North Carolina editorial roundup

Recent editorials from North Carolina newspapers:

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Dec. 18

The Charlotte Observer on if the Carolina Panthers’ owner would sell the team to someone who would move it out of Charlotte:

Should Carolina Panthers fans worry that owner Jerry Richardson might sell the team to someone who would move it out of Charlotte?

Maybe, but first they should worry about something else - the employees whom Richardson allegedly mistreated to the point that the team had to pay them significant hush money.

If allegations detailed in a disturbing Sports Illustrated report are true - and there’s little reason to believe they are not - Richardson demeaned and objectified female employees and hurled a racial slur at a black employee. His behavior cannot be explained away as an old man with old notions navigating in a new, woke world. He made people choose between their comfort, their dignity and their job. It was wrong.

That doesn’t change that this is a sad end to a relationship that has largely been good for Charlotte. Richardson changed this city by bringing an NFL team here. You can debate the worthiness of spending public dollars on pro sports, but there’s little debate the Panthers helped shape Charlotte’s brand and legitimize it in the eyes of businesses and talent who’ve come since. Plus, it’s just fun to have a home team to root for on Sundays.

All of which is why a lot of Charlotte feels uncomfortable. Richardson’s decision to sell the team at season’s end is the right call, but it accelerates a process that was probably at least a couple of years away. It also raises that uncomfortable question: Will the team go to an owner who will move it elsewhere?

We doubt it. Both Richardson and the NFL have reason to want to keep the Panthers in Charlotte. For his part, Richardson all but explained why in his statement Sunday, which began: “There’s been no greater mission or purpose in my life than to have brought an NFL franchise to Charlotte.” There’s little reason to believe that goal - to have a team in a city he loves - has changed.

The NFL also would prefer to keep the Panthers in Charlotte, a growing and thriving market. Smart business people don’t mess with success, and Charlotte has shown it can and will support a franchise, even when it struggles. NFL owners get to make the final call on who gets to join their exclusive club. Their thumb surely will be firmly on the scale for buyers who want to keep the team here.

Still, nothing is certain in business, and Charlotte’s discomfort today is a reminder of the risks of wooing pro sports. While fans and cities see teams as community partners who help make a place better, those teams ultimately have a different bottom line than ours. They can come and go, as we painfully learned once before with the Charlotte Hornets.

We hope that doesn’t happen, and that a local owner or group will come forth with a legitimate bid that makes the decision easy for Richardson and the NFL. We expect city leaders to be proactive but not panicked, to remind the NFL and prospective owners that life (and business) is good here without making entreaties that will cost Charlotte too much later.

Because life, and business, really is good here. The NFL knows that. We should, too, no matter what comes next.

Online: http://www.charlotteobserver.com

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Dec. 18

The News & Observer of Raleigh on changes to school funding:

Beware Republicans bearing changes in the formulas used to fund public education in North Carolina. For one thing, they’re hardly cheerleaders for public schools, what with their strong support of expanding charter schools (intended as laboratories for innovation, but some have evolved in the minds of their proprietors as quasi-private schools) and a voucher program wherein taxpayers pay some parents’ expenses for private schools.

Now, some Republicans, notably Jerry Tillman of Archdale, who have backed GOP efforts thus far, want to look at changing the formula for funding public schools. Why? One reason cited is that the current formula, which allots money to charters and school districts through 37 categories (textbooks, teachers), has been in place since 1985. Sorry, but the fact that the system, which appears to have worked, has been around for 30 years isn’t reason enough to change it.

The real reasons behind the shakeup advocated by some lawmakers may be found in one Republican argument that funding for charters should be increased. They’re already boosting voucher money over the next decade or so. Both these things drain money from the conventional public schools to which the majority of North Carolina families send their children, and the types of schools, public schools, that have made North Carolina a better, vastly better, state over the last 100 years.

There’s another factor in this movement as well. Republicans gain most of their political strength from smaller towns and rural areas. They’ve ramped up the tension between those areas and the state’s urban areas, which drive most of the economic development in the state. Republicans like to pit cities - which tend to be more Democratic - against those rural areas, as if the two had to be enemies. In fact, smaller towns and rural parts of the state also benefit from the economic development in and around the cities. Many residents of those small areas work in the cities, for example. And economic development officials from the cities and rural counties can work together to recruit large businesses that may need space for their plants but access to airports (cities) in order to work in a global environment.

