Responsibility on GOP

Editorial in Greenville Daily Reflector, July 26, 2013.

The end came swiftly for Billy Ray Hall, who for 25 years served as president of the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center. He resigned only two days after State Auditor Beth Wood released a sharply critical review that highlighting the center’s lack of adequate oversight, calling “unreasonable” Hall’s $221,000 salary and revealing a fund of nearly a quarter million dollars for Hall’s retirement.

The Rural Center, which had been in the crosshairs of Gov. Pat McCrory and Republican lawmakers, faces an uncertain future under a state budget that includes no new funding. Yet, its purpose — to help poverty-stricken communities across North Carolina — remains pressing, and it is critical that Raleigh find avenues that improve infrastructure and cultivate employment in the state’s rural corners.

As any resident of eastern North Carolina knows all too well, the distribution of employment opportunity varies dramatically from one end of the state to the other. While areas like the Triangle and Triad prosper, rural counties once dependent on agriculture, manufacturing, textiles or furniture find even those jobs in increasingly short supply, accelerating an endemic cycle of poverty.

The Rural Center was envisioned as a mechanism for improving those communities through targeted grants that bolster infrastructure, making those areas more attractive to would-be employers. It has been successful in creating thousands of jobs but, as the recent state auditor’s report makes clear, suffers from a lack of oversight to adequately manage the millions in tax dollars it receives annually.

McCrory and state Budget Director Art Pope took aim at the center — long a target of state Republicans — with a proposal to gut the center in favor of a new economic development apparatus to be created under the authority of the Commerce Department. The audit’s report served as the evidence needed for their action. It sealed Hall’s fate and called into question the center’s future.

Yet, as Republican officials celebrate the center’s downfall, the need for economic assistance in places with double-digit unemployment — places throughout eastern North Carolina — remains obvious. It is critical that the governor and his legislative allies should not lose sight of this fact while dancing on the Rural Center’s grave.

Rural Center leaders — Hall, in particular — cannot blame others for a fate they sealed with sloppiness and hubris. The onus is now on McCrory and Republican lawmakers to do better by the communities the center was designed to help, recognizing the need is both massive and inescapable.