Teachers Rallies and Government Budgets - Episode 10

North Carolina teachers just staged a “not‑a‑strike” day in Raleigh, and the spin is almost as loud as the rally itself. In this episode, Reuel, Nick, and Ben break down what the NCAE really demanded, why New Hanover County was the only large district that refused to cave, and how unions are blurring the line between genuine teacher concerns and partisan theater. They dig into the Opportunity Scholarship fight, the reality of teacher pay and benefits, and the larger question of whether endless protests are moving the needle at all. Then they zoom out to exploding housing costs, local tax hikes, and budget battles that decide whether government actually serves taxpayers or just grows itself.

What you’ll learn / Key moments

• 00:00 – Opening, why politics never slows down anymore and why this episode focuses on the “teachers’ rally” in Raleigh.
• 02:30 – What actually happened in Raleigh: who organized the protest, what teachers say they want, and how the NCAE mixes real grievances with left‑wing slogans.
• 08:30 – Why New Hanover County’s school board refused to move a workday, how many districts effectively shut down, and what that meant for families.
• 15:30 – Are these rallies really “strikes”? North Carolina law on teacher unions, collective bargaining, and why lawmakers hesitate to enforce it.
• 23:00 – Teacher pay, benefits, and cost of living: what the numbers really look like in New Hanover County, and why money alone doesn’t fix failing schools.
• 32:00 – Opportunity Scholarships, “make the wealthy pay,” and why massive per‑pupil spending demands without leverage look performative, not serious.
• 40:00 – Housing and development: people demanding “affordable housing” while blocking new units, and the basic supply‑and‑demand economics no one wants to admit.
• 52:00 – Wilmington and New Hanover budgets: living‑wage pushes, tax hikes, COVID money hangovers, and what services taxpayers actually get for rising bills.
• 01:08:00 – Hospital quality, Novant, and how “nonprofit vs for‑profit” misses the real question of whether patients are getting better care.
• 01:15:00 – Quick hits on Supreme Court drama, redistricting, and what’s coming next in Raleigh and New Hanover County politics.

What You Can Do

If you’re tired of performative rallies, fuzzy budget talk, and politicians “adjusting” your taxes instead of being honest about raising them, this episode is your playbook. Share it with a friend who has kids in public school, a neighbor who just got their new tax bill, or someone who still thinks more slogans equal better policy. Then show up: at school board meetings, budget hearings, and at the ballot box, and demand clarity on what government is actually providing for the money it takes from you. 

Finally, stay plugged in by subscribing to the show, signing up for the Wilmington Standard daily update, and following our work across radio, email, and local reporting so you’re ready for the fights coming to Raleigh and New Hanover County.

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to the three guys podcast, I'm Reuel Sample, joined on my left, your right by Nick Craig from The Nick Craig Show. Hey Reuel, how's it going? Good to see you. Likewise. And on my right, your left, Ben Schachtman from WHQR. Hey man, how you doing? I'm doing great. Gentlemen, this is the reason why I moved to North Carolina. The weather outside is fantastic. To sit in a brick room with Ben and I and do a podcast? No. Oh, okay. No, it's going outside after sitting in a brick room. It is gorgeous out. I'll tell you what, I sat outside with my father last night on our front porch and it was just stunning. It was just great. Not my father, but everything else was just fantastic. Excellent. I'm sure your father's a lovely man. He is. He is, and he'll be the first to tell you that. So we've got a lot to talk about. We haven't been on the air for a while because I'll tell you what, getting all three of us together is like pulling teeth at times or herding or shepherding cats. And there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. Ben has been in this business a lot longer than I have, but I feel like there used to be a political cycle that would be kind of defined and it seems like that is now non-existent and it's just, even in off years, even last year with the municipal elections, it's just, it's all the time. It doesn't stop. We're idling at 3,000 RPM. I mean, even as we're doing this, the general assembly is in the middle of their short session and there's just a lot going on. Primaries all over the country. I caveat all of my answers when people ask questions now, I'm like, as of today, as of like this morning. Literally as of like, I'll do the show at seven o'clock and by 11, I'm like, oh, that's 45 minutes of content that is no longer relevant. Well, one of the things that is still is relevant and it really came, this one came like a freight train out of the fog. The whole thing about the teacher's rally in North Carolina, because it happened, it came up very quickly. It was a question about teachers having the day off to go up to up to Raleigh and have a protest. Ben, what happened up in Raleigh? What was all that about? So the idea was it was the North Carolina Association of Editors, which is like a quasi union when we can get into the whole, the reasons why like collective action is illegal for government employees in North Carolina, but in all intents and purposes, it is a union. They call themselves a union. So they were organizing teachers from around the state to go to Raleigh on a Friday when legislators weren't there to protest a number of things, but the top line ones were there's no budget, which means there's been no raises. And that also means, by the way, so local county or local school districts can't implement raises until the state passes a budget resolution. So even if New Hampshire County wanted to say, well, we're going to go ahead and give you raises that still can't go through. So there's a lot of frustration about the lack of a budget. There's there's some more general demands for wage increases, like most union negotiations. They're starting very high. I'm sure we can talk about that. And also they're frustrated with the Opportunity Scholarship, which is a state program has been around for a few years now and essentially provides money tiered based on families income that you can use and take that to a private school. And I think the sort of middle of the road attitude on that has usually been people don't have like our own superintendent, Dr. Chris Barnes, has said, I don't care if you do that, but you also need to fund our schools. So it's the for some people, it's the funding for the Opportunity Scholarship because all money is fungible. It looks like it's at the expense of public school funding, even though legislators will argue it's not. And then the sort of the further left argument is that this is a deliberate attack on the public school system, trying to steer parents into the private school. The data shows that a lot of people who are getting the vouchers were already in private schools. And so it doesn't seem to be the culprit. People have made it out to be. But anyway, those. So those are the sort of top line issues that educators had. Nick, one of the big things that got people upset about this, especially from the teacher unions, what they wanted to do is they wanted to move the workday that had been scheduled for May 4th, which was the Monday to May 1st, the Friday, and the Board of Education pushed back on that. But that just to many people, that seemed just like a simple calendar change. What was the problem with that? You said something at your open that I think is an important part of the discussion and probably intentional. You mentioned it was a freight train coming out of the smog or a freight train coming out of the smoke. That was, to me, intentional by the NCAE is you kind of last minute. And when we say last minute, we're talking about within the span of two or three weeks, which I think, I don't know that you'd say, oh, that's the absolute last minute, but you're talking about a complex facility, right? If you decide you want to go out to lunch day, you make that decision yourself. It doesn't uproot everything. You're talking about thousands of employees and tens of thousands of students. So when even for a snow day or something like that, it's a significant impact on a community. So like many districts across the state, the New Hanover County Board of Education was having to deal with, okay, what do we do here? There's a possibility that hundreds of teachers are not in the classroom when they're expected to be on a day that was set on the calendar more than a year ago. And out of all of the big 12 school districts, New Hanover County was the only one that didn't, from a conservative standpoint, didn't cave to the NCAE's demands and said, no, we've got a teacher work day on Monday. Parents have planned for that. Students have planned for that. And that's what we're keeping it. If you want to take PTO time and drive up to Raleigh and stand in front of a brick building with nobody being there, which is exactly what happened on Friday, that's your prerogative. You're an employee, but you have PTO if you're allowed to take it and do that. And one other thing, Ben mentioned some of the highlights on it. And from my vantage point and all of the things that were discussed in those kind of top items, I think are all fair. You want to discuss the OPS program, Opportunity Scholarship Program, great. You want to discuss teacher pay. All that stuff is, I think, a fine discussion. But then right below that was make the wealthy pay their fair share, protect and save our democracy, pass fair maps. And so for me, as a conservative looking at this argument, you've taken what I think is a valid discussion over, should we pay teachers more? Should we increase education funding, which is, by the way, more than $18 billion in the last school year? You've now taken that discussion and you've lost me because you've now tainted your protest with a bunch of left-wing nonsense that we see at all of these No Kings protests and everything else. And I think for a lot of parents and folks that are not ideologically aligned politically, they see those things and they go, hold on a second here. I thought Miss Sally from third grade was going up to protest teacher pay, but now they're walking around with a sign showing Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler wearing their NCAE shirts. And to me, you lose the ability