The latest poll for the Locke Foundation finds about an eight-point generic advantage for Democrats on the General Assembly ballot. Harper Polling’s survey was in the field from Sept. 13 to Sept. 15 and found that of the 608 likely voters it talked to, 49.5% said they were probably or definitely going to vote for […]
State Auditor Dave Boliek’s office confirmed Thursday that it’s looking into what it terms “the matter involving Superintendent Crystal Hill” of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The acknowledgement comes amid some intense drama for the district, which has a $2.1 billion budget and as of the 2025-26 academic year was serving 143,757 students. It began when the […]
North Carolina’s would-be physicians have been shying away from setting up primary care practices in the rural parts of the state for years, and the situation is not getting better. Only eight of the 463 people who graduated from a public or private medical school here in 2015 were practicing in rural North Carolina in […]
UNC System President Peter Hans and his aides left Wednesday’s Board of Governors budget committee meeting with an implicit green light to entertain campus-level requests for another set of tuition increases. The idea drew objections mainly from BOG member Art Pope, the former state legislator and CEO of Variety Wholesalers. “We should go back to […]
A divided N.C. Court of Appeals panel has sided with the Rules Review Commission on the key point of its battle with the Coastal Resources Commission over the renewal of a set of environmental regulations. Republican Judges Jefferson Griffin and Jeffery Carpenter ruled Wednesday that strictures against “significant adverse impact” in several of the CRC’s […]
Even UNC System President Peter Hans concedes that in college sports going forward, it’s likely that “those who spend the most will generally win the most games.” His comment, leading off a Wednesday briefing on athletics spending for the Board of Governors, came the same day The Athletic published a story that highlights how big […]
Federal regulators say the East Coast’s power grid, North Carolina’s included, handled January’s two winter storms way better than it did the Christmas Eve storm back in 2022 that prompted some overnight blackouts. The main reason for this, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says, is that utilities like Duke Energy planned better, communicated better and […]
UNC System campuses used student fees to raise $136.4 million for their intercollegiate sports teams in fiscal 2024-25, about 21.3% of what it cost to field them. Campus also directly subsidized their sports programs to the tune of $63.2 million, via cash allocations from other parts of their operation or via “indirect” means such as […]
Though they definitely favor setting up a special power-rate class for data centers, Attorney General Jeff Jackson and his aides nonetheless say the N.C. Utilities Commission has to tread carefully. Anything on those lines has to be “artfully designed” to remain in compliance with state anti-discrimination law that bars utilities from using rates to impose […]
The No. 2 man on the State Health Plan trustees told a Congressional subcommittee he favors doing away with North Carolina’s certificate-of-need laws to foster more competition in the healthcare sector. “There’s no reason for you to have to seek state permission to build a healthcare facility,” says Dr. Brian Miller, a Johns Hopkins physician […]
State Health Plan officials have added a dozen Atrium Health hospitals and clinics to the plan’s middle-cost tier, but Atrium’s big hospitals in Charlotte and Winston-Salem aren’t among them. The decision follows weeks of talks between the two sides and means that teachers and other state employees in the Charlotte area and the Triad could […]
A proposed rewrite of the UNC System’s construction-project policy would retain for the Board of Governors the ability to veto new buildings, even if legislators signal a willingness to fund them. On the docket for this week’s BOG meetings, the revision system President Peter Hans and his aides propose says that should legislators allocate money […]
Here at Business North Carolina, we remain bemused by some of the numbers in the analysis of school enrollments that consultant Brian Eschbacher gave the Charter Schools Review Board on Sept. 8. One that sticks out is that close to a quarter of the students that attend North Carolina’s public K-12 schools, traditional and charter, […]
Not a single one of the UNC System’s schools is able to pay for intercollegiate athletics with just the revenue its teams bring in — and they’re all subsidizing their programs in some way from the academic side of the house. With sports-related expenses likely to rise, the situation calls for a top-down policy framework […]
James Farrell/WFAE Radio It seemed like an innocuous moment, the kind of bureaucratic wrangling that happens all the time in the Government Center. At a March 2025 school board meeting, then-board member Melissa Easley questioned a proposed contract expansion that would give more money to an educational consulting firm called “SYDKIMYL.” She said she’d never […]
