Hear that train a-comin'

Those of us who have to travel between Raleigh and Charlotte from time to time get weary of the traffic on the Interstates or the stoplights that dot the U.S. 64-49 route across the central part of the state. With gas prices staying high, many of us have yearned for a fast train trip linking the city centers.
The passenger trains called the Carolinian and the Piedmont aren’t quite there yet, but they're getting close. State transportation officials say the average time for the Raleigh-Charlotte run is now three hours and nine minutes – making it competitive with driving and faster than driving if a pit stop is necessary. As the online schedule shows, you can leave Raleigh at 7:05 a.m. and be in Charlotte at 10:14 a.m. – for one-way fares as low as $22.
Now the public appears to be responding to the quicker trip – which once took upwards of four hours – and to high gasoline prices. The DOT’s Rail Division reported in a news release last week that ridership in June was up more than 30 percent over a year ago. The Piedmont, which runs between Raleigh and Charlotte both ways daily, was up 38 percent to 4,442 riders; the Carolinian, which runs between those cities and goes on to the northeast, was up 31 percent to 20,628 riders. “Ridership was strongest on the weekends,” DOT said.
Nationally, the state DOT said, ridership on state-supported trains was up 7.4 percent – and up 4.1 percent for long-distance trains.
Former Gov. Jim Hunt wanted DOT to make enough track, train and signal improvements to cut the travel time between the states’ capitals of commerce and government to two hours before he left office in 2001. That was simply beyond reach, and reducing it to a couple of hours by 2010 might be tough, too. But as the state whittles the travel time below three hours and keeps lopping off the minutes with faster service, it will likely find that ridership will continue to grow.

Doug and Darcy Orr's legacy

When he was a vice chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and professor of geography, Doug Orr earned a reputation for serious scholarship, public engagement, lively teaching, appreciation for the arts, an affinity for what folks now call roots music, a deep-seated concern for the environment and a love of North Carolina history and culture.
In 1972 he and several colleagues produced the Metrolina Atlas, a groundbreaking work about the region around Charlotte. Then in 1975 he and his colleagues Alfred Stuart and Jim Clay produced the North Carolina Atlas: Portrait of a Changing Southern State. Those are among the reasons why he was asked to become president of Warren Wilson College in the Swannanoa Valley east of Asheville in 1991.
During his time at Warren Wilson, he and his spouse Darcy became the public face of that lovely little college. They boosted its traditional commitment to work, study and service (students who attend Warren Wilson must work at a campus job that defrays part of the cost, and must perform community services before they can graduate), raised an already heightened environmental consciousness to new levels and in the process rebuilt much of the campus. (Disclosure: I know about this because my daughter went to school there and I’ve been on the board of visitors there for several years.)
It’s a gorgeous place unlike any other college I’ve visited. Orr and Stuart also co-edited a new volume, North Carolina Atlas: Portrait of a Southern State this is invaluable to understanding North Carolina’s environment, its history and culture.
Doug Orr retired recently as president, and the college has done something pretty nice: it has named its new admissions and college relations building the Doug and Darcy Orr Cottage.
It’s not just that the cottage is lovely – built with native stone and lumber milled from trees grown on campus. It’s unique -- the first such college or university structure in North Carolina to attain the designation of a Gold Certified Building under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. That’s the pinnacle of planning and construction for the green building movement. For more on this and a picture of the cottage, click here.