to have the discussion when you masquerade it with all of these other left-wing talking points that, first of all, A, are not relevant here in North Carolina and B, shouldn't be the stated purpose of the North Carolina Association of Educators. So I want to take two tacks on this and give you guys a take on both of them. The first is what you're talking about, is this the overtly partisan nature of some of the demonstrators. I think locally, the chapter here did a good job of trying to try to keep this about those top line issues that I think everyone thinks are in the Overton window. But obviously once you get on the street with signs, yeah, I saw the Trump is Hitler sign. But I'll say just to cut you off real quick, on the kidsovercorporations.com, whatever that website was set up by the NCAE, that stuff was listed on their website as their call to action. I'm there with the local chapter, I think was doing a better job of messaging. But the state level, yeah. No, I'm giving you the point and I think the issue is, and I think this is where some teachers I talked to struggled, because a lot of teachers, they're very busy. They do not have time for politics. They're not innately political creatures, unlike the union organizers who are. Sure. Because being in a union, I grew up in Union, you know. Unionville? Union County was not far away, but Jersey is a union place, you know. And so it's, you know, we all grew up in the shadow of Hoffa betting on which end of Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands he was buried in. But it's an innately political business, even if you say it's not, you're wielding political power and sometimes using political money. So but for the average teacher, right, from their point of view, Republicans have controlled the General Assembly for a long time, better part two decades. And that is whose feet you can lay lagging teacher pay at. We're among the worst in the nation. But if you want to work with them, right, then you risk alienating them. So I talked to a lot of teachers who are like, I don't really want to go in guns blazing because they're, you know, many teachers I talked to were not super confident that Democrats are going to take back both houses of the General Assembly and then, you know, snap a finger and their wish list comes true. So there's, you know, I saw people who were pumped that Sam Page was there because it's an entree. Like, can we sit down with Republicans and work something out? Berger has made gestures that we know we need to do something. This is embarrassing. And if you're going to be, you know, just real politic about it, it's like at a certain point being last in the nation hurts even Republicans because it just looks so bad. The optics are so bad. Yes. So teachers I talked to were torn between being frustrated with the Republican establishment. And that's where you get stuff like maps, like if we could, you know, re-gerrymander this state in a democratic way, if the pendulum swings once again, then maybe we can get what we want that way. Or if we can or alternatively, right, do we go in and keep this a nonpartisan issue and try to work with the Republican establishment, which will probably hold on for another cycle in the G.A. and maybe many more. But those are the teachers. The organizers did seem less concerned about that. And it also, I felt like it exposed some of those teachers to the wrath of right wing media when they themselves were there for different reasons than the union would want to, because unions taken on overt political leanings here. So there was kind of a my point of view, there was a disconnect between the union and the teachers. If the teachers had focused, the teachers and the teachers union had just focused on the impasse on the budget, which quite frankly is ludicrous. It's ludicrous. And we're Republicans talking about Republicans. No, no, no, no, no spin, no, no, no, no sugarcoating that. They should have passed this budget a while ago. If the teachers had talked about just teachers pay, do you think the do you think the the public reception would have been better? Yes, I do. One hundred percent. And I think if this were these events don't just pop up three weeks beforehand. This is something that the NCA had been planning for four months. But and again, I think it was intentional to kind of, hey, let's make all these school districts scramble. We'll get a bunch of teachers kind of up in arms over this and put a lot of pressure on these administrations or the school boards, either the superintendent or or the board itself to kind of make this knee jerk reaction to, oh, well, I'm hearing from all my staff that they would need to go do this. So let's cancel school. If this had been planned out three months ago and proposed to the school districts three months ago and kept in the lane of teacher pay, even the opportunity scholarship program, which I think is a stupid argument, but at least it's in the education realm. So I can I can entertain the discussion. I do think I think a lot of folks on the right that kind of rolled their eyes at this event would have been willing to take it more seriously. And, you know, one of the other things that I've heard a lot from watching the the General Assembly short session, there's been a couple of different education related hearings. Another one focusing on the Chapel Hill, Carborough City School District is that I've heard from multiple lawmakers now publicly, not not privately. You put us in a really tough position when we pass legislation like the Parents' Bill of Rights and you are openly defying it as a school district. And then you're coming to us saying, give us more money. And multiple lawmakers, whether that's the valid excuse or not, make the point you're putting me in a really tough position to advocate for public schools when you're coming here lying. And we've got the evidence to prove that what you're saying is not, in fact, what you're doing. So I think Republicans are kind of balancing that idea out right now of there are many districts that are not in compliant from their vantage point with state law, which again, whether you think the law is stupid or not, it's the law the same way that the calendar law is the law. I would argue that law is incredibly stupid, but it's the law. And so if you don't follow it, you're breaking the laws of school district, which I don't think is inherently a good thing. So keeping it on brand to me probably would have lent itself to a more prosperous situation. There's a reason that there was discussion on it Friday and a little bit on Saturday, nothing on Sunday. And here we kicked off a new week and it is a event that is now very far in the rearview mirror, even though it was only just a couple of days ago. Ben, you and Nick, both are from New York, where you had New Jersey. Huh? New York, New Jersey, New York, New Jersey, New Jersey, New Jersey at all. I'm strictly from New York, where teachers were allowed to unionize and organize. Yeah. And I grew up in the great state of Pennsylvania where teachers were allowed to organize. I remember having a teacher strike that made us go all the way to the end of June for school because they delayed school so much. One of the demands of the NCAE is for teachers to organize and to be able to collectively bargain, which is not allowed here in North Carolina. So that's my second question for you guys, because I think I've heard a lot of disparate opinions about this. And so under North Carolina law, government employees are not allowed to unionize, they're not allowed to collectively bargain, and they're not allowed to strike. It is expressively forbidden and it's illegal for them to strike. And I've routinely seen over the last 10 years, Berger and other powerful folks in the Republican side of things in the General Assembly, suggest that the teachers union is breaking the law. But they've never actually, the law is actually kind of vague, unfortunately. What is a strike? And so there's been a few legislators who suggested, OK, if that's the problem, let's put some additional sentences into the law and tighten this up so we can actually say so we can actually, you know, if needs be, arrest union organizers. Interesting. And no one has had the gumption to push that through because that feels like a bridge too far, because arresting teachers is different. Rolling your eyes at teachers because they're protesting on May Day, with a long nose, the day, while the socialists are, you know, doing a capitalist freeze out in the park or whatever, like rolling your eyes at the kids with berets is different than arresting a teacher. Like that feels a little Gestapo. So it's always been in this fuzzy area of like, it has some of the characteristics of a strike, but it's not. And actually asking the school board to accommodate a strike, right, is like giving students a safe space to protest. Like, well, then it's not really a strike if you have permission to leave. If the mill owner says, oh, you guys can take the half day today, then you're not striking. The mill owner gave you a half day. Like you're not playing hooky. Yeah, it's like Schrodinger's strike. It's like we don't really know if it is or isn't a strike. And they want some of the benefits of the strike, right, which is getting the public's attention. Did you just bring Schrodinger's cat into a sort of economic club? That's very good. Trying to keep the brow high. That's very good. So. So, yeah, they want some of the impact of a strike, which is getting the public's attention, getting like an official's attention. They don't want some of the other parts of the strike, which are consequences. Strikers get fired. They get replaced by scabs. That's the game. And so it is, again, it is weird because it is in this uncanny valley between like a strike and a personal act of protest. So right now, Ben is right, NCAE. And what is the national? NEA. NEA, yeah, the NEA, but also there's a there's a national organization for the government office, government office employees or something like that. