- [Kelly] Lawmakers receive recommendations for reforming North Carolina's D.M.V.

and are more veto override attempts coming from state lawmakers?

This is "State Lines."

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[lively music] ♪ - Welcome to "State Lines," I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, a true VIP, former North Carolina Attorney General, Rufus Edmisten, WUNC Radio's Colin Campbell beside him Skye David of New Frame Legal and the "Do Politics Better" podcast.

Check that out.

And John Locke Foundation's Mitch Kokai, and he has a show called "The Debrief" as well.

You two are encroaching on Colin and I's territory.

- The competing podcast of the political world.

Actually I think most people listen to all of them if they're political junkies, they watch this show.

- All this new media, Rufus, where's your podcast?

- Why would I do one?

- Why not?

- Let's you and I do one.

- Well, we gotta do a show called State- - "The Rufus Chronicle."

- There you go.

- We must do a show called "State Lines."

And there is a lot going on in this state.

We've talked about the US Senate race.

We'll take a break from that this week because big news came out of Raleigh where state auditor, Dave Bullock has released a large review of North Carolina's Division of Motor Vehicles, its challenges, and he is offered some recommendations for reform.

Auditor Bullock says D.M.V.

does not have the necessary control over its budget and operations.

He's proposing making the D.M.V.

an independent state agency away from the Department of Transportation and this would build upon a June audit that says D.M.V.

staff levels have not kept pace with North Carolina's population growth.

D.M.V.

fees raise over $2 billion a year through the State Department of Transportation, credit, News Observer for that, among other news outlets out there good job on their reporting.

$2 billion enterprise D.M.V.

auditor says it's broken.

Let's fix it, Colin.

- Yeah, so this is gonna be an interesting battle to see I mean Bullock is suggesting this be a separate agency that would help address the problem, both the governor's folks and the current D.M.V.

commissioner, Paul Tyner saying, "No, that's actually a terrible idea because in order to do that you'd be focusing on having to replicate a lot of the things they get from the Department of Transportation like attorneys and human resources and things like that."

It seems like the big issue here is that you've got a lot of vacancies.

One thing that really stuck out to me in that report is that Harnett County fast growing county right south of triangle, one driver's license examiner for the entire county.

And if you can't staff these places with the number of people and you can't pay them enough that they'll wanna stay in these jobs and you can get people to fill the vacancies, I'm not sure how you get at this problem of long lines, long wait times.

- Rufus, talk to us about audits.

We've had auditors in the past who just released financial reports and this new auditor is releasing financial reports and suggestions, what's the- - Well he's now got the Dave Act.

He is the smart guy.

I've known Dave a long time.

Yes, the auditors in the past, and I've dealt with 'em, so many have been in my career, he's a very activist auditor and he's gonna go beyond the business of counting the Ps and the Qs and to say, "This is not working."

Now in D.M.V., Colin, I couldn't agree with you more.

It is absurd that in our state that is the ninth most popular, populated state in the country, people have to stand in line.

I read a chronicle today of a guy standing in there nine hours, that is cruel and unusual punishment and it's primarily because they won't fund it right now, the business of whether it's independent or not, that's to be seen.

The one thing about an independent agency, they can go lobby their own cause, they can do other things.

However, D.M.V.

is a lot of transportation-related, so I don't know about that one.

- Mitch, DMV is an independent agency.

That would give them control to institute self reforms.

I mean, if you read behind, it seems to suggest a bureaucratic DOT has prevented reforming the DMV, that it would maybe do itself good by not having to answer to anyone else.

I'm trying to understand this.

- The sense that I got was that there was some concern that you might have the tail wagging the dog.

That you had DMV, which was providing some large percentage, maybe a third of the money for the DOT, but was only getting about 3% of the staffing or the support.

And that DMV officials, although they have been such an important part of what's happening at the DOT, have almost no input into what the department's planning and priorities are.

So I think that was probably one of the justifications.

We didn't hear the auditor say, "Well, let's make it an independent agency and give the general assembly control," which obviously would've made it a partisan thing.

Another thing to take away from the Democratic governor.

But I do think there's this sense, as Dave Boliek was coming forward with this, that, look, the DMV is a major operation.

It's probably the one piece of state government that everyone interacts with at some point, and no one likes those interactions.

So let's do something about it.

And maybe getting them out from under the DOT's thumb would be what to do.

- Skye, I think it's very interesting, the DMV can raise over $2 billion.

But yet all that money comes in, it goes somewhere.

But the Democrats and Republican legislatures haven't upgraded the computers.

The mainframe computers are older than some of the examiners and all this kind of stuff we hear.

How does it get that way, that such a lucrative, if you wanna call it that, agency can be left behind with population growth in this state becoming a top 10 destination?

- I think part of that is what everybody has said, that they're bringing in a lot of money.

But DOT is the one asking the legislature for what they want and they're not asking for a lot for DMV.

And I think Colin had a report yesterday on some stuff that DMV's trying to be a little more proactive after this audit came out.

And say, hey, we're gonna use some new ideas to kind of cut down on that wait time.

And I thought that was pretty smart.

- Yeah, there's a lot that they can do in terms of, you know, how people would stand in line.

If you get a text message, there's a DMV near my house that's next to a Subway restaurant and everyone's standing out in the heat.

