ignoring the realities facing local school districts.

Process-wise, expect the House to convene tomorrow, refer the bill to committee, and then high-tail it out of town. Without House action, the Senate has no play.

For you junior historians out there, there have been six vetos by N.C. governors since the power was given to them. None of those vetos have been over-ridden.

Where I should be: Hanging about the legislature today as all the honorables come back to town not to veto a bill.

Where I will be: Sitting in an ugly room listening to some corporate trainer tell me stuff I probably should already know.

Check www.news-record.com for updates. And I've asked my colleague Bruce over at The Chalkboard to keep an eye on the fun and games surrounding HB 706.

Now that our friendly local corporate trainers are done with their two days of teaching me ... something or other, I'm sure it was important ... let's look around at what I've been missing lottery-wise.

First off, the lottery has a new web site: http://lottery.nc.gov. I don't see any reason they couldn't keep that address, so all you folks who rushed out and bought up domain names might be out of luck.

Among the first items posted is a help wanted advertisement for an executive director. In case you're thinking of applying:

The Executive Director must have considerable management and operation experience and knowledge of the state-sponsored lottery industry. Experience with start up of a state lottery is preferred. The successful candidate will have demonstrated commitment to integrity and the promotion of responsible gaming. Candidates should have substantial experience with personnel supervision, contract and financial management, public relations, and strong leadership.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Next up, I have to give props to another paper for doing something I wish I had thought about. The Raleigh News & Observer asked for and got e-mails from Speaker Jim Black's office regarding the lottery.

The e-mails showed that one of the two biggest lottery vendors, Scientific Games, helped write the lottery law. Click here to read the story. (You may have to register as a user.)

There is no question this looks hinky. But it's a good example of something that goes on quite a bit down at the legislature. Lobbyists submit proposed wording and re-wording of legislation all the time. In this case, the lobbyists in question happen to have left a particularly vulnerable trail of bread crumbs, but this isn't a unique circumstance as far as folks with interest in a particular piece of legislation helping to shape that legislation.

It will make the RFP and other contracting maneuvers very interesting to watch though. And if Scientific Games does get a big fat lottery contract, you might expect questions to persist.

By the way, expect a lot of sniping back and forth between Scientific Games and their chief rival, GTECH. These folks go after each other in lots of states. Wars-of-words, lawsuits and political back-door dealings seem to be pretty much par for the course with these two.

Of course, at least one lottery commissioner has talked about having some of the work - computer networking and such - that a vendor usually does undertaken by the state itself. Malachi Greene, of Charlotte, mentioned after the first lottery commission meeting that he was not entirely convinced the state lottery should be contracting all the work out. It will be interesting to see if anyone other commissioners join him in that view.

It's time for the Friday afternoon appointments from the governor's office. So far, just one today:

• Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes has been appointed to the N.C. Emergency Response Commission. Click here for the full release from Easley's office.

Update:
If you are curious as to what a grilled cheese eating contest looks like, well, it looks like this:

Click for a larger image.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... local elections heating up - relatively speaking - skullduggery in the lottery, John Edwards acting like, well, John Edwards ... all of it important I'm sure.

But today I've been dispatched to the State Fair to cover the big grilled cheese eating contest.

Folks, I took the family to the fair over the weekend and I'm forced to wonder if the grilled cheese eaters (you know the guys and gals who shove as many sandwiches down their gullets during a set period of time) will even rate in the land of giant turkey legs and fried candy bars.

If you're going to be out there today, drop me an e-mail at mbinker@news-record.com or just look for the guy holding a notebook and wearing a slightly bemused look on his face.

Ever since I first started covering elections, I've had people ask me why voters aren't required to show some sort of photo identification when they come to the polls. The worry has been, I think, that anyone could show up and claim to be someone else.

My understanding from speaking lawyers has always been that a person's right to vote shouldn't hinge on them being able to afford or get a government identification card of some sort. Those who are especially disposed to flowery language would say things like, "Voting is a right that must be as unfettered as possible."

Well, it turns out at least one federal court agrees, striking down Georgia's effort to require identification for voting. From our friends at the Associate Press (after the jump):

Good morning.

