Opinion Roundup: Wake redistricting, social media monitoring in schools, passenger protections for NC ride-sharing users and more

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 -- A round up of opinion, commentary and analysis on: Former NAACP head fighting trespass charge from arrest at General Assembly, passenger protections for NC ride-sharing users, alterations to ID qualifications for voting signed by Gov. Cooper, Sutton Lake site of numerous coal ash spills, social media monitoring in schools and more.

TYLER STOCKS: Congressional candidates spar over ad campaigns (Greenville Daily Reflector reports) -- The candidates vying for the Republican nomination for the 3rd District Congressional seat took shots at each other during a debate Monday for being dishonest in their advertisements. N.C. Rep. Greg Murphy, a Greenville urologist and surgeon, and Dr. Joan Perry, a Kinston pediatrician, are campaigning for a July 9 runoff. The winner will face candidates from the Democratic, Libertarian and Constitutional parties on Sept. 10.

COLIN CAMPBELL: Wake Redistricting (The Insider reports) -- A "bipartisan" group of House legislators will back Wake County House districts proposed by a court-appointed "special master" in 2017, House Rules Chairman David Lewis, R-Harnett, conceded. The special master's proposal -- once panned by Republicans as an effort to give Democrats an advantage, appears to be preferred to address a court ruling requiring lawmakers to redraw Wake House districts ahead of the 2020 election. Lewis said the bill will be filed today, ahead of a Thursday meeting of the House Redistricting Committee. A webpage for public comment was posted on the General Assembly website. While not providing specifics, Lewis described the bill as "bipartisan."

LAURA LESLIE: Former NAACP head fighting trespass charge from arrest at General Assembly (WRAL-TV reports) -- Rev. William Barber, the former head of the state NAACP and architect of N.C.'s "Moral Monday" protests, hopes to persuade a jury to clear him of trespassing at the General Assembly, calling his 2017 arrest unconstitutional.

MARTHA QUILLIN: Can an NC citizen trespass in a building owned by the people of NC? That is the question. (Durham Herald-Sun reports) -- In a hearing ahead of his trial on 2nd-degree trespassing charges, an attorney for the Rev. William Barber said a jury should be able to decide whether a N.C. citizen can be found guilty of trespassing in a building the people own and maintain for the purpose of addressing their political leaders. An assistant district attorney argued that’s for a judge to find, because it’s too complicated an issue for a jury to handle.

GINGER LIVINGSTON: Vidant makes public settlement offer (Greenville Daily Reflector reports) -- Vidant Medical Center is offering what is calls a "reasonable settlement agreement" to end a lawsuit by UNC and East Carolina over governance changes involving the hospital's board of trustees. Part of the statement released by Vidant Medical Center Monday evening calls on the General Assembly to "immediately remove" a proposal that would strip the hospital of $35 million in Medicaid reimbursements it receives for serving as the teaching hospital for ECU's Brody School of Medicine. "Vidant Medical Center continues to be committed and open to discussions about changes to its board structure," the news release stated. "This includes conversations with elected representatives and conversations with the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, East Carolina University and Pitt County."

TAFT WIREBACK: Democratic senators from Guilford split on state budget. Find out why (Greensboro News & Record reports) -- State Sens. Gladys Robinson and Michael Garrett cast opposing budget votes last week.

Passenger protections for NC ride-sharing users considered (AP reports) -- Some North Carolina lawmakers are seeking more protections for ride-sharing service users following the death of a college student this year in South Carolina.

LAUREN HORSCH: Select Committee on Disaster Relief (The Insider reports) -- House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, plans to reauthorize a committee focusing on disaster relief in the near future. The move comes after House Majority Leader John Bell, R-Wayne, and Deputy Majority Leader Brenden Jones, R-Columbus, asked for the committee to be reinstated because of a report released by the General Assembly's Program Evaluation Division found that Gov. Roy Cooper's administration had only spent about 1 percent of the $236.5 million in federal grant funding for Hurricane Matthew storm victims.

Alterations to ID qualifications for voting signed by Cooper (AP reports) -- Gov. Roy Cooper has signed into law altered rules on how student and government employee identification cards can qualify as voter IDs, which are required for casting ballots in North Carolina elections starting next year.

LAUREN HORSCH: Moore GoFundMe (The Insider reports) -- Former Rep. Rodney Moore, D-Mecklenburg, has established an online fundraising page to cover legal costs after being indicted on nine felony counts of filing false campaign statements.