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. There's a whole bunch. Right now in the state of North Carolina, they cannot unionize. So they act more like a PAC or a lobbyist group. Should we tighten up what what goes on or should we go the other way? No, I think I mean, I think to Ben's point, you know, these one off days and let's let's let's kind of set the stage on this a little bit. Twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. There were NCAE, I think one, maybe two of these large NCAE protests. So it's not unheard of that these happen. The one off days, I think, to Ben's point is why you haven't seen lawmakers really have the balls to go in and be like, oh, we're going to start rounding up, you know, teachers and union organizers. But to the example that you gave rule where presumably it was a long term strike where you were out of school, if NCAE said next week no teachers are going to school, I guarantee you Phil Berger, Destin Hall and the Republican majority is in Raleigh codifying state law and arresting those individuals. Because I think that that's when you get more into the the strike category, a long term, even a week, even a couple of days work stop. But you do something on a Friday in May, you know, the Marxist holiday, May Day. I don't think it I don't think it fits the I don't think it fits the strike. I mean, I called it a strike because it was. Did you call it a strike? Yeah, because it did well. Yeah, I mean, it's it's got to Ben's point. It's got all of the earmarks of of a strike. They're very careful in their language to avoid saying strike. But if you were a casual observer from a different country, you didn't know the nuances of North Carolina law and the rhetoric of education associations, you'd be like, oh, they're on strike. 9000 teachers did not show up for work on Friday and went to Raleigh to hold signs. That if you just saw a clip on CNN of this happening in France, you'd be like, oh, it's a teacher strike. But it did effectively shut down. What was it, 20 school districts? Yeah, 20, 21 or 22. Here's the other thing I think is interesting. And this is, you know, in the broader context of strikes and unions. I think the most effective strike, like in in like collective memory of my family growing up was the garbage union strike in New York City because the city just became an unlivable shithole within days, more so than usual, more so than usual. And this is New York City, like in late 70s, going in the 80s, like good times. But like when you just have a mountain, you just have like, you know, the Andes Mountains of trash going down Broadway. There was no leverage on the other side. Yeah. You know, and they the city had to cave. There was no there was no other way out of that situation. And I think what's different with this is like, yeah, you could cause a lot of frustration for people if you were to go on a general strike. Even though it would be illegal. But I think on the on the right, you would be able to say, look at all these families that you're kind of screwing over. We now have to find child care for a week. We now have to find sometimes food for a week. All of these, you know, substitutes who are, you know, now just flailing, trying to keep control of this. You know, these kids who are now going to be going to school in the June or, you know, missing important prep time. You know, you could you could weigh both sides of the argument. But it is I think there's like a much more it's a riskier proposition because you you risk public blowback if you strike. Yeah, especially in a place where people are not used to it. And there's one other interesting thing to note about this. The NCAE, the teachers association, it does not have broad membership, but it's something like anywhere between 15 and 10 percent of teachers in the state are actually members of NCAE. Really? It is not 60, 70, 80 percent membership. It used to be go going back to the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. But they I mean, the long and the short of the story is when Republicans took control of the North Carolina General Assembly and just essentially boxed out the NCAE and said, we're not going to you guys are a left wing group, we're not going to interact with you. Their membership plummeted. I think it was like 20 percent of teachers in New Hanover County. Wow. Which is, I think, higher. Yeah. So it's it's not, you know, and there's a hundred and sixteen or one hundred and twelve school districts across the state of North Carolina. Eighty three percent of them operated on a normal schedule on Friday. And there were no problems here in New Hanover County at all. Not that I would assume we would have heard about them. I know I'm sure Ben talked to some people in the school district. I did. I mean, nothing more than. Yeah, I mean, sucks when you've got a bunch of substitutes. It was a stressful day. But if you wanted to leave the, you know, the central office tower, I heard Pat Bradford was volunteering. She actually said she had a good time. Yeah, I saw a picture on Facebook. She said she was enjoying herself. But yeah, I guess that's kind of my point, is that, you know, this was I would be fully supportive of anyone's desire, right, regardless of the cause to by themselves or with a group, whatever. Take take your personal day. If if they prove it, they prove it, you know, and and go to Raleigh and protest. I don't have a lot of faith in that getting anything done. I mean, they've been doing this the next point for almost a decade. And teacher salaries have remained from their point of view, very low from my point of view, very low. That has not moved the needle. They haven't had the ability to actually get in the hall of power, negotiate like a more effective union might. But if that's what they want to do, God bless. Yeah. Right. So the the political part of it doesn't seem to be effective. Or if it is, it is a very slow drip, drip, drip kind of thing. And then the you know, the the you know, the other part of a strike is that you cause you're inflicting damage and it didn't seem to do that. Yeah. So I don't know what what teachers unions are supposed to do. The frustration feels very valid to me. But it but the if you keep going to Raleigh, even in large numbers and nothing is changing, if we're still behind Mississippi and teacher pay, then it it feels performative to a certain extent. Again, I get the frustration, but it's like maybe you should find a different way to maybe you should at least think about different ways to do this. Yeah. I mean, you know, from my vantage point, the the the solution to to said problem over things like teacher pay in this larger discussion is why are people looking at what? Why are so many families? Why are more than 160,000 families across the state of North Carolina taking advantage of the opportunity scholarship and getting out of public schools? Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I think that is part of the discussion that needs to be had. And, you know, there was a great there's a great presentation at the school board meeting last night. And this is not this is not a very popular thing to say. But but I feel compelled to say it. You know, when you talk about teacher salary, the only thing that is ever discussed is your paycheck, whatever that is. Fifty whatever the starting teacher salaries is. Sixty two. Fifty one thousand. Something like that in three thousand in New Hanover County. It's somewhere in the mid 50s because we have one of the largest supplements, local supplements anywhere in the in the in the state. So the only discussion is teacher pay. Fifty some odd thousand dollars a year. What is not discussed is it's not a 12 month a year job. It includes almost nine thousand dollars a year worth of health care benefits. Phenomenal health care for and and thousands. I think during the presentation I saw last night during the school board meeting, almost five thousand dollars a year worth of retirement benefits. That has to factor into. And I know that's not take home dollars, but as somebody that is purchasing their health care through the Obamacare exchange right now and spending nearly four hundred dollars a month on health insurance, that needs to factor into the discussion. And if it doesn't, we're not we're not truly discussing. We're not we're not having a full holistic view of everything to have said discussion. Teachers are not working 12 months out of the year now. Some do summer school and stuff, but that's that's additional money. That's an additional pay that they get for that. Yeah. And so that none of this is to say that we shouldn't have the discussion over teacher pay. But you can't say teachers are making forty eight thousand dollars a year and that's it. And they're being starved out by the North Carolina legislature. It's not an accurate beginning place to start the discussion. I agree with that. I do think that's why. And I also don't think you can do apples to apples comparison with other regions. The cost of living is different. Sure. Like I do think that in the effort to get this all down onto a protest placard, we lose a ton of money as it needs to, as it needs to. But, you know, I do think if you're looking at, you know, especially New Hanover County, I think we're almost. We're almost getting to an absurdist point of view where it's like, how much more can we push the public sector to keep up with the cost of living here? Like at a certain point, you know, we approach downtown Manhattan prices. Yeah, we're there. We're, you know, we're, you know, scarcity drives up cost. And are we going to bust them in from rural areas? Are we going to do, you know, Brunswick County is looking at making cost like, you know, purpose built like teacher housing. Are we going to do teacher's barracks? Like what do we do? You know, because even if you, you know, even if you're so much more forthright about what the financial situation actually is and you factor in what they make or you sort of annualize their salary, however you want to slice that up financially, if they can't afford to live in New Hanover County, like what do you do? And that goes for, you know, cops and firefighters and nurses and stuff too. But it's like, um, we're, we're seeing this in some of the other local governments where we are really, really losing a fistfight with the cost of living. Yeah. Um, and that's not going to be the same in every county. So that, that discontent is not going to be the same, you know, for every district that's sending some teachers. But for, for our district, it seems like I, I would like to see some discussions, you know, think outside the box a little bit because ultimately we will just hit a wall with how much money, for example, the County commissioners of the state are willing to put into trying to keep up with the cost of living. Yeah, that's an interesting, it's an interesting point of view. Uh, one of the big things that came up in last year's municipal election, it's going to come up again in this year's County, uh, elections are as a development is that, uh, you know, if, if, if a person who wants to develop a piece of land