For those who missed the dead tree version of the paper, check out this story on a recently released audit of the N.C. prison system.

And Click here to read the report itself. (Warning, this is a pretty big PDF file.)

The most remarkable thing to me about the report is not that they found problems. But one of the chief problems they found - overpaying prison workers - is ongoing and something that prison officials don't seem to think they can stop.

I don't know that anyone really expected a state sponsored gambling enterprise to be pure as the driven snow. It's just doesn't seem like the nature of this particular beast to be without problems.

But, as this latest story from the Associated Press illustrates, things seem to be "off to a right good mess," as my grandmother would say.

Meanwhile, if you're keen on watching the lottery commission in action, take note of the following (after the jump):

Gov. Mike Easley's Friday appointments this week include:

• Gwennella Lamberth Quick of Greensboro to the N.C. Council on Sickle Cell Syndrome. According to the governor's office:

  Quick is a clinical assistant professor at the School of Nursing at NCA&T. She received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from NCA&T and her master’s degree in community health nursing from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

  Board duties include advising the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commission for Health Services on the needs of persons with sickle cell syndrome and making recommendations to meet these needs. The board has 15 members, each serving three-year terms. The governor appoints all members.

• Shirley T. Frye of Greensboro to the Guilford Technical Community College Board Trustees. According to the governor's office:

  Frye is the former vice president of community relations for WFMY-TV in Greensboro. She is chair of United Way of Greater Greensboro and the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation. Frye received the Athena Award from the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the Brotherhood Humanitarian Citation Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice.

This is not the lottery story I wanted to work on.

The News & Record has been running a lot of wire copy on the lottery shenanigans. Basically, the three big points boil down to this:

• Lobbyists with a pretty strong connection to at least one lottery vendor submitted legal language to the General Assembly that was used in the final draft of the lottery law.
• At least one lottery commission member has pretty strong ties to that same company. Although, to be fair, he knows a lot of different lottery folks.
• At least one person in the House Speaker’s office may have had a legal duty to publicly disclose her lobbying work on behalf of the same lottery company, but didn’t.

As I said, I have other fish to fry (granted, some of them are leaving little IOU notes on my hook, but that’s another story), but there's been enough of a ruckus now that some local perspective is needed.

So here's the question that I’ve been asking some folks today: Given all that, if you are a lottery backer, is your faith in the lottery, or the state's ability to run a lottery, shaken? Even if you’re a lottery opponent, can the game still be redeemed? Or is all this a tempest in a teapot, Raleigh business as usual getting blown out of proportion because it’s related to the lottery?

Send your answers via the comment link below or e-mail: mbinker@news-record.com or ring me up: 919/832-5549.

Thanks.

One of the more aggravating things for a reporter is to spend time on a story that never gets published. While it's not exactly a "waste" of time, it is time that, in the end, probably could have been better spent.

I bit into one of those stories this week in regards to a follow up on the elections for North Carolina NAACP state office. I'm writing about it here for a couple reasons: There have been allusions to it on our letters page, and I think some other folks might run with it this weekend. (And if they do, well, good for them.)

If you don't remember, this was the election during which County Commissioner Skip Alston lost his post as president of the N.C. NAACP to Rev. William Barber of Goldsboro. Carolyn Coleman, another county commissioner, won a seat as first vice president from Gladys Shipman, who is the president of the local Greensboro branch of the group.

Good morning. A few lottery tidbits to start your week, whether you like it or not:

• From Sunday's paper, this story summarizes the fun and games from the past couple weeks. It also quotes a bunch of people saying that the lottery is going to move forward, despite the bad publicity.

• The lottery commission's vendor selection committee met this morning to talk about how they might go about finding companies to help the state run the game.

Unfortunately for the folks on that subcommittee, without an executive director on board and some other decisions that the full commission needs to make, they can't do a whole lot.

One thing that did become apparent from this morning's meeting is that the timeline for having a lottery up and running is getting longer and longer.

Immediately after the lottery bill was signed, supporters in the General Assembly said that they thought a lottery could be up and running by January or February.

But commission member Robert Farris, who heads the vendor selection subcommittee, said that he didn't think than an executive director would be in place until sometime in December.