ELIZABETH FRIEND: Senate Budget Includes $4M To Expand Lea-Hutaff Island Wildlife Sanctuary (WUNC reports) -- A $4 million dollar appropriation in the state Senate’s budget would enable Audubon NC to purchase a portion of one of the state's last undeveloped barrier islands.

RICK HASSEN: DOJ Responds to Census Plaintiffsr, Claiming No False Statements and No Evidence Hofeller Material Was Used in DOJ Position on Citizenship Question on Census (Election Law Blog reports) -- Here is the letter, painting a starkly different picture of both the facts and legal relevance of the Hofeller materials. This will no doubt have to be hashed out by the district court, while the Supreme Court drafts its opinion (and certainly dissents) in the census case. And regardless of what the truth actually is, this letter will give more than enough cover to Justices wishing to ignore the Hofeller material in siding with the government on the citizenship question. UPDATE: DOJ has now shared its letter with the Supreme Court. As Tierney Sneed notes, DOJ is suggesting that the material came from a brief in Evenwel (ironically one authored by Gerry Hebert, Paul Smith, and Anita Earls). Here was my response:

EMILY WEAVER: Childhood hunger rampant in parts of Western N.C. (Carolina Public Press reports) -- Food insecurity drives hunger in entire families, but often hits children the hardest. School and community programs targeting children seek to help.

JESSICA GRESKO: A dispute involving the pirate Blackbeard's sunken ship is on deck for the Supreme Court's next term. (AP reports) -- The justices said they will hear arguments in the fall in a copyright case involving the Queen Anne's Revenge, which was discovered off North Carolina's coast in 1996. The case pits the state of North Carolina against a company that has documented the ship's recovery.

TYLER DUKES: US Supreme Court will hear copyright case tied to Blackbeard flagship (WRAL-TV reports) -- The nation's highest court has agreed to take on a North Carolina case contesting how state officials used video footage of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of the fabled pirate captain Blackbeard sunk just off the cost of Beaufort.

HUNTER INGRAM: ‘Swamp Thing,’ ‘Uncle Frank’ eligible for $13 million in N.C. grants (Wilmington Star-News reports) -- The DC Universe streaming series and independent film are collectively eligible for $13.1 million in grant funding.

Chain closes N.C. stores over racist receipts (AP reports) -- A national chain has closed two of its N.C. stores and two workers were fired after racist names were added to two customer receipts.

JESS BRAVIN & NATALIE ANDREWS: House Panel Moves to Hold Barr, Ross in Contempt Over Census Question (Wall Street Journal reports) -- The House Oversight and Reform Committee moved to vote to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for ignoring the panel’s subpoena seeking information about efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form.

JESS BRAVIN: Supreme Court Sides With Worker in Discrimination Suit (Wall Street Journal reports) -- The court announced that it took on a copyright piracy case for the next term—one that involves a real pirate, Blackbeard, whose ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, was salvaged in 1998, nearly 300 years after it ran aground. A videographer alleges the state of NC violated his copyright by posting his footage of the salvage operation online.

SCOTT SEXTON: A $1,200 shot at staying out of jail. It seems to be working for people who struggle with addiction (Winston-Salem Journal reports) -- A late breakfast in the nearly empty Downtown Deli restaurant is hardly the place an inmate struggling with opioid addiction might expect to find help. Yet it was the main course on offer as a small working group of Forsyth County court officials, prosecutors and mental-health providers picked over eggs and coffee last week while plotting ways to keep alive — and possibly expand — a radical program to help slow the revolving door of low-level offenders through the jail.

Virginia shooting underscores need for research (Winston-Salem Journal) -- It happened again. We knew it would; it was just a matter of time.

JOHN HENDERSON: Clark raises concerns about funding for Fayetteville Civil War museum (Fayetteville Observer) -- Fayetteville and Cumberland County no longer are obligated to make good on $14 million in pledges for a new Civil War history museum, Democratic State Sen. Ben Clark said.

Emma Boettcher wrote UNC thesis on ‘Jeopardy!’ clues. She dethroned the record-shattering champ. (Washington Post reports) -- Emma Boettcher has spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a “Jeopardy!” clue difficult. The 70-page final paper she wrote in 2016 as the capstone for her master’s degree in information science at UNC dealt with that very subject. Using thousands of clues scraped from the show’s archive, she painstakingly analyzed whether a computer could correctly guess a trivia question’s difficulty level based on factors like its length or wording. (The answer was that certain characteristics, such as the number of noun phrases, were indeed giveaways.)