into affordable housing, so on and so forth, what generally happens is they develop that piece of land, they put it on the market and those units just, they go, the monthly prices go through the roof. So they develop another piece of land, but at the same time we're trying to stop development. So where, where, where is the, uh, where's the balance? This discussion is going on right now. There's the big debate. I know Ben's written about it, about sledge forest up in the Northern half of the County. The same, from my vantage point, the same fools that scream about affordable housing are outside protesting a nearly 1,200, uh, unit, uh, a single family housing unit up in the Northern half of the County. I think they beat them down to 4,000 units. Now I think they beat them down to 4,000, 4,000 units. It's a large, you talk about adding 4,000 homes and yep. I will say that. I will add this real quick. Um, uh, to, to your point, um, I run into a lot of pushback from the left on this is, um, what's called filtering, which is, you know, the argument is from some people on the left is that, well, this doesn't count because it's not affordable housing and it won't be, you know, Hilton bluffs. I think it's what they're going to call it. These will be very high end. If you have Hilton in the name, it's not going to be a bluff. But it's, um, the idea is that when people move to this region and they are affluent and they can afford an $800,000 house or a $3,000 a month rental and they can't find it, they will settle for something less. And they, they're at that point, they're less concerned about the price point. If I come into the market looking for an Audi and they don't have one, I'm like, well, I'll just get the nicest Nissan you have because maybe I'm planning on trading this in a couple of years anyway. I don't, I'm not going to haggle. I don't really care. Yeah. You know, but some, but that means that the Nissan dealer, you know, can like inch up a little bit with his costs because now you've got these aspiring Audi, uh, fans who are like, all right, they're settling for the Nissan, but the people who could maybe, you know, push their budget and get up to a Nissan are now priced out. And this goes all the way down the market. So people act like building luxury homes doesn't impact the affordable housing market, but it does. Uh, and there's a, that makes some people very queasy. Yeah. Um, with, with sledge forest, you could do a whole other podcast on sledge forest, but I understand that there are, you know, some environmental concerns. I understand that there are some questions about whether the County applied the, uh, the UDO appropriately, that'll all apparently get hashed out in court. Now they've been sued by all their neighbors. Fine. And we'll follow the story and it will be what it will be. And people are obviously have different minds about it, but it's fair to say that some measure of the pushback against that has nothing to do with the special tree frogs that live there where the old oak trees, people just hate development. Yeah. But then they, but it's the same people that show up to a city council meeting and demand more affordable housing. I mean, it is the most idiotic thing I've, I've, I've ever seen. It's, it's totally illogical. And you know, obviously this gets into a little bit of politics, but it is basic supply and demand economics. And you know, we've seen the growth in Charlotte and Raleigh, obviously our state's two biggest cities. Both of those areas have the luxury of going out. Charlotte is now practical. I mean, Charlotte is now South Carolina and all the way up to Lake Norman. Raleigh is all the way up to orange County and halfway into Johnston. New Hanover doesn't have that. There's a freaking, there's a freaking, I mean, there's just nowhere to go. There is no out. Out is over a bridge or two bridges soon to probably be one bridge and North to Pender County. That's it. There's nowhere else. So we talked about New York city and their teachers. How many of those teachers actually crossed the bridge every day? Oh, the whole bridge and tunnel battalion. I mean, yeah. Because they can't $70 a $70 a day going, going back and forth on the bridge. There's a reason that there's a megalopolis that goes from Baltimore to Boston. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, if you're riding the rails, you ride the Acela. It's kind of hard to tell when one, when like the suburban outer atmosphere of New York ends and that after Boston begins, it's just sort of like dense, but suburban for hours. And to the next point, we can't do that here. And there's been very little regional planning. I won't say there's been no regional planning zero when it comes to, you know, what are the employment needs? What are the housing needs? What are the transportation needs in a, in a, from my point of view, in a sane society, 10 years ago, we would have said, we see the way of going. And so we're no, no transportation pun intended, but like let's talk to Pender and Brunswick County about some regional, if you want to incentivize it, if you want to, maybe you just go the abundance route and just like, how can we take some of the bureaucratic impediments out of the way? How can we change the zoning maps where we know where big multifamily departments are going to go? And we put them on bus routes so that we can have teachers and cops and nurses who are inevitably going to get priced at New Hanover County, or at least the white hot center in Hanover County and have them live somewhere nice, somewhere where it's reasonably easy and not wildly taxing for them to get here. Cause if you're on a bus, at least you can get some work done. You know, especially if it's like, if you had like a direct route, say you had like a Hampstead to government center, something like that. Yeah. But that kind of planning has been so far off the radar. What I've heard about what I've heard county commissioners talk about in terms of that is that it's called a tax leak because they want people living here. Of course. But if they can't afford to live here, they're going to have to live someplace else. The whole idea of the government getting involved in what you pay for a rental just offends me because that, that I'm a conservative free market guy is that you charge what the free market can bear. And so the, the, the sort of more libertarian approach then, right? If you're not going to do incentives, you're not going to do caps, which I see the arguments for and against those. But you're like, okay, we know people are going to try and build here, right? We have some control over what gets built, where we have some control over what the process you have to go through is, which is laborious and expensive. And you could certainly say, I think it would be less offensive to yours, to your sensibilities if we're like, we picked an area and say Northern part of Manor County, we're saying we're going to cluster dense development here. So all you developers, you want to buy this trash forest land that they've just been itching to unload as soon as that, as soon as we use the COVID money to put water and sealer up to the other part of the county, they are ready to go. Right. So, you know, the, the DR Horton's the Cape Fear commercial, whoever it is, right. Whatever you want to build, you want to build dense, build here. We'll put a bus route here. We'll put a, you know, put some amenities here. We'll put a new library, whatever you guys want. Yeah. And make it sensible and profitable for you to build here. Then we'll have 500, you know, 50,000 more units, which will never make a $1,600 a month apartment, go back to a thousand dollars a month. Right. But it might keep it from going up to 3,200. Well, that's sensible. That's sensible. The other thing I wanted to point out, uh, as we kind of wrap this one up is one of the things that they wanted to do was they wanted to demand $20,000 per student by 2030 and a 25% across the board raise for all employees. Yet at the same time, they wanted to take away the corporate tax relief that will bring corporations and people here so that we can actually have that kind of money. And they also disregard the historic reality that number of dollars spent on student actually has very little impact upon education. Reality, uh, Washington DC has the highest per capita student in the country and nobody can claim that the Washington DC school district. Yeah. And you'll hear a lot about the Mississippi miracle now. Yeah. It's a great example. And certainly there are, it is not just money. Money helps, but it's not everything. Right. Um, I think there, there's certainly some curriculum issues that, you know, if you got smart people in a room, there are better ways we can do things. The, the, the one-to-one technology thing seems to be, uh, from people I've talked to disastrous. Oh yeah. Um, it's weird. It's ugly head right now in new Hanover County. People do not retain information from screen reading the way they do from discourse with a teacher. But that does cost some money because the more kids you have in the class, the less discourse you have with the teacher. Um, but yeah, it's not just money. I also think, um, to the side note, the, uh, the asks are very big, um, and sometimes contradictory, but I, I think if you're, if you're a Trump fan, you should respect that. So you're, you're, you're not, you're, you are certainly not accusing the NCAE of channeling their inner Trump and all I think, I mean, Trump grew up in the age of big business bluster and it's, there's no bigger, go home. It's not a, it's not a long walk from Trump to Hoffman, right? You know, you go in and you ask for double the wages. The mill owner says, go to hell. You know, you strike, he comes back and says, what about 10% more? You strike again. He says, 20% you claim total victory, expunge any mention that you, that you went in for a hundred percent. And if anyone brings up the fact that you were asking for double salaries, you're like, I don't know what you're talking about. We total victory. We dominated the mill owner. We got 20% raises. You're welcome. I'm the best. No one has ever done it like I do. Yeah. I mean there's, there is a, there's a spirit there that, uh, I think if you condemn one, you got to condemn the other. Yeah. But I think that goes to the point that you made earlier. Yes. From a, I mean from a typical negotiating standpoint, you start as high as possible and then hopefully get whittled down for anybody that loves going to our lovely pawn and antique shops across the area. This is a very common tap, one of which