Democrats Choose Fishing Pier Over Teachers

While Democrats continue closed-door negotiations scheming to raise taxes on North Carolinians and threaten budget cuts that will harm teachers and the sick, disabled, and elderly, they continue to defend a $25 million fishing pier being built in the home of Democratic Senate Leader Marc Basnight (D-Dare).

Nag’s Head lavish pier gets a lashing

By Mark Johnson

Charlotte Observer

RALEIGH North Carolina is building a new pier at Nags Head, but this is not just a simple boardwalk from which to cast a fishing rod.

This pier is essentially an aquarium on pilings, with live animal exhibits, a 16,000-square-foot pier house and wind turbines generating electricity.

The price tag is $25 million.

The project is drawing heat as an example of extravagant state spending at a time when the state doesn’t have money to spare. The fact that the pier sits in the district of powerful state Senate leader Marc Basnight, a Manteo Democrat, adds fuel to the political fire.

Liberal and conservative critics are pounding the new pier, trying to transform the project into North Carolina’s “bridge to nowhere,” the Alaska construction project that the state’s Republican governor, Sarah Palin, boasted of trying to block as wasteful government pork.

Critics have deployed a television ad and mass e-mails bashing the pier, saying it is a luxury the state can’t afford when it is handing out pink slips to teachers and shutting down pieces of the state’s health care services.

“The right hand is cutting the ability for a grandmother to stay at home and not go into a nursing home and the other hand is funding new construction projects like the pier,” said Tim Rogers, executive director of the Association for Home & Hospice Care of North Carolina.

While the pier looks like an easy target, the facts don’t quite make it the glowing example of misplaced spending that critics suggest.

No money from this year’s state budget will be used, and large chunks of the funding were earmarked for the pier or similar projects well before the recession kicked in.

John Bone, president and CEO of the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce, said the pier will create hundreds of construction jobs. He described how it will serve as a platform for ocean research and a live action exhibit that will teach children and adults alike about forms of renewable energy and ways to preserve the environment.

Of course it’s expected to draw lots of tourists with money to spend, too.

“It’s a tool for education, research, economic development – all of those things,” Bone said, “and is worth no less than anything else the state does.”

Much of the pier pressure is about timing. The state is building it at the same time that lawmakers are writing a budget that is expected to pack more students into classrooms, shut down university programs and make scores of other spending cuts. In many ways, the pier is a vehicle for the larger tussle over balancing the budget: what to cut, what taxes to raise.

The Association for Home Care & Hospice of North Carolina plastered the pier into an ad attacking Sen. Doug Berger, a Franklin County Democrat. The commercial scolds Berger for voting to fund the pier eight days after voting to cut a health care support services program. Berger argues that many of the recipients of that aid don’t need it, and the program needs to be weeded of fraud and abuse.

The N.C. Association of Educators sent an e-mail to its 65,000 members two weeks ago encouraging them to tell lawmakers to support education over projects such as the pier.

“Did you run (for office) on the pier or run on education?” said Brian Lewis, the association’s lobbyist, describing the message to lawmakers. “They tell us it’s a bad year, and it is. They’re laying off teachers, and then this stuff pops up.”

Republicans roll out the pier as a standard talking point in criticizing the Democrats who have a controlling majority in the legislature.

“They’re telling everybody we’re going to have to raise taxes or we run out of money,” said Senate Republican leader Phil Berger of Eden. “If they can go back and find money for the pier, why can’t they find money to keep from laying off teachers and do other important things?”

Click here to read the full story from the Charlotte Observer…

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