And, he said, the state would not issue an RFP for anyone to do any work for the lottery until the executive director has had a chance to look over the RFPs. To boot, he said the shortest amount of time possible from issuing the RFP to having tickets sold would be on the order of four months.

That would put the earliest possible start of a lottery sometime in April, maybe, if everything goes really well.

For my lottery commission story from today’s paper click here. It’s merely the report out of one subcommittee, but there it is anyway.

The full lottery commission meets again tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10 a.m. Another subcommittee – this one to deal with rules for merchants who wish to sell lottery tickets – meets before that at 8 a.m.

And finally, if you've been following the Kevin Geddings saga, this from our friends at the AP:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Despite bipartisan calls for his resignation, a lottery commissioner under scrutiny for his relationship with a lobbyist for a potential gambling vendor said Monday that House

Speaker Jim Black has told him he wants him to stay on the panel.
"I think the speaker was very supportive," commission member Kevin Geddings said in an interview. Geddings said Black, who recommended him to the new nine-member panel, told him to "keep doing a good job, and that's what I intend to do."

Geddings, who operates a public relations firm, disclosed last month that he was friends with Alan Middleton, who is a vice president for government relations at Scientific Games Corp. Geddings also acknowledged he hired Middleton several years ago, before Middleton worked at the company, to work on some public relations projects.

Update: Click here for the governor's press release. More to come in tomorrow's paper. For all you teacher's out there, this means more money in November's paycheck.

Click here for the rush story from AP.

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Gov. Easley is scheduled to make an appearance at a Raleigh elementary school this afternoon to announce a plan to raise teacher salaries. Although this has the trappings of a dog and pony show, there actually is going to be some real news out of this one.

Back when the final state budget was negotiated this summer, about $85 million was set aside for to help raise teacher salaries in some way.

Basically, the legislature told Easley to figure out a way to use the money to make North Carolina's teacher salaries more competitive with other states. The string attached to the money was that the legislative leadership had to sign off on it before the governor could use the money.

Well, apparently they've hit on something that Easley, House Speaker Jim Black and Senate leader Marc Basnight can all agree to.

The announcement is schedule for 1 p.m. today. We'll have a story in the Wednesday's paper (you remember, the thing that gets thrown on the doorstep every morning) and we will, no doubt, update online this afternoon.

Some other background on this after the jump:

Click here for the story from the paper on the teacher pay raises.

I'd have more to say, but the lottery commission starts meeting at 8 a.m. and I'm off to that...and my friendly local coffee merchant.

For those of your following this story, about subpoenas for Speaker Jim Black's records, will be interested in this.

The Speaker's office has released the subpoenas. There are three, all of them in PDF files:

• subpoena one
  
• subpoena two
  
• subpoena three

For bonus fun, click here for the news release that came along with the subpoenas. I had to copy the release from an e-mail, so it's not all official looking.

My favorite thing about the subpoenas is they seems to be fairly ecumenical, they go after everything and anyone it looks like the prosecutor could think of associated with Jim Black. So, of course, it asks for correspondence between Black and lottery companies, folks in the video poker industry, staff aids, lottery commissioner Kevin Geddings, etc..

Some of the odder folks on the list: Michael Decker, the Republican then Democratic and then Republican legislator who through the House into a tie last session, Southland Gaming of the Virgin Islands, and establishment listed as “Thee Dollhouse.” I thinking they mean this joint. (Warning, not a suitable link for those of us at work with less understanding bosses or those at home with less understanding spouses.) Also on the list of “relevant parties” is ElectriCities, the organization for public power providers.

Fascinating stuff. The paper will carry a wire story telling us what it all means tomorrow.

Only one story from me over the weekend: this one on whether the lottery and video poker can co-exist.

Oh, and I don't know how many folks are out on their "personal watercraft," which I grew up calling a jet ski, this time of year, but the rules on those things are about to change.

You still have to be 16 to pilot one by yourself. But the minimum age for young riders to pilot with adult accompaniment has risen from 12-years-old to 14-years-old.

Click here to read the new law, which goes into effect Tuesday, Nov. 1. Unless folks are into cold-weather water sports, it'll probably affect more vacation plans next summer.