I fall, uh, fall up to many, many times. Are you a, are you a pawn and antique show? Yeah. Cheap. Yes. So anytime, anytime I get a deal. Um, but to Ben's point earlier, when you come up with these demands, a 25% across the board pay increase, which is insane. And then a $20,000 floor per pupil, it's currently at 13,000. So you're talking about adding $7,000 per student and a 25% raise. All of that is great. If you have leverage as in the story that Ben just described, I will, then we're going to strike the NCA literally has zero leverage. So I completely understand the tactic of, of, of going bigger, going home. But when you have no, when you have no cards to play, you're sitting there and you folded the hand already. And then you come out with these ridiculous demands to, from, from a conservative standpoint, the whole event looks even more ludicrous than it already did because it's, it's not a good faith. It's not a good faith starting ground. And you have no ability to, again, there was nobody there on Friday. There was nobody to even negotiate with. You were playing poker with this brick wall and thinking, I'm going to, I'm going to win this one. The performance. And I will bring you this. I think the part of this that struck me as the most performative and political was the, um, the injecting the corporate tax rate into this. Um, because if there was anything you were going to get Republicans to come to the table on, um, it would not be the long, hard fought battle to, to bring that corporate tax rate down for the sake of increasing business. Like that is a philosophical hill that the powers that be are going to die on. And if you can read the room, you'd be like, that's probably not where they're going to bend. It's literally the reason why we don't have a budget right now, because Republicans can't get together on that in Raleigh. It's such a contentious issue as to how far to cut it. And the NCA is like, how the hell would they just make it 8% again? Like it was under Ben Perdue. Like, I mean, it's just totally, it's totally insane. They want to turn the boat around and go that way. It's not going to happen. I mean, there is, we are now watching it like a very interesting, like multi faction debate about how we raise money. Cause you've got folks in the general assembly now openly advocating, um, for capping the mill rate or abolishing property tax. I don't think that has any legs, but it's funny. It's funny. It's funny to listen. It's funny to watch. And it's funny to probably see county managers start going. Yeah. My $350 a year salary. It's my libertarian brother-in-law. I'm like his fifth Shiner buck. And all of a sudden he's given control of North Carolina. There's a lot of North Carolinian conservatives who really want us to be Florida. Yeah. And I think, but okay. So, but before you go on for good reason, I mean, if you are a conservative, you look at what just happened in Florida this, this last week with redistricting and the success that they've had. And you would say, well, no doubt you want to be Florida. I mean, it is, it is the, I would argue from in any state across the country, it is the greatest example as a conservative and a Republican of what that governance looks like in effect. I mean, the state is exploding in prosperity. They've got a phenomenal governor down there and tired of winning. I mean, that's literally what's going on in Florida. They've taken what was a swing state 10 years ago. And it's not even, it's not even in the top 10 swing states across the country. It's very red. Yeah. It's not because they're sunburned snowbirds. Well, uh, you know, we're, we're on the top of the budgets. It's also at the budgets at the state level. It's also budget season here in Wilmington and new Hanover County, everybody's favorite time of the year. It's not the sexiest thing in the world, but they are talking about it and we're going to keep an eye on it here in, in Wilmington. They're looking at tax increases for living wages and other things. Yeah. There's, there's two big pieces. One is there's a lot of deferred capital projects. Um, and this budget, the proposed budget from the, from the new manager, Becky Hawk, which has not been approved yet. And we've already seen some of the council members be a little bit like that's a lot all at once. Um, so this would catch them up on a lot of Cal projects. It would also, um, boost all the salaries up to what they're calling the living wage is about 45 K a year. The problem in terms of like balancing the budget with that is that they're worried about what's called salary compression, which is basically say you've got junior secretary makes 35 K their manager makes 50 K. Now you move them up to 45 K. Now you're like, I'm managing this person. I'm doing twice the work. I'm the direct supervisor and I'm really only making like a few dollars more an hour than the person who like can is not going to be in trouble if this project doesn't go through. Uh, and then you follow that up the administrative chain. So the argument is that you have to then move everybody up. Um, so it's not just giving, it's not just pulling the lowest people up to bottom rung of affordable, uh, like being able to afford living in the region. It's, it's moving, it's shifting the whole pay scale. I just picture something going like this, which is very expensive. Um, and that's, that's a significant chunk of what they're calling. That's a five point whatever cent raised, but really it comes out to being a couple hundred bucks a year for sort of median homeowner and Wilmington. It's a massive increase. It's a significant increase. I don't know what the final percentage is somewhere around. Is it 12? It's 20% 20% and that's on top of the reevaluation that happened last year that people got really ticked over because, so yeah, I mean the, the city did, um, actually I was surprised how close to revenue neutral the city kept it last year, but there's, there are, that doesn't mean your tax bill won't go up. It means it mitigates it quite a bit. Yeah. It may go up a little bit. It may go down. Yeah. But the more your property is worth, the more every cent of the tax rate means. Right. Um, so I mean, the texture has been all over the place. It's been as high as in the city. It's been as high as 50 cents and it dropped down in the twenties and now it's creeping back up. Um, this, I think a lot of the feedback I've heard so far is that this is a lot all at once. I've heard a couple of the council members say, is there any way we could like phase this in? Um, I've heard some concern that even though the County looks like they will probably talk about that in a second, the County looks like it will probably hold the line on tax increases this year. Next year, if the school bond passes, there will definitely be a tax increase cause they'll have to start paying that debt down immediately. Um, and that'll be 1.7 in some sense. So that'll hit people. And yeah. And when people get, people who live in the city that you pay city tax and County tax and they don't really discriminate who they're at mad at. And if it's an election year for city council and you voted for a tax raise and now people are feeling it and the, and the screws been turned. Yeah. That can be bad. Yeah. Yeah. This is this, um, the debate ongoing in the city council, which I'll admit I've kind of tuned out a little bit as there's, I know there's, I no longer have a horse in the fight. It is an exclusive Democrat control council. And so I, you know, there, there's, there's nothing that's really going to be done on that. This is to me, this is a terrible idea for the newly elected Democrat council and would really feed into every right wing talking point that Democrats are completely incapable of governing without making your life a living hell by make, by just raising your tax. I mean, I will say like the most, uh, you know, um, pointed critiques in the Facebook comment sections was like, if you elect these people, they will immediately raise your taxes. And they did. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what I'm just saying. Like purely. And to Ben's point earlier about a lot of the deferred capital stuff, all of that is accurate. It, the, uh, we talked earlier about the optics of the Republicans in Raleigh, not being able to pass a budget, how it just looks terrible. The idea that, Hey, Hey, shiny city, Wilmington, you now have seven Democrats on the County on the city council and Hey, your property taxes are going to go up by 20% just months after we're sworn into office. It just, it fits every single narrative of a mismanagement by, by those on the political left. Miss Hawk. And I don't know her from, from Eve, but she was actually talking about this, this pay increase before they were sworn in or it wasn't. I think that, I believe she had mentioned it back. This would have been June last year. Cause they, she walked into the tail end of budget negotiations and didn't really have much say in it because most of the work had been done. And I think she started talking and the city, I mean, the city passes its budget in June. Um, they have to by law and pass it by the end of June. And then they take a couple months off. And then like in November, they start talking about it again. So at the very least, by fall of last year, we had heard about this. Initially we saw, and this is how managers work. We saw like a two cent version, a four cent version, a six cent version, and a 6.2 version. And then at the most recent meeting they said, well, we cut it down to 5.7 and by it, they meant the thing we knew we were going to do. You know, you watch the county manager. I mean, the county manager did the same thing. You had Chris Kudre saying we've got two options here. One is keep taxes where they are. One is add two cents to the tax. Republicans have said point blank, they will not go for that. But because there's two options on the table, you'll see in the press, you know, New Hanover County is considering a tax rate. Star News had that as their banner headline. And it's like, technically, yes, they are considering it. But like, for God's sakes, it's three to two. It's not hard math. