A decimal difference
Okay Doug, Ed and whoever else was worried about this, I have an answer.
Someone in the administration made a math error.
For those of you not in the loop, Gov. Mike Easley has protested the planned sale of federal forest land in North Carolina. In a letter to the Bush administration, Easley said that the sale of 9,828 acres would amount to nearly 9 percent of the federal forest land in the state. Whoever did that math was a decimal point off - the sale really amounts to nearly 1 percent of federal forest land in the state.
Seth Effron, a former News & Record staffer from back in the day who is Easley's deputy press secretary, says that a corrected letter is being sent to Washington, D.C. and that a correction is being sent to the Associated Press, which wrote the story most our readers saw.
However, Effron said Easley was still opposed to the sale.