Paul O'Connor: Family, readers lose a great voice in NC politics

My heart isn't in this.

A month ago, I walked away from this column, leaving it in the most capable hands of Mark Binker, a 43-year-old veteran old-school journalist who was as smart and dedicated as they come.

Then Mark died Saturday morning.

A great husband, a great dad, a terrific journalist. Gone. My words are inadequate to comfort his wife, Marla, and Mark's two boys, and they also won't explain to readers what North Carolina journalism has lost. Mark was the ideal reporter for the best job remaining in state political news.

Mark wrote a column for today on last week's legislative crossover deadline. His boss, Clifton Dowell, and I are too stunned to know what is right: Run his last column or have me write one. Ethically, we didn't see how we could run the quotes Mark got from lawmakers without his being here. So, I'm compromising, using some of Mark's info, but not his quotes, and adding my thoughts.

Some background on the deadline: Legislators instituted it about 20 years ago hoping to modernize their operations. Over the previous three decades or so, the state's population and budget had grown enormously and the role of state government had expanded similarly. But the legislature didn't change.

The results were predictable. Nothing got done early in the session, the session dragged, then, when legislators got tired enough to go home, hundreds of bills hit the fan all at once.

So, legislative leaders set earlier deadlines, one to file bills, another for bills to pass their houses of origin and cross over to the other chamber. It spread the stress out better. The deadline came and went last week, and Mark wrote this lead for his final column:

"North Carolina's legislative sausage factory ground more than its typical output last week as lawmakers played their own version of beat the clock."

A paragraph later he wrote, "More than 220 separate measures made it halfway to the governor's desk by passing either the House or Senate during the last week of April. That's a remarkable clip given the legislature only sent eight bills to the governor during the first three months of its session."

Over the years, the deadline evolved to serve another purpose. As Mark noted, it gave legislative leaders an opportunity "to sort the plausible from the preposterous." Legislative leaders can orchestrate the demise of some tenuous bills simply by arranging for their failure to pass, without an up or down vote, by the crossover deadline. That is, bills with some support but maybe not enough to risk the possible ramifications of their becoming law.

Mark noted two such bills: "the biennial effort to allow motorcyclists to zoom around the state without a helmet ... (and) a bill that would let police pull over someone merely driving the speed limit in the left lane of a highway when lead foots might want to use that space to exceed the speed limit."

The crossover deadline, like any deadline, serves another purpose: It forces people to compromise. We saw that when lawmakers compromised to fix, at least temporarily, the mess looming for August caused by last year's law mandating smaller class sizes in lower grades. Had the bill not passed, school districts would have faced the firing of arts and physical education teachers.

Even with the crossover deadline, one big problem persists. Whenever there is a crush of legislation heading to the floor on deadline, bills get through without the full debate they deserve. That happened last week.

Mark cited "a bill lawmakers hope will make it easier for arenas like the Charlotte Motor Speedway to serve beer and wine at special events." The bill passed the House despite unresolved questions about its impact on state revenues.

Come July, August or whenever this legislature decides to adjourn, there will be another crush of legislation and some bills will be slipped onto the docket. We will wake some morning to learn that bills we knew little about had become law just before adjournment. The person who creates the reform that ends that nefarious practice deserves the Medal of Freedom.

Please keep Mark's family in your prayers.

http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Columnists/2017/05/03/Losing-A-colleague.html