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and if you've, and there's been three or four budget workshops now it has been, and you talk about not sexy, those meetings. And that's another issue where it's like, uh, it's, it's all about optics because there are all of these, um, very arcane, uh, financial mechanisms. Like if you have changed under your couch, that the county has like 10 couches and they're huge and there's a lot of money in them. But what it all boils down to is you could raid those couches, right. And avoid raising taxes. Or you could, uh, raise taxes. The commissioners more or less seem to want most of the same things in the budget. In fact, the two budget options are the same total bottom line amounts, just different ways of funding them. The, the argument from the Democrats, Rob's Apple and Stephanie Walker is that this is not sustainable. You know, eventually we're gonna have to raise the tax rate. They keep saying adjust, but they mean raise. Before you continue. I'm so glad you pointed it out because that, that, that, they, cause you'll hear commissioners, uh, Scalise and Pierce be like, so you're saying raise tax. And they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. We're, we're talking about adjusting the tax rate. Yeah. It's fine. If you, if you want to raise taxes, that's, that's, yeah. That's a fine thing to do. I hate that. It's like, just, Hey, I want to cut taxes. You want to raise taxes. That's fine. Let's discuss. But when you're like, Oh, we're, uh, you know, you hear this incorporation all the time. Oh, we're making a, making a strategic pivot on our workforce. We right-size the workforce, which means Jim and accounting is homeless. And that's fine. If you need to fire Jim to keep the company afloat, but this like this nonsensical way of describing just wait, we want to raise taxes because we don't want to raid our revenue. Stabilization fund is a fine discussion. It's two sides of the coin. If you cut taxes, you cut services, people will be unhappy. And then you have to defend that. So last year they cut, um, nurses for schools. They cut pre-K. Um, they cut a lot, they cut 10% across all the accounting departments. Some of those things no one noticed like the departmental cuts. I haven't hot. I've heard individual people, but I haven't seen like mass outcry about it. Um, nurses and pre-K brand popular. Right. So this year, uh, Republicans are like, okay, we'll work at putting that back in there. They had to eat some crow. Yeah. That's the cost, right? If you want to raise taxes, uh, you have to make a case for it. Right. You also sort of have to, um, you know, go out there and sell it to people. So the it's, I just want politicians to tell me what they're actually going to do. I, you know, if, if they were going to cut services and there's, and they were, you know, trying to put some kind of heavy gloss on it, I would be equally unhappy with it. But all about to say, so there's all these little ways the County can move money around to avoid raising taxes this year. And next year they'll probably have exhausted all of those. But next year is next year. And there's an election this year. That's right. So if you're on the campaign trail, all you have to say is like, you know, Hey, look, we had extra money around and we use that instead of raising your taxes. That is a way easier. If you're just shaking hands, going down the line, that's a way easier. So then saying real fiscal responsibility requires difficult decisions. And to do this in a sensible and sustainable way, we had to raise taxes. I think both are good arguments, but one is a lot easier to do quickly. Well, and to your point earlier rule, this is after the reevaluation last year, which even though it was a revenue neutral rate, again, that's an average. And most people saw not a huge increase, but, but an increase in their property budget still went up like 12. It was 11. Well, it was 11 million. And, and I'm glad you brought, cause that was exactly where I was going to go. Watching these budget workshops. There has been a very significant back and forth specifically between Stephanie Walker, a Democrat and Liam Pierce, a Republican. Every time Stephanie opens her mouth to talk about, she goes, we cut funding. We cut the budget last year. And, and Liam Pierce immediately jumps in every time he goes, we didn't cut. We increased government spending by $11 million. Now were things cut? Yes. But again, going back to the framing and how it laid out, it is, it is inaccurate to say that the County cut their spending last year. When you increase something by $11 million. What's left out of this a lot. And commissioners haven't gotten to this, because they're in it. They know it. But the public, I think sometimes misses this out is that the budget was over half a billion dollars at one point. It was so packed with COVID money. And all of that had taken clock. So they had to spend it. In some cases they spent it on worthwhile things. And some, I was just like, okay. That pissed her away. And because they had to, you know, it's like when I got the, you know, when I got my $1,400 stipend, I bought a guitar amp. Was that the most financially sensible thing? No, but I just got free money and I went out and spent it. Many governments also did that. So we had a number of things that for several years were funded by COVID relief money. Including those extra pre-K classrooms. We doubled from six to 12. Having a nurse in every school was not a thing before the pandemic. And some of these things, it turns out we didn't have them before. So we proven we could live without them, but it turns out we really liked them. Parents really liked having a nurse. They knew in the school all the time, especially if you've got a kid with an allergy or diabetes or something like that. And they raised cane when they took that back. And so the County was like, okay, well, this is something we should probably spend a little more money in. But there was a lot of COVID era programs that they got rid of that no one is screaming about. And so they, but they ran out of that federal money. And so some of those things were cut. You could say cut, but they just, they no longer had that from the federal government. They had to go back to what many people thought was a very sensible budget in 2019. Yeah. And this is the, the, the, the, the issue when you get in, you know, looking at all of the, without re-litigating COVID-19 here, one of the, one of the issues on the, now the backside of COVID was all of this money. And we're, we're not talking about like, Oh, you know, a couple million bucks. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars spread across counties and school systems and, and municipal governments. I mean, billions, trillion. Yeah. I mean like all, like all of this, I don't even know what the numbers over the state of North Carolina, but using one-time monies, AKA COVID funds for nurses, nurses. And if you want to, I want a nurse in the school, every school year, it turns out you need to pay them every year. So when you use one-time money to do that, you are faced with, and it's okay to maybe do that in the short term, but it leads us to the situation that Ben just described where the community goes, Oh yeah, we liked this. So now the, from a conservative standpoint, the option is okay. You like this, then let's find something else that we can get rid of because you think this is a higher priority, but that's never the discussion. It's well, we'd like this thing too. And we also want this thing. Oh, and we also want that thing too. Yeah. In defense of my guitar amp purchase, it was a one-time purchase with one-time funding. And that's so that's, I mean, that's, that's perfect. If I had used that money to scale up to a nicer apartment and then you would've been screwed. And then I was like, where's my third and fourth and fifth stipend check. And they're like, Oh no, we're not doing that. Yeah. Now like that money should have been used for like per, well, you don't want the county purchasing property. That's a whole nother ballpark, but like vehicles, uh, major capital expenses, uh, expenses, HVAC. You, I mean, you would never put that money especially towards staff and salary. And they put a lot of it into salary. And that was incredible. The conservative dream. And I've had many conservative friends who, uh, who have said this, cause this is what they did in their own lives. Right. And I know that running a government is way different than your personal finances, but there are some philosophical through lines. Many people when they got their stipend checks, they just paid off debt. They paid off a credit card. They paid off a car loan. And I think there are many people, uh, from the center on right. And even some folks on the left who probably would have been okay with them taking, but they weren't allowed to, but if they were allowed to, right. If they just took the a hundred million dollars paid off all of our debt, which is a significant portion of our, you can actually see it. It's broken out when you get a tax bill, you can see how much of that is for paying off debt, pay off that debt. Okay. We're free and clear. And now our taxes will automatically lower cause we're not having that debt service every year, but that's, there were constraints that didn't allow you to do that. Yeah. Federal money's always come with those. I mean, the, the, the amount of restriction and regulation with that money was insane. I mean, in many cases, governments had to hire people to figure out how the hell they could spend the money because it was expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Pay somebody $90,000 a year to figure out how to spend the car. I remember when you entered any contracted with someone to give the money away. Yeah. It's like, yeah, cause it's so in the weeds and so complex. It was surreal. Here's what voters are going to have to decide that voters are going to have to decide how much government is going to provide for them. Uh, are, do they want trash service? Do they want mental healthcare? Do they want nurses in schools? Do they want a police force? Do they want a fire force, the fire department that responds quickly? Do they want, uh, do they want HR folks handling everything? Well, uh, the more for every service that a voter wants, there's a cost to that. And so the more we add, the more you got to pay for it. So you have the, you either have to divest to those services and privatize them, which is what I'm all in favor of, or you're just going to have to realize that you're going to have to pay for them. And as Wilmington and new Hanover County expands and people want more services, well, that's gotta be paid for first and for advice from somewhere. And I, and I say, this is, you know, this discussion always, uh, revolves around affordable housing. And I look forward to whenever the County of announces that they're hosting their public comment. And like I've done the last couple of years, I'm going to get up there and