As I have described in several posts (links to these are listed at the end of this post), the legislature’s 2010 amendments to the personnel privacy statutes affecting most North Carolina public employers raised many questions. Several state and local … Read more

Utility Jones arrives for work as a water and sewer utility fee collection agent for a local government. He is met at the door by an irate customer, Dell Linquent, who claims that her water was shut off illegally the … Read more

UPDATE September 2013:  The 2013 legislation revising the board of adjustment statutes affects the standards for granting variances.  S.L. 2013 – 126 repeals the reference to “practical difficulties” and provides that to grant a variance unnecessary hardship must result from … Read more

UPDATE November 2013: The 2013 General Assembly repealed all legislation authorizing instant runoff elections in North Carolina.  As the law now stands, the kinds of instant runoff voting described in the following post are no longer possible in North Carolina. … Read more

Building on this earlier post, here are a few more myths about tax foreclosures that deserve debunking.  (This time I promise to avoid bragging on Duke basketball.)  But first allow me to plug two resources that might be of interest to … Read more

Three members of a five-member city council are meeting to discuss city business. Is that a majority? You’d think this would be an easy question, but the answer depends on the context for the question. The basic definition of “majority” … Read more

Last November the voters elected a new town council, and to celebrate the victors invited their local congressman to administer the oath of office.  Several months later some pedant pointed out that North Carolina law doesn’t permit congressmen to administer … Read more

A city resident forwards an e-mail to Councilwoman Leslie Knope. The e-mail accuses certain other city council members of improper conduct. Councilwoman Knope opens the e-mail on her home computer, which is set up to remotely log in to her public … Read more

In my last two posts (here and here), I’ve discussed the efforts of the City Council of Emerald City, North Carolina, to support its local businesses by adopting a local preference policy.  Purchasing Officer Scarecrow has just finished reviewing the … Read more

It’s flu shot season in North Carolina. Flu vaccine clinics are underway in physicians’ offices, health departments, drug stores, some workplaces, and even the North Carolina State Fair. Unlike last year, the vaccine supply appears to be plentiful and is not … Read more

[Update: in 2015, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment did not protect Shirvell’s conduct, based on reasoning similar to that discussed below.] What are the limits of First Amendment protection for government employees?  Consider this somewhat … Read more

North Carolina cities have a choice of governance structure: the mayor-council form or the council-manager form. According to the School of Government’s Forms of Government database, 300 cities in North Carolina use the mayor-council form, and 67 of them employ … Read more

UPDATE September 2013:  The North Carolina supreme court subsequently ruled that counties do not have statutory authority to impose school impact fees. That 2012 case is discussed here. The population of Partition County has grown dramatically over the past several … Read more

UPDATE 2013: This blog has been updated to reflect legislative changes made in S.L. 2013-413. Many local governments across the state provide some form of solid waste services for their citizens. Under the public enterprise statutes, counties and municipalities have … Read more

In my last post, I talked about the efforts of the City Council of Emerald City, North Carolina, to support its local businesses by adopting a local preference policy. We now rejoin our friends in Emerald City, where the City … Read more

UPDATE November 2013: The 2013 General Assembly amended the early voting statutes to eliminate same-day registration and voting and to shorten the early voting period by one week. UPDATE February 2017:  In July 2016 the federal Fourth Circuit Court of … Read more

What’s the only type of property that can change from real property to personal property and back again in the blink of an eye? The answer is mobile homes, the species of property that produces more headaches per tax dollar than … Read more

In this post about access to emails, I described three categories of public employee emails: 1)emails that are public records and subject to public access; 2) emails that are public records but an exception either prohibits disclosure or eliminates the right … Read more

“Where do you go in this town to get a tat, to find someone who can sling some ink? I wanna find somebody like they have on L.A. Ink that can do some real work on me. You know, a … Read more

Your governing board recently instructed you to look at any and all means to cut costs. In reviewing ways to streamline administrative expenses you discover that the unit can reduce its utility fee collection costs significantly by printing and mailing … Read more