The unsinkable Floyd Lupton

Who was Floyd Lupton and why is a ferry named for him?
The news media have had a field day with the recent reports how the State Ports Authority and the Department of Transportation ran up bills exceeding $30,000 while giving a special July 4 weekend cruise to the tall ships festival to government bigwigs, muckety-mucks and honchos aboard the state ferry Floyd Lupton.
Gov. Mike Easley was especially steamed about misuse of the ferry. The Floyd Lupton is a river-class ferry that runs across the lower Neuse River from Minnesott Beach to Cherry Branch. It’s a free ferry and makes the run over and back all day long. When the ports authority and transportation department took the ferry out of its regular run for several days to paint up, fix up and drive the anointed around Beaufort and Morehead City July 1, they also took one of the bigger ferries out of service. The Floyd Lupton was replaced with a smaller ferry for a few days that could handle fewer cars on a busy holiday weekend. Reports say that dozens or cars had to wait because of delays due to the smaller vessel’s substitution.
It was a big mess, not the least because the honored guests got to sip wine and beer and eat scallops and shrimp, to the tune of a steel band, while a lot of ordinary folks had to stand in the heat and wait – some of them futilely – for an up-close inspection of the tall ships. As fiascoes go, the state may have wasted more money and caused bigger problems with other public relations disasters, but this one was a doozie.
If the state had handled this in a different way, it might have come up with a perfectly defensible cruise at little or no cost to taxpayers. But itwould have required the considerable talents of the man for whom the ferry was named – the late Floyd Lupton of Belhaven.
Lupton, who died a year ago, was one of the most effective politicians I’ve ever known. He was administrative assistant to the late U.S. Rep. Walter Jones Sr. for more than a quarter of a century. And as my colleague at the Observer, Associate Editor Mary Schulken, will tell you, Lupton pretty much ran the First Congressional District for more than two decades. Many folks thought Lupton was the congressman, she says; it was Lupton who always showed up at community meetings or church in that part of the state, where she worked for years for the Daily Reflector in Greenville.
I met Lupton in the early 1970s when I was a green-as-grass Washington correspondent for the Greensboro Daily News. Lupton had already been in Washington for years and knew where the levers of power were and which ones to pull. Some of my stories appeared in the Norfolk Virginian Pilot, which covered northeastern North Carolina and was owned by the same small group that owned the Daily News. And Lupton went out of his way to make sure the Pilot knew what Jones was doing.
Usually it was getting something done. Jones was chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee and wielded some power. Behind the scenes, though, Lupton ran things.
Here’s what Lupton might have done if he’d been asked how to provide a free cruise: In an earlier day, he might have arranged for a Coast Guard cutter for the cruise, but by the late 1990s he would have spotted the public relations nightmare in using a government vessel at such a public event.
He’d have said a plain old steel ferry wasn’t right. He’d have picked up the phone and gotten the folks at Hatteras Yachts in New Bern to loan one of their biggest, gold-plated motor yachts and provide captain, crew and fuel. He’d have called his contacts in the hospitality industry to provide free catering and waiters and supply live entertainment. Shoot, he’d probably have called newspaper publishers and TV anchors to come along so they’d get a good view.
And dared them to complain about it.
When Jones died in 1992, Lupton toyed with running for the seat. So did Jones’ son, Walter Jr., who by then had switched parties and become a Republican. But Lupton was a lifelong Democrat and he told Jones Jr. he couldn’t support a Republican.
Jones Jr. later had the last laugh, winning the First District seat and holding it still. He and Lupton remained good friends, and Jones sponsored a bill signed by President Bush renaming the post office in Belhaven for Floyd Lupton. As someone from one of the Down East newspapers has written, not many folks get a post office and a ferry named for them.

The not-so-golden rule(s)

