Somebody is trying to stir something up because Republican legislators went to an ALEC conference. Maybe we’re short of news, or maybe the local daily was only looking for an in for Representative Tim Moffitt’s declaration, “I’m a limited government, free enterprise person.”
If that is so, then Ashevillians under the water siege might ask why a regional authority is preferable to local-government control, why the state gets to overrun local arrangements, and why the water system is being seized for bestowal rather than being sold to the highest bidder.
David Forbes at the Mountain Xpress called attention to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about apparent applications of power to increase partisan advantage. As in Asheville, so in Charlotte.
“No one has come out to say specifically ‘this is political revenge against Democratic strongholds,’” says David Swindell, who teaches public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “But these changes amount to an unprecedented attack on the state’s cities, which happen to be home to many of the state’s Democrats.”
And that makes more sense than the great and spacious words fed the public by the legislators.