So there is no benefit to North Carolina or to its workers in starving urban school districts in the name of being more fair to the rural districts. There’s a solution to that issue: Fund all schools adequately, and in fact invest more in rural districts that may have been starved for money for many years. The Leandro case spotlighted that problem, and the state was ordered by the courts to stand behind its constitutional guarantee of a “sound, basic education” for all students.

Lawmakers - party doesn’t matter - need to quit trying to shift money from one place to another in order to make education dollars stretch, and spend enough on education to get the job done for all students and families.

That “sound, basic education” is the only funding formula the state needs, and it’s only a starting point. Public schools are the foundation of North Carolina in every way, helping children, families, the state economy (and educated workforce is number one on the list of needs of prospective employers). There is the foundation of a funding formula, as it is and has been for decades. There is no reason to engage in radical changes that might hurt some schools without really helping others very much in the end.

Online: http://www.newsobserver.com/

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Dec. 19

The Fayetteville Observer on lawsuits that may aid the opioid addiction battle:

New Hanover County has sued opioid manufacturers and distributors, attempting to recover some of the exorbitant costs that the opioid epidemic has imposed. According to one study, the county has what may be the worst opioid addiction problem in the country.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, asks that drug companies pay for past and future costs of dealing with the epidemic. The county wants the manufacturers and distributors to create an “abatement fund” to cover medical care, addiction treatment, law enforcement and caring for children often left homeless by addicted parents.

The county will have plenty of company in the courtroom. The Washington Post reported last summer that at least 25 cities, counties and states have already filed civil suits against drug makers, distributors and some large pharmacy chains. Several state attorneys general have spoken publicly of their frustration with the drug industry, which has failed to deal with the problems its opioid medications have created. “If they’re not going to do it voluntarily, we’re going to drag them to the table and make them,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said as his state sued five drug manufacturers.

The New Hanover lawsuit says, “The distributors and manufacturers intentionally and/or unlawfully breached their legal duties under federal and state law to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse and report suspicious orders of prescription opiates.”

The lawsuit argues that drug makers “aggressively pushed highly addictive opioids, falsely representing to doctors that patients would only rarely succumb to drug addiction.” Extensive marketing campaigns that downplayed the serious dangers of opioids have been widely documented in the past few years. And the country is only beginning to get an accurate picture of the epidemic’s real dimensions. Lawmakers from Washington down to local city councils are seeing that stronger law enforcement isn’t the answer to this national illness that afflicts society at every level - including in many of those lawmakers’ own families. And that alone is changing the nature of our nation’s long-failing “war on drugs.”

Communities are turning to treatment as the best way to control the addiction epidemic. Merely halting the flow of opioids is not enough - and if we have learned anything from our four frustrating decades of a war on drugs, we know that it’s an impossible dream anyway. Addicts are the ultimate consumers driving the immutable law of supply and demand. The only way to stop the flow of drugs into our cities and towns is to get the addicts clean and sober. Few towns are equipped for that challenge.

In Fayetteville, for example, where there are thousands of people struggling with addiction, there are only a few dozen beds in inpatient drug-treatment programs. That’s not unusual. In many rural counties, there are no treatment facilities at all. We all know that we need to exponentially expand our treatment capability, but where will the money come from, especially in this time of restricted budgets?

The answer may be in lawsuits like the one filed by New Hanover County. There’s a model for that approach: the suits filed by many states in the 1990s against the tobacco industry for the enormous health burdens that smoking places on society. That led in 1998 to the $246 billion settlement between 46 states and the five largest tobacco companies. Unfortunately, the money wasn’t entirely well spent and many states - like North Carolina - used far too little of it for smoking-cessation and treatment programs. But perhaps if this growing number of opioid suits leads to a similar settlement, we’ll profit from our tobacco settlement experience and use the money exclusively for treatment, intervention and anti-drug education and advocacy.

New Hanover is taking the right course in filing this suit. We hope other counties - and the state - will join the effort. It may be the only way we can win this war.

Online: http://www.fayobserver.com/