The General Assembly’s Finance Committee room wasn’t large enough for all the people who wanted to watch the first meeting of the new committee studying North Carolina’s annexation laws.
Walking by the open committee room doors about 20 minutes into the meeting, I spotted at least a half dozen people monitoring the proceedings from the hall.
The committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Vernon Malone, D-Wake, had explained earlier why this new joint House-Senate committee is addressing annexation issues:
A great deal of discussion has already preceded this first joint meeting. The House of Representatives [has] had ? that [House] committee ? has had several meetings and hearings up to this point. But this will be the first occasion that members of the Senate have been a part of this discussion.
I’ve had an opportunity to review minutes of meetings that were held previously, and those minutes would suggest that there is indeed a very keen interest in this issue. Maybe “keen” is not the word I want to use, but that’s the one I will use to be more polite, I guess.
Today this will be an information-sharing meeting … mostly for the members of the Senate who are not familiar with what has transpired up to this point.
Malone also described the meeting as a “crash course” for “those of us who have not been previosuly involved in this conversation.”
For the John Locke Foundation’s take on forced annexation, click here.
