Orr: End special tax breaks, treat WNC fairly

August 30, 2007

Jordan SchraderOrr

RALEIGH – Hendersonville native Bob Orr keeps a map of North Carolina in his car covered in pushpins that mark the hometowns of the state’s most prominent leaders and candidates.

Orr is running for the Republican nomination for governor and has stuck his own pin in Yancey County, where he keeps a home, though he spends most of his time in Raleigh now. It’s one of just two pins west of Interstate 77.

The former state Supreme Court justice who practiced law in Asheville says he wants to make government more responsive to WNC residents.

But he also has his sights set on education and transportation reform and on ending the kind of tax breaks meant to lure businesses like Dell and Google.

Orr talked about those issues and others in an interview with the Citizen-Times.

Q: How is the leadership of the state affected by the fact that most of the people who run the state are from down east?

A: I think it’s been a real detriment to Western North Carolina.

I mean, you look at the issue that you reported on recently about the lottery proceeds formula, how their efforts to get it restructured more fairly to provide funds up in the west didn’t pass. ... You look at the story on the I-26 connector, (which) was supposed to be finished in 2008 and now not even going to start until 2013. Costs have gone up exponentially.

If you had someone in Raleigh who was concerned, truly concerned, about Western North Carolina, the issues involving where to put that connector would have long since been resolved and progress moving forward.

Mental health funding issues have hurt small, rural counties.

I think across the board you simply see decisions that are made … that tend to favor the east or the Piedmont because that’s where the power structure is.

Q: Do we need a state law that regulates how you can and can’t develop mountain slopes?

A: My sense is that that’s probably not a good idea.

Obviously circumstances are dramatically different in the mountainous parts of the state versus the Piedmont and the coast, and trying to tailor one law to cover all those circumstances probably doesn’t make much sense.

Q: How are you going to get over the hurdle of not being able to make massive loans to your campaign, unlike your opponents in the Republican primary? Salisbury lawyer Bill Graham has loaned $614,000 and state Sen. Fred Smith has loaned $386,000 to their campaigns.

A: I made a $500 loan to get my campaign started. (laughs) ... I certainly can’t match their personal wealth, but I do think that in the context of the primary, large amounts of money are not near as important as they might be come the general election.

Q: What do you see as your big issues you’re going to stress in the primary?

A: One is public education reform. ... Transportation infrastructure spending is going to emerge as a campaign issue, in part because of the Minneapolis bridge tragedy. ...

The tax incentives, what I call so-called targeted tax incentives or subsidies, I think, is an emerging issue. ... We see the state and the local government literally being taken to the cleaners by the ability of the company to leverage them into giving away these huge tax breaks.

And I haven’t heard anybody give me a satisfactory answer why Google, whose first-quarter profits for 2007 was in excess of a billion dollars, doesn’t have to pay property taxes in Caldwell County.

Property taxes fund your schools. They fund your basic government services.

And the answer of course is always, “Well, you know, Google wouldn’t have come.”

Well, I don’t believe that. Caldwell County had everything they wanted: power grid, water, cheap land, available work force, and they literally exploited the issue by saying, “Oh, we might go to South Carolina. We might go to Iowa.”

So they go to Caldwell County, and they still go to South Carolina. They still go to Iowa.

So it’s obvious it was not an either-or situation.

Q: What should be done about transportation needs?

A: You can only tax so much, so the state has to look, prioritize where we spend our highway dollars. … If the state could plan on a more long-term basis and go ahead, even if they’re not going to build roads, go ahead and secure the right of way for those roads, then you would have a more consistent planning of development because people would know long-term where the roads are going.

You would contain costs.

And if for some reason it was determined that you were not going to build the road, you could always sell the land back, maybe at an increased cost.

Q: Do you think we need to raise the gas tax or the tax on car sales or any other taxes to pay for highways?

A: I’m not in favor of raising the gas tax or the sales tax on cars. ... We need to modernize dramatically our tax system. Nobody wants to get very far out on that limb, OK, because everybody’s got sort-of their special interest.

But what happens because of this antiquated system, is you have what I call sort of a fragmented approach to taxes: “Oh let’s throw a 3 percent car sales tax here. Let’s increase fees for courts over here. Let’s add a little tax, bump it up on sales.”

So what you don’t have is this comprehensive tax policy.

And it’s sort of, what political entity is either weak enough for us to sort-of roll over and raise taxes on them, or on the flip side, what interest is so powerful that we need to give them a tax break and thus reduce our revenues?

Q: Assuming that both houses of the legislature stay Democratic, how would you work with the other party? Would anything get done?

A: If you operate on the assumption that most people over there are interested in trying to do good things for the state, and if you deal fairly with them, then I think I can work with the Democrats and the Republicans.

And on the issues that are contentious, I think the governor has to go to the public.

Q: Would you sign the public financing election pilots giving public money to candidates for state school superintendent, auditor and insurance commissioner?

A: The solution is not public financing.

The solution is to have these offices under the authority of the governor so that the governor is accountable for the operation of these departments.

I understand the good government argument that well, special interests won’t be able to influence the election, but I don’t believe that. ... It favors incumbents, because they’ve got the benefit of name recognition. And the thing that’s never plugged into it is the importance of endorsements and organized groups doing work for you.

Q: Should the state get rid of the lottery?

A: I do honestly think that it was adopted in violation of the state constitution. It should be struck down for that reason. I do think it’s bad public policy. ... The scratch-off games are geared to induce people to keep playing, and to play more, the winnings. I mean, that’s why they want to increase the winnings. And experts will tell you that’s sort of the fundamental part of gambling addiction.

Q: What do you think about private gambling? Should the state have banned video poker, as it did?

A: I think it’s an inconsistent policy to say that it’s OK to gamble on lotteries but it’s not OK to gamble on video poker. Let’s face it, the public wants to do a certain amount of gambling in various ways, and the state just needs to reasonably and fairly regulate it and enforce those laws strictly.