How UNC Thesis Helped Emma Boettcher Beat James Holzhauer on ‘Jeopardy!’ (New York Times reports) -- Before Emma Boettcher arrived at the “Jeopardy!” studio in California on a Tuesday in March, she hadn’t heard of James Holzhauer. Boettcher, a 27-year-old librarian at the University of Chicago, did not know that the contestant she would soon face had already won 32 games, amassed $2.46 million and established himself as one of the game show’s greatest players of all time. Games are prerecorded, usually five in one day; Holzhauer’s first win would not air until April 4. After finishing college at Princeton, she went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where she studied information science. While there, Boettcher decided to write her master’s paper on her longtime obsession with a certain game show. In her 70-page final paper, Boettcher explored whether certain characteristics of a “Jeopardy!” clue could predict its difficulty level.

REGGIE PONDER: Per-student spending at ECSU now $20K a year (Elizabeth City Daily Advance) -- State spending per-student at Elizabeth City State University has exceeded per-student spending at other University of North Carolina campuses in recent years, and is now just over $20,000 a year. But Sen. Bob Steinburg, R-Chowan, says that the figure is expected to decrease as enrollment at ECSU continues to grow. Enrollment growth at ECSU can be traced partly to the NC Promise tuition discount program, which Steinburg noted was included in the budget the Senate passed last week. The program discounts in-state tuition at ECSU at $500 per semester and out-of-state tuition at $2,500 per semester.

KELLY HINCHCLIFFE & TYLER DUKES: Some NC schools pay thousands to monitor for social media threats (WRAL-TV reports) -- A handful of school systems are hoping algorithms created by private companies can help surface issues of violence, bullying and self-harm. But do they work?

KELLY HINCHCLIFFE: Social media monitoring in schools: What's the real cost? (WRAL-TV reports) -- WRAL Investigates reached out to all of the state's 115 school systems to find out which districts make use of automated software to detect and alert administrators to threats that impact student populations.

MATTHEW BURNS: Two Orange deputies on leave after superiors not told of threat in high school bathroom (WRAL reports) -- The Orange County Sheriff's Office has placed two deputies on leave while authorities investigate why they weren't informed for several days about a threat found in a bathroom at Cedar Ridge High School.

ANNA BLYTHE: No timeline for state investigation into NC Children’s Hospital (NC Health News reports) -- A New York Times report on the UNC Children's Hospital pediatric heart surgery program sparks a investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services.

TRISTA TALTON: Samples Suggest Unreported Coal Ash Spills (Coastal Review reports) -- Coal ash found in the sediment at the bottom of Lake Sutton suggests multiple, unreported and unmonitored spills have occurred for years at Duke Energy’s former coal-fired plant near Wilmington, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Duke University. Sediment samples collected from the lake in 2015 and again last year after Hurricane Florence detected contaminants including arsenic, selenium, thalium and copper – metals found in coal.

EMERGY DALESIO: Study finds heavy metals in Wilmington lake bottom extensive (AP reports) -- A toxic stew of coal ash has spilled repeatedly and apparently unnoticed from storage pits at a Wilmington power plant into an adjoining lake, according to a Duke University scientist who said that flooding last September from Hurricane Florence was only the latest example.

DAVE DEWITT: Sutton Lake Site Of Numerous Coal Ash Spills (WUNC-FM) -- A Duke University researcher says that Sutton Lake, near Wilmington, has been the site of numerous coal ash spills, both before and after Hurricane Florence.

MAC LEGERTON: No public need for Atlantic Coast Pipeline projects (Fayetteville Observer column) -- There are many reasons why the proposed Liquefied Natural Gas Facility in Robeson County and the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline are unneeded, highly dangerous and a burden to all ratepayers and consumers of energy in N.C.

Ginseng harvest period opens soon for 2 NC national forests (AP reports) -- The time period to apply for the popular ginseng harvest permits in two national forests in N.C. is approaching.

SCOTT NUNN: Veteran reporter Ben Steelman retiring after more than 40 years (Wilmington Star-News reports) -- If anyone has written more about Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear than Ben Steelman, few come to mind. One who did was local historian James Sprunt (1846-1924), who wrote the book “Chronicles of the Cape Fear.” Searching for more details on Sprunt pointed to a StarNews article written by -- of course -- Steelman. How fitting. Had they been contemporaries, the two likely would have been friends.

PHOTOS: Ben Steelman through the years (Wilmington Star-News reports) -- After more than 40 years at the Star-News, reporting Ben Steelman is retiring. Since Dec. 4, 1977, Steelman has been chronicling (and reviewing and commenting on) just about every aspect of the Cape Fear region.