Henry M. Robert was an Army general who understood the value of simple rules, uniformly applied. “Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty,” Gen. Robert is quoted as saying.
A century ago he put the rules of Congress into a book many know as Robert’s Rules. Most legislative bodies use Robert’s Rules as well as other manuals of precedents, and revise their own rules to help run their parliamentary sessions.
North Carolina’s General Assembly is no different – but like many, adopting those rules and following them are two different things. Both the N.C. House and Senate seem to follow their own rules as they see the need – and depart from them when it’s convenient to do so.
So it was the other day when Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue was presiding in the Senate on a vote to require schools to give students an opportunity to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag. The House and Senate have engaged in some childish shenanigans over who should get credit for the bill – Sen. Neal Hunt, a Republican who first proposed the idea; Sen. Julia Boseman, a Democrat whose bill the Senate approved; or a different version spliced into an unrelated bill and approved by the House after ignoring Boseman’s bill – most likely because she has called for the resignation of Speaker Jim Black. Fast forward to this week when Perdue was presiding and the Senate deadlocked at 24-24 on the bill with Republicans for it and most Democrats against it, hoping to resurrect the Boseman bill. What’s supposed to happen on a deadlock, according to the rules, is that the lieutenant governor may cast the deciding vote, as Perdue eagerly did when the lottery bill was deadlocked last fall. If the lieutenant governor doesn’t vote to break the tie, the bill dies. Or, alternatively, a senator, usually from the lieutenant governor’s party, may jump up and ask to change his or her vote, sparing the lieutenant governor the discomfort of having to cast a sticky-wicket vote.
None of those things happened. After a most awkward moment, according to accounts of the session, a quick recess was called and Senate Democratic leaders huddled, perhaps finally realizing how silly they looked in opposing a bill to do much of what they had already voted for in an earlier bill. When the Senate reconvened, Democratic Leader Tony Rand moved to reconsider the vote and try again. The Senate did, and lo and behold, the Pledge of Allegiance bill passed unanimously.
That’s leadership, I guess. But Perdue, considered by many the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, sure missed an opportunity to make a statement about the House and Senate’s petty squabbling.

Lake in '08?

While he was still chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake Jr. pushed the General Assembly for more resources for the state court system – more clerks, more prosecutors, more court reporters, and especially better electronic equipment. But Lake was never able to persuade the legislature to provide nearly as many resources as the court system needed.
One reason may have been the state’s lack of money. Another was wariness of the Democrat-dominated General Assembly to giving more resources to an appellate court system that had produced some adverse judicial opinions on redistricting and voting. At one point a few years ago, lawmakers were grumbling to the point of discussing impeachment – truly a crackpot idea. It went nowhere after former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell placed a few calls to his Democratic friends in the legislature. But Lake never persuaded lawmakers to beef up spending on the judicial branch in a major way.
Lake had pursued one other goal. He appointed a study commission in 2002 called the Actual Innocence Commission to develop ways for the courts to respond more effectively to credible claims of innocence by those behind bars. That commission recommended an Innocence Inquiry Commission to investigate claims of factual innocence. If a majority of eight commissioners agreed there was substantive evidence of factual innocence, the case would go to a special panel of judges in Superior Court to hold a hearing. If they found unanimously that the inmate was innocent, the charges would be dropped.
Lake retired at age 72 as chief justice earlier this year, and a funny thing happened since then. Thanks partly to the fact that there was more than $2 billion available for lawmakers to play with, and partly to the fact that Gov. Mike Easley recommended a big boost in court spending, the legislature approved a significant increase for the courts for the first time in years.
And Monday night, the Senate voted 48-1 to approve a bill similar to a measure approved by the House 80-23 last year to create the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission.
It must have been extremely gratifying to Lake, a former state senator and superior court judge, to watch from the gallery as the bill whose origins he launched was so overwhelmingly approved. In fact, senators gave Lake a standing ovation after the bill passed.
It was all the more remarkable because the legislature had not invited Lake to give State of the Judiciary addresses to joint legislative sessions, as it had with his predecessors. The warm ovation Monday night probably did a lot to soothe ruffled feelings between the legislative and judicial branches. But it’s also interesting to note that Lake has let it be known he may run for the Republican nomination for governor in 2008. After all, he’s got a couple of new legislative accomplishments to brag about. That might not be enough to build a campaign around, but it’s a start. Lake in ’08?

No more smoke-filled rooms?

