A Week in the Life

(Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

The CHAPEL HILL-CARRBORO SCHOOL BOARD ended a two-year professional development contract it had never approved but the school system had dropped $342,000 on anyway, thanks to administrators who found a way around the normal approval mechanism. According to a new report from LIVEITUP! HILLSBOROUGH STREET, food and beverage sales in the corridor surrounding N.C. State grew almost 9 percent from 2018 to 2019. In November, ethics watchdog BOB HALL filed a complaint against Senate leader Phil Berger over a house he owned in Raleigh and rented to his campaign. A month later, Berger sold the house to a lobbyist. Last Tuesday, Hall filed another ethics complaint.

Orange County Superior Court Judge ALLEN BADDOUR, who signed off on the secretly negotiated settlement between the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate veterans and the UNC System in November, vacated that agreement, ruling that the SCV never had grounds to sue in the first place—which, no shit, Sherlock, the SCV said as much two months ago.

MCCLATCHY CO., the parent company of The News & Observer and The Durham Herald-Sun, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If a judge accepts its reorganization plan, McClatchy will be taken over by the hedge fund that owns American Media Inc., the parent company of, among other publications, The National Enquirer. New rankings showed that North Carolina’s MARK MEADOWS, a leading Trump sycophant, is the most conservative member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The North Carolina Democratic Party filed an ethics complaint against SENATOR THOM TILLIS, saying that a fundraising email he sent asking for donations to a “Presidential Protection Fund” while he was a juror in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial violated the law. Nothing is likely to come of it. On the first day of early voting, former New York City mayor MIKE BLOOMBERG came to Raleigh to pitch people on the idea that he could beat Trump. He did not address the recently surfaced video of him defending stop-and-frisk by saying that young black men all look alike or video of him saying that the end of redlining caused the housing crisis.

The first six of more than 280 families who were evacuated from MCDOUGALD TERRACE in the wake of the public housing complex’s carbon monoxide crisis returned home. BERNIE SANDERS, now leading in polls in North Carolina, brought more than 3,000 people to the Durham Convention Center for a rally featuring, appropriately enough, Bull Durham actor Susan Sarandon.

JOHN BOLTON, a neocon who has never met a war he didn’t like—and who could have testified to Congress about his firsthand knowledge of Trump’s quid pro quo but chose to sell his book instead—gave a talk to a sold-out audience at Duke.

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The Good, The Bad & The Awful

T. Greg Doucette

There are a lot of people who deserve credit for unraveling the UNC Board of Governors’ $2.5 million secret Silent Sam deal with the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which a judge vacated last week: the student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel, whose reporting brought to light all sorts of chicanery; the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which intervened on behalf of students and faculty, leading to the settlement being tossed, among others. But it’s possible none of this would have happened without local attorney, former BOG member, and INDY Voices columnist T. Greg Doucette, who first reported the insanity of the day-before-Thanksgiving wham-bam lawsuit-settlement, then acquired sources inside the SCV who leaked him information— including Commander Kevin Stone’s letter to his men bragging that the BOG made a deal even though it knew the SCV didn’t have the standing to sue—that exposed the whole charade for what it was.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Last week, the CHCCS School Board axed a two-year, $767,000 professional development contract with an organization called Education Elements. The move came two months after the board suspended the contract, which came two weeks after the board says it first learned about it. By that point, the school system had already shelled out $342,000, though it never voted to approve the contract, and the contract never went through the state-required pre-audit process. How did this happen? According to school board chairwoman Mary Ann Wolf, since each monthly payment to Education Elements fell below $90,000—the threshold for getting board approval—administrators just decided they could do it on their own, no big deal.

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McClatchy Co. Everyone assumed it was coming at one point or another. McClatchy makes a good amount of revenue, but it’s saddled with too much debt, both from its acquisition of Knight-Ridder and its pension fund. Assuming a judge approves the bankruptcy reorganization the company proposed last week, it will shave down that debt and shift the burden of its pension obligations to the federal government. In the short term, its papers—including The News & Observer and The Durham Herald-Sun—shouldn’t be affected. But longer-term, it’s hard to be optimistic, either for our local papers or for local journalism generally. McClatchy’s new majority owner will be a hedge fund (and a hedge fund that controls The National Enquirer and Us Weekly ’s parent company, no less). Hedge funds, as a rule, don’t exist to make public-interest journalism; they exist to make profits.