Former NC governors denounce proposed GOP power shifts
A bipartisan group of five former North Carolina governors spoke out Wednesday against a Republican push to strip the governor’s office of appointment powers, including at the state’s Community College System, which is in the middle of a presidential search.
The former governors warned of “real chaos and harm” from a trio of bills that would shift power at boards dealing with education, transportation, utility company regulations, environmental rules, economic development grants and public health rules.
“A dramatic shift in who chooses the people who carry out the laws threatens progress, and people’s livelihood,” former Govs. Jim Hunt, Jim Martin, Mike Easley, Bev Perdue and Pat McCrory said in a letter to the state legislature’s top Republican leaders.
GOP senators moved one of the bills through the Senate Education/Higher Education Committee on a divided voice vote Wednesday, setting it up for expected Senate passage in the coming days. House Bill 692 would give the governor’s appointments on the State Board of Community Colleges to the legislature, as well as eliminate gubernatorial and local school board appointments to the boards of trustees that manage the system’s 58 individual campuses.
The bill would also give the General Assembly’s majority party, currently Republicans, veto power over the state board’s selection of a system president by requiring a confirmation vote in both the House and Senate. The bill also strengthens the president’s office, giving the system president the power to fire campus presidents – a power reserved now for campus trustee boards.
The system board is looking for a new president after Thomas Stith resigned in July. The departure was prompted in part by what people familiar with the matter described as concerns over hiring decisions by Stith. Stith didn’t respond to WRAL News’ requests for comment about the reasons for his resignation.
The community college system has had seven presidents in the last eight years, four of them interim, including the current interim president.
Sources familiar with the search, who requested anonymity to discuss the hiring process with WRAL News, described the recruitment effort as fluid. Sources indicated that the leading candidate — Matt Gianneschi, the chief operating officer at Colorado Mountain College — withdrew his application and that the search committee is now considering alternate candidates.
It was unclear why he withdrew his application. Gianneschi didn’t immediately respond to a WRAL News request for comment.
Senate Republicans said the community college overhaul bill is needed because some system campuses aren’t working well with businesses to set up training programs for potential workers.
“There are underlying issues with the community college system which must be addressed,” lead bill sponsor Sen. Amy Galey said. “Community colleges must be nimble, responsive organizations that are eager to interface with new business.”
Republican Senate Leader Phil Berger is a co-sponsor of the bill, which is unusual for the chamber’s top leader. A spokeswoman for Berger told WRAL News that the senator “has not been involved in the search process for the next system president.”
“With the severe turnover in the Community Colleges System's president, Sen. Berger thinks it's wise for the General Assembly to confirm the president to ensure there is an additional layer of oversight of the board's hire,” the spokeswoman, Lauren Horsch, said.
Governors’ letter
Wednesday’s letter from the former governors targeted two other bills in addition to the community college measure.
Senate Bill 512 tinkers with appointments on nine boards, including the N.C. Utilities Commission, which sets electricity rates, the Board of Transportation and the Environmental Management Commission, which sets pollution standards businesses must follow.
House Bill 17 calls for a voter referendum to amend the state constitution and make the State Board of Education an elected body instead of one appointed primarily by the governor. The governors asked lawmakers to reject all three bills and “preserve the continuity of our state and constitutional standard for separation of powers.”
Horsch said it’s “not surprising that five former governors care more about amassing as much power as possible for one person rather than balancing these so-called independent boards.”
“The General Assembly remains the branch of government that most closely represents the people of North Carolina,” she said in an email. “It has members that represent every inch of this state that can find and put forth a qualified slate of appointees that will be voted on by 170 people, instead of being hand-picked by one.”
In practice, though, the minority party often has limited say in appointments, with majority party leadership controlling the appointment process instead of throwing things open to all 170 General Assembly members.
“In my nine years there has been no true inclusion of the minority party,” House Democratic Leader Robert Reives said Wednesday. “The reality is that there are two people who have practical control over the appointment process in the Legislature: Senator Berger and Speaker [of the House Tim] Moore.”
The separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches has been a running debate in North Carolina for at least a decade. McCrory, a Republican, sued GOP lawmakers over the issue during his term and ultimately won in a case called McCrory v. Berger. In their letter Wednesday, McCrory and the other former governors said most of the power-shifting legislation lawmakers are discussing now appears to be “clearly unconstitutional” under that case and others.
Republican lawmakers disagree, saying the bills are constitutional under McCrory v. Berger or that they deal with things not touched on by the case. Either way, the state Supreme Court that may ultimately decide the issue has turned over significantly since McCrory v. Berger was heard, and current Chief Justice Paul Newby filed the lone dissenting opinion in that case.
Community Colleges
Republican senators said the state’s community college system is too siloed, more like “58 individual organizations,” in Galey’s words, than one system with 58 campuses.
House Bill 692 addresses that, in part, by giving the system president the power to fire campus presidents.
“If the Board of Trustees won’t do it, then the system president has the authority to do it,” said Galey, R-Alamance.
Sen. Joyce Waddell, D-Mecklenburg, pressed in the education committee Wednesday for specific failings. Galey declined to name names but said some presidents are “less responsive to the needs of employers than others.”
Democrats in committee complained that the bill eliminates not only the governor’s appointments to the system board but appointments on local boards of trustees that local school boards handle now. The measure also shifts hundreds of community college board appointments to the General Assembly, which Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake, said could be burdensome for the body.
“The bill removes ‘community’ from the community college,” Chaudhuri said.
Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Pamlico, recently expressed similar concerns, according to The Daily Advance in Elizabeth City.