Tobacco hasn’t been king in North Carolina for a long time, but it was still worth noting the other day when the N.C. General Assembly banned smoking in its halls – or any other government building it occupies.
Time was when a legislator voting to ban smoking or even tax tobacco was regarded as suicidal. But now tobacco has hardly any defenders left. The Senate voted 45-1 to ban smoking anywhere in the Legislative Building and the Legislative Office Building across the street, and the House concurred on a 95-14 vote.
The bill to ban smoking passed on June 30 – one day before the N.C. cigarette tax went up another nickel, to 35 cents per pack. Last fall it went from a nickel a pack to 30 cents, a tax increase that once was unthinkable in a state where tobacco farming, warehousing, auctioneering and cigarette production constituted a political powerhouse.
It wasn’t until the governorship of Bob Scott (1969-73) that the state first passed a small cigarette tax, and the notion of restricting smoking in public buildings was simply a fantasy. In the early 1990s, a state senator from High Point proposed a bill increasing the cigarette tax; the Senate killed the bill on the spot instead of at least allowing it to be assigned to a committee for its ritual gutting.
Things change. The House and Senate banned smoking on the floor of those chambers some time ago, but still permitted it in halls and elsewhere – until passing the bill last week. Other state buildings have been smoke-free for years. Gov. Jim Hunt issued an executive order prohibiting smoking in most state buildings and in the Capitol during his governorship.
That ended a long tradition of tobacco use in the historic building. Historian Raymond Beck, site manager for the N.C. Capitol Historic Site, has funny stories about tobacco customs in an earlier time when lawmakers smoked pipes and cigars, dipped snuff and chewed tobacco. “Tobacco use seemed to be almost de rigueur,” he notes.
In the days before cuspidors, the Capitol had “spit boxes” here, there and yonder – practically under each desk. These were sand-filled boxes, similar to cat litter boxes, where lawmakers could expectorate their juicy goo. There are still some spit boxes in the Capitol.
Nice shiny brass spitoons came along later, he says. There are also records of a pottery cuspidor, including one in use as late as 1893 that had a “tobacco spit glaze.” This may be more than most of us really want to know about it, but it’s a reminder that tobacco use was once a routine part of public life in North Carolina.
No more.

Cap City rising

When I was growing up in Greensboro in the ’50s and early ’60s, the state’s biggest cities were Charlotte and Winston-Salem. Greensboro would soon pass Winston as No. 2, and Raleigh was still down the list – an Eastern Piedmont town that wasn’t even connected to the rest of the world by an interstate highway yet.

But after the Research Triangle Park started rolling and IBM moved its research facilities there and other tech companies followed, everything changed. Steady growth began bringing new families, transforming the sleepy little town of Cary into one of the most prosperous in the state, driving Raleigh into second place among the state’s cities and threatening to push the total population of Wake County past Mecklenburg.

This rapid growth still amazes me. We moved to Raleigh in 1977 when I became Raleigh correspondent for the Greensboro Daily News. We thought we might stay a couple of years. We found a nice place in North Raleigh just outside a partially completed beltline, not quite out to the edge of town but up that way. It took me barely 20 minutes to get downtown to work.

Nearly 30 years later, we’re in the same house, but it’s between two beltlines, the old I-440 and the new and still under construction I-540. Every municipality in the county is growing rapidly – four of the once-little towns lead the state in growth – and Raleigh is bursting at the seams.
A report this week from the U.S. Census said the state capital grew by 14,000 residents 2004-2005, more than any other city on the Eastern seaboard. The growth rate of 4.3 percent ranked Raleigh 13th in the nation, trailed by Cary’s 3.3 percent growth at 22nd. Charlotte had growth of 2.1 percent, 40th in the nation.

Now we’ve been moved. We’re still in the same house in the same neighborhood, but the developers and real estate sales folks have changed our part of town from North Raleigh to Midtown. As the city has grown to an estimated 341,500 population and spread in almost every direction, our neighborhood on the north side appears to be closer to the city center than to the outskirts.
Funny thing, though. My 20-minute commute to work, in the same building where I began capital corresponding 29 years ago, has stayed about the same. Can’t complain about that.