be as blunt as I can be. I'm a lower middle-class or I don't even know where the scale is, but middle-class homeowner in Hanover County. Yeah. Well, top class, maybe in a, in brow. Um, and it will always be, Oh, affordable housing and services. And the argument I've made, when I've spoken at these public comments, the last couple of years is all of these decisions make my life more on affordable. And, and as a, uh, a late 20 something year old, that doesn't have kids in the public school system. I watched these discussions and I'm not saying the government needs to make, should make its decisions based around me. I understand. There's, it's a very diverse community here. I take advantage of arguably none of the services that the County covers. Yes. Sheriffs, they just built a brand new fire station on Gordon road. I do take advantage of Smith's Creek park. Other than that, my County services are non-existent private trash, CFPUA water. And well, I guess everybody pays for their own water and sewer now, but, um, you know, that, that is, I think where a lot of folks find themselves, especially those that are either younger or older and are retired and don't have, you know, their kids are grown. Maybe they have grandkids that are not in the public school system. They find themselves in these odd positions where yes, the County does provide a lot of great services. For example, I don't use the library now. It's not because I don't read. It's because what I read is news articles and blogs and that stuff is not available in the library. So that's great that we've got project race. It's great that we've got a new library going up in the Northern portion of the County. I will never use that. I'm never going to, I have no reason. And I imagine a lot of people, I'm not saying get rid of libraries, but I'm saying it's, it's, it's, and, and you could look at somebody else in the middle and say, well, I don't go to the park. Like, so why the hell am I paying for, for, for these green spaces? Why am I paying for these parks? It's, it's, it's the, it's the give and take to your point earlier of if you want government to provide all of these services, somebody is going to have to figure out how to pay for it. And when you start boxing me out of my own home by raising my property taxes to do that, I'm not only going to take offense to that. I'm going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that doesn't happen because I made smart. And this is, I mean, this is the, the, what makes me who I am. I saved up every damn dollar I had and had to drain my savings account to purchase my property, not leveraging a bunch of debt. And I made that decision. And then, so when the County's like, well, hell, we just got to spend 35 60 million more dollars so that we can keep government running. Right. It just, it drives me batshit crazy because I didn't have that. I do think I will say something nice about the job of elected officials that don't do that often. Um, it's an insane task to try and figure out where you fit in with the coalition of people who will vote for them because someone who feels the same way about the library that you do might feel very passionately about the senior center. Exactly. Cut any funding from seniors. The emails, the suicide political suicide. Yeah. I mean, it's the largest voting block in the United States. That's why they won't touch. They accidentally like cut one service from the senior. I forget what it was. And it wasn't even a high, it was like less than a million dollars, but like they just, they somehow missed it in the final tweaking of the budget and the hate mail, the King for everyone, R's and D's alike. So like someone, like if you're a Republican, just like a hypothetical, you're a Republican commissioner. I've got to fit you and what you want under the same needs as maybe a retiree as under a fiscal conservative who does like the park. Um, you know, and I've got to sort of triangulate or quadrangulate, you know, whatever the largest number of people who are sort of, you know, in my base and all of their wants and needs. And that means really aggravating the crap out of some of them. I don't use the senior center. I do use the library. Every time I drive by the senior center and I like, I know all the fights. I'm like, I care. Yeah. I mean, I've literally, my, my, my closest experience in the senior center is standing out there during early voting. Right. It's an early voting. Yeah. But it is, it is a tough and likewise on, on the democratic side, you've got people who are very passionate about, you know, pre-K, then you've got other people who are old retirees. They don't care. They couldn't care less about it. They're paying their grandkids to go to private school. They're paying for that out of pocket. They've got to do the same thing. They've got to orchestrate a coalition and figure out what the Venn diagram of what those people want. And that again means alienating and aggravating the crap out of some portion of people. And it is, I, you know, in a dream world, every voter would get their own sort of a la carte menu. And it's like, what I want to pay for and what I don't want to pay for, you know, it's like, do I want to pay for Amtrak? Do I want to pay for national defense? Do I want to pay for entitlement benefits? And you could go through and do it, but you can't. Yeah. Um, but it is, you know, so I say all that to say like, it is a, it is a mind boggling task for elected officials to try and cobble together like a coherent vision of what makes sense to spend your money on knowing that on the granular level, you will always run into someone who's like, what are you doing with my, with my money? Yeah. Like I went into project grace for the first time a couple of weeks ago, beautiful facility, very nice facility. And I just thought to myself like, was it $600 million or something was the final price tag on the, on that facility. I'm never, I'm never going to go there. And I have no reason to go there. Chris Kudre for getting that done. I think it is, uh, I'm not saying it's a master stroke. I, I, I was critical of it. I was plating his ankle, the entire way through. Cause I was hearing from people like you who are like, this doesn't feel like what government should be doing. This feels like a private developer should be doing this. I'll also say, uh, so on, on the democratic side, I think one of the things I, I sometimes, sometimes Republicans can be a little callous, I think in their language when they're talking about making cuts. I think on the flip side, Democrats sometimes utterly fail to connect like money to value. Like saying if we don't give this nine one one expansion, people are going to call nine one one and die. Like, uh, somebody's going to be choking and then they pick up nine one one. They're going to drop dead. I mean, hyperbole is a whole other crime, which I'm happy to prosecute. But what I mean is, and I'm stealing this from John stir, but he says this all the time when he, when he is raking Democrats over the coals, when he's saying like, you can't just spend people's money. Like you have to explain to them, I'm taking your money. What are you getting from it? And I think sometimes the arguments are just highfalutin and vague and they don't for the average voter connect what's missing from their, from their bank account at the end of the year with how is their life different? And you know, I think both of those critiques, uh, you could, you could lay out to some of our local officials, like cutting for the sake of cutting can sound really harsh when something you care about has been cut. Sure. Um, but also just spending for the sake of spending when you haven't explained how it's going to prove your life can be equally offensive. The example that's used here all the time is, and I've heard this in the most recent budget workshop this last week or this last, yeah, I don't remember when it was, maybe it was Monday. Um, high quality, high, we're going to continue to provide a high quality services for our citizens. And I'm like, what the hell does that, what does that mean? Like what can you define to Ben's point, define what a high quality services to me, a 29 year old single guy that's not married, living in New Hanover County. What is, what is a quality service to me? You and you is vastly different. There's a, there's a reason if you look at the before pictures of when I can't, when a politician first goes into office and the picture of when they come out of office, Obama's the best example of it. He went in there looking young and spry. And when he, I mean, when he, when he was done with his eight years, he looked like an old man. I will say something nice about Joe Biden. He looked exactly the same. I guess you go in. Trump has looked old for 30 years. I will also say one of the things I hear, and I hear this from a lot of my friends who are politically apathetic, when government will often not do a good job. And I'm here, I'm not talking about like deficiencies, but bureaucracies, you know, we need the $15,000 Motorola because that's the best phone. And they just put it on a budget. Now there was actually a couple of really good reasons to purchase that particular Motorola here. I think I believe I'm talking about the Wilmington police department. And they laid out a bunch of use cases and you could debate it, but at least they called the chief up to explain this. But many, many times that does not happen. Right. And that was only because people I think ECT had put on like they're buying $5 million worth of walkie talkies. And thankfully someone in council was like, we should explain that. But often it's like, Oh, we upgraded to Microsoft deluxe with chat GBT. And it's like, why the hell did, who, why? I mean the school board meeting last night, there was a pretty significant discussion over and to David Perry who I don't like at all brought up the objection to just renewing this contract for what?