Year-end Wrap: Highs, lows of NC politics in 2017

It was a year that saw change at the top of state government, the inside of countless courtrooms and when GenX came to mean something other than people born from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

Posted 9:08 p.m. Dec 28, 2017 — Updated 9:08 p.m. Dec 28, 2017

RALEIGH, N.C. — It was a year that saw change at the top of state government, the inside of countless courtrooms and when GenX came to mean something other than people born from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

The bitter partisanship that has marked North Carolina politics in recent years only got more rancorous in 2017, as Democrat Roy Cooper took office as governor after a hard-fought election against Republican incumbent Pat McCrory that included weeks of allegations of voter fraud.

Cooper squared off against the GOP-controlled legislature in and out of court, issuing legal challenges to several laws passed by the General Assembly as well as 14 vetoes. Lawmakers overrode 10 of those vetoes and tweaked legislation to bypass another.

Many of the court cases weren't handled so easily, as lawsuits over a proposed combination of state elections and ethics boards, the size of the North Carolina Court of Appeals and who's in charge at the state Department of Public Instruction remain unresolved.

As the federal courts settled long-running lawsuits over voter ID and the legality of state House and Senate voting districts (GOP legislative leaders lost on both counts), new challenges arose as lawmakers tried to rejigger voting districts. The maps to be used in the 2018 elections haven't been settled yet but will likely go a long way toward deciding the balance of power in the General Assembly in the coming years.

Legislative plans to overhaul North Carolina's judicial system by redrawing districts for trial court judges and possibly shifting to a system of lawmakers appointing people to the bench or retention elections for sitting judges, also created a stir late in the year.

Although fights over class size mandates in elementary schools whether Confederate statues across the state would stand or fall grabbed headlines for brief periods during 2017, no issue outside Raleigh set off alarm bells on Jones Street more than GenX and similar unregulated chemicals. Used in consumer products ranging from Teflon to fast-food wrappers, the chemicals have been found in drinking water supplies from Cary to Wilmington. Lawmakers have tried to educate themselves on the science of perfluorinated chemicals while trying to come up with ways to ensure water is safe to drink in North Carolina.

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