$470,000 for, for Microsoft three 65 instances. And you know, the, the argument from the school system was like, Oh, this is the vendor we use. And yeah, like we, like we kind of have to do this and it's like, no, well did you, did you look at an alternative? Now obviously an alternative comes with costs. If you're going to expense hundreds of hours of staff time to do something, there's a cost, but it's this, this notion of just like, well yeah, we've always worked with this vendor, so it's gone up X amount of dollars. And yeah, we just need a budget amendment for just $470,000. Well it's no, no, no, no biggie. I certainly know I, and I'm not talking about the abolitionist, you know, defund the police crowd. I'm talking about just middle of the road people when the sheriff's department bought the Mustangs, the Mustangs, they're like, come on. Yeah. It's not a great look. It's not a great look. But I'm driving my, I'm driving my 2009 Volkswagen Jetta. And it's like, Oh, great. This is my high quality public service. So much. So as the sheriff's office couldn't race around in there, they're blacked out. Most of it tends to get a pass from local officials. They don't push back. But I just mean there's so many things in the budget that are, you could or could not make a case on. And I'm not saying we're as bad as like the Saudi government where like the janitors are driving, you know, Rolls Royce. You're funding an entire golf league. Okay. Let me close on this one. I used to do mornings here in, uh, in Wilmington on wave. I used to drive in to work very early and I live up in the Northern, I live off Gordon road. So I drive straight down, uh, college much faster than the speed limit. Cause there's nobody on the road at four o'clock in the morning. And every morning I drive by the government. So there's the, in the parking lot of the strip club, everybody's favorite facility, all the TVs are on, all the lights are on every single morning. And this is of course, obviously on the three hour radio show, we did a lot of these in-depth discussions over the budget and the discussion of, Oh, well, we just got to figure out. I'm thinking how much are you, you know, not that a TV uses a lot of energy, but what it does do is it kills the lifespan of the television. And let's be clear. These aren't some Walmart brand O and N $400 TV. These things are tens of thousands of dollars that they spend on these stupid ass TVs and they sit on in these freaking conference rooms all day forever. And then they die and they have to replace them. And same thing with the, with the, with the lights and the power bill. And so it's just a little things like that where you wonder in your home, of course, Ben, I would assume when you left today, you didn't leave every single light on in your house and your air conditioning set to 65 degrees. No, I'm not a maniac. No. And why would you? Cause it would be, you'd be literally pissing money away. But then you look at government and you're like, Oh yeah, this is normal that we have every freaking light on in this stupid goddamn building for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A government purchasing is, uh, I used to do purchasing for the military. Uh, we would have two catalogs. One was the established military catalog and the other one was the catalog. If you just absolutely couldn't find it. I compared the prices once. It's like five times more. Oh yeah. It's amazing. So, all right. Just like everything else we wanted to do today, we had a whole bunch of other things. We'll just quickly round up everything. Uh, Contagi Brown, uh, made a absolute fool of herself, uh, yesterday, uh, in the decision about, um, the redistricting in Louisiana. Uh, what was it? A six to one, uh, six, one ruling. So we're going to keep an eye on that. We should, uh, I thought, uh, she was joined in the descent. Um, she wasn't, what she wasn't joined in was going after the conservative justices and accusing them of being partisan hacks. She was all alone on that front. And yeah, she was all alone in, uh, in, in, in the decision though. Wasn't she? I thought it was six when I was six. She, she was, she did not get the backing of the other level judges when she went after them on that, which, uh, I thought it was notable. And you could say, I think some people will think that she has the courage of her convictions, but this is second or third time where she's gone out past the edge of the window of the left side of the court. Yeah. Um, which, you know, lifetime appointment do you want? That's a good point. The lifetime. Yeah. Literally like, what are you going to do? Fire me? That's been a, that's been a huge change in my very short lifetime is, uh, you used to not see the Supreme court say anything personal about anybody else. Yeah. I, for the last 10 years, I have been wondering when the erosion of social norms would get to the highest court in the land. And I think we're there. Yeah, we're definitely there. Yeah. So that'll be interesting to see. Uh, fortunately it won't have an impact on North Carolina. Our redistricting stuff happened last year, but it could on a couple of other States. I know Alabama, um, I guess a redistricting, it's a gerrymandering arms race. Yeah. But so fortunately North Carolina is not, won't be affected by that. At least now, maybe in a, maybe in 2030, another eight years. Ben, what are you working on down there at WHQR? Oh God. And aside from all of the budget stuff, um, the, the ratings for the hospitals come out this weekend, next week. Oh joy. So leapfrog is an independent nonprofit, um, that uses a lot of federal data and also patient surveys. Um, it's, you know, it's one of the few nonprofits, I can say it's actually a nonpolitical, nonpartisan profit. They don't have a dog in the fight. They just rank hospitals and they have ranked our hospital, the head of original medical center relatively poorly. We've been getting the C for a couple of years. And then there's the center for Medicaid and Medicare services. This is the federal government, um, does its own ranking and that's due out very soon. We've slipped in the patient ratings. We used to have three out of five stars. We're now down to two out of five stars and we are at two out of five stars for, for hospital quality. Um, and all that translates into people getting stuff left in their abdominal cavities and dying. So I, it's, it sounds highfalutin, but we're talking about people getting infections they didn't need to get, um, paying bills because they're in the hospital way longer than they should be. Um, the, the real world consequences for, for everybody, all stripes, all walks of life. And, um, so I, I'm planning on sitting for an interview with Lori Whalen, who's the new regional hospital president. Cause they had another CEO, go back to UNC health. Um, I, I give her credit. I believe she's, you know, making real efforts, but it's, uh, I feel like every six months we have this conversation and every six months they say, the hospital says, you know, like, uh, the changes have already been made, but the data is lagging and you'll see it soon. And I feel like I will be in my fifties before I would like to be wrong about this, but it just feels like it just keeps the, the improvements they swear I haven't just keep not appearing. I want to be, I want desperately want to be wrong about that. At the same time, Novant and Novant's in the middle of all this is that they are facing increased scrutiny by taking it. It's not just Novant. It's like every major hospital system. They're taking over more and more smaller clinics. Yep. Um, change literally just changing the insurance number on it. And then upping their prices. Yeah. And there's, there's nothing new in the service. I will say one of the biggest mistakes the public made during the hospital sale process, and we do not have time to really get all that. Oh really? You don't got, you don't have another three hours to sit here. The democratic party in particular became convinced because they did some polling that it was a material difference, whether a for-profit or nonprofit hospital system came in and bought the county own hospital. And that was such a misunderstanding of how hospital systems work. Um, Novant's buys hospitals, extracts capital and uses it to purchase new hospitals in a way that is more rapacious than other for-profit hospital networks like HCA. And so that, that the idea that somehow nonprofit good for profit bad, I, there really was like this anti-capitalist lens that people saw that through. And it was just, they didn't know anything about the hospitals and I didn't either. So I called a bunch of experts and they were like, no, it doesn't matter. Like look at their patient quality, look at their, like, are they, are they expanding responsibly or are they tearing across, you know, a whole swath of the state? And in Novant's case, it was the latter. A whole swath of the state. Into South Carolina. Yeah, they're all over the place. So, uh, check up everything that, uh, that Ben is doing over at whqr.org. Correct. And, uh, nonprofit good for profit bad. Yeah, exactly. As long as the government's paying for it. And, uh, not anymore. And make sure that you subscribe to your Sunday update required reading. Uh, Nick, what are you working on over at the Nick Craig show? Uh, close eye on the general assembly. Uh, legislative short session continues for the rest of this month. All of, um, all of May, all of June and the, for a few couple of days at the beginning of July, hopefully fingers crossed. Um, so lots, lots going on there. Um, couple of veto overrides, of course, still waiting on a budget. Um, seeing a lot of very interesting pieces of legislation filed by both sides of the political spectrum, abolishing the ABC system, completely rolling back the opportunity scholarship program. Um, the pickleball legislation is back, which has been a hot, uh, hot legislation filed over the last couple of years. So this is kind of the wishlist time, but the reality is lawmakers need to get out of there so they can get back to their districts and run elections. Um, so close on the close on the general assembly. Okay. And, uh, you've got, uh, you're on every day, uh, Monday through Friday on the correct show. Yep. And, uh, but you also have a daily update that goes out. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh, the, uh, the, uh, NC, uh, morning email, uh, NC morning line.com into your inbox at six 30 every morning. Um, state story, West Charlotte, Raleigh East, which is Wilmington stock futures day in North Carolina history. Uh, all that free and see morning line.com. Fantastic. And over at the Wilmington standard, we just cover it all. So whatever pops up on our radar, that's what we put up. So make sure that you check out the daily update at the, the Wilmington standard comes out mostly every day. And so just check us out on Facebook and all of us are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Oh, I am not on Tik TOK. Are you on Tik TOK? Are you on Tik TOK? Okay. We're too old to be on Tik TOK. Yeah. I know my place. So gents for a Nick Craig and Ben Schachtman, I almost call you Shapiro again, Ben Schachtman from WHQR. I'm Roel Sample from the Wilmington standard. Thanks for listening.