And it's like, you could just go into that Subway, eat a sandwich, get a drink, get out of the heat.

- Then you smell like Subway.

- Yeah, you'll smell like Subway.

But at least you know you're better than standing in line outside the DMV for nine hours, but- - And you'll have a license at the end, so.

- Yeah, exactly.

One of the interesting things about all the money with DOT, I mean when you pay your DMV fees, a lot of that is going to road upkeep.

And DOT has to balance, how much does it spend towards the DMV operations versus road building?

Which I've reported on a lot of the major road projects that are must do's for the state are getting delayed and delayed and delayed, and we keep getting stuck in traffic.

So there's a lot of competing interest here.

- Very quickly, Rufus, does Dave Boliek hand over his report to lawmakers and the governor and they say, "Thank you very much," and ignore him like they do so many, many other things?

- No, they can't.

- Or do they take him seriously?

- This is the grassroots movement.

I remember when I was Secretary of State, the Secretary of State's office made 10 times the amount of money we were given, but I couldn't get any of it back.

And DMV faces the same thing.

And no entity touches more lives than DMV in the state of North Carolina.

- Next topic is Governor Josh Stein signing of the mini budget bill that state lawmakers had approved on its short session just last week.

Republican House and Senate budget negotiators pushed through some policy and funding items on which they could agree on without much controversy.

Hence, the small mini bill.

There are some teacher pay raises in there.

Some state workers get a pay hike.

The DMV will get funding to hire over 60 new examiners.

Governor Stein publicly calls this a bandaid budget that, quote, "Keeps the lights on."

And Skye, he's telling legislative Republicans they need to get serious about investing in the people.

But budget writers and negotiators say this does a lot of good.

Erin Paré was on here last week.

Representative of Wake County said, yes, small budget, but it's mighty.

- That's right, they did the things they had to do and they can't agree on much more than that right now, so it's all they could do.

So we got those first steps.

Lights are on, and I'm not sure there is going to be a big budget bill, but maybe some more mini budgets to come.

- There are all these lobbyists in Raleigh and they all work all year long to try to get some sliver of something in a budget or a bill somewhere.

Was this a great disappointment to all those people that walk the halls that to get a mini budget as opposed to a, I guess a maximum budget?

- No, I think it was a reality check.

There's a money problem and the state does not have the money to be funding all of this stuff it's been funding.

We're just in tougher economic times.

And so you have to really prioritize what's needed.

- Well, Colin, on one side, if you have more bills coming in, many budgets, that gives the lobbyists more of a chance than just one shot at the state budget.

- How would you know about that?

- I am one of those people.

- Hey, Mitch, this quote mini budget, it's not a mini budget, it's the budget right now.

So are we looking at truly something that we should look at as being just small in stature or is that an appropriately sized state budget for some people?

- Well, remember that we have a state law that says if you have no new state budget at the end of the two year budget, the old budget remains in place.

So this budget, in a large respect, just basically makes adjustments to that old budget.

Usually the budget bills are hundreds of pages.

This one was 32 pages.

So it covers some items that needed to be covered as Skye was alluding to, and it throws in some other things that you might not have expected just as a continuation of what was there before.

But I think what this tells us is that legislators realize we probably aren't going to come to an agreement on the big broad issues like the tax cuts and what the size of the raises are gonna be.

So let's go ahead and put out something on the issues that we can agree to so that the lights stay on, so that people who are gonna get step raises or have to have enrollment increases, like in the community colleges and the public schools, those things will happen that we all agree on and we'll set aside our differences for another day.

- Rufus, once again, the school teachers rise and they get their pay raise in a 30 page budget.

No one else gets anything.

The power of teachers are more powerful than I think they think they are.

- Well, they've not been very powerful recently and I'm glad for that.

But the only of those are step increases for the higher echelon teachers.

And I hear from state employees all the time and being a retired state employee, they're mad.

But I think Mitch is correct.

Skye's correct.

I've seen more non-budget agreement years in my career than I have those that did.

And I've often thought, why doesn't the federal government adopt this wonderful thing that we have?

At least you're not gonna go into a big budget fight every time and have to shut down government.

It's a pretty wise idea.

- Yeah and that was something that was adopted in 2016 back when McCrory was still in, and this was Republicans all fighting over this.

And they decided, why are we going into October and not having a budget and worrying about shutdowns and all of these continuing resolutions?

Let's just pass a law that says we don't have a new budget by July 1, the old budget remains in effect.

You have the good side of that is that you don't have these fights over continuing resolutions.

The downside is that there is less incentive to come up with a deal.

- The pressure's gone now.

It's like, well, the lights are gonna stay on one way or the other.

- And if you are in a situation where one side says they look at the other side's budget and they say, well, that's worse than what we already had, then we're not gonna go with that.

Let's just keep what we already had.

- And that's the problem this year, I mean, you've got the big fight over these scheduled income tax cuts and the Senate's position is, let's not touch what's already in state law.

Let's keep these tax cuts coming.

So their advantage is to not agree to a deal unless the House caves on this income tax issue, which it looks like they're not going to.

- To the point about the Evergreen Statute though, I think your normal North Carolinian doesn't even know that there isn't a budget.

- It's true, the show rolls on.

- Back in days when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, the same thing happened.

It's phenomenal how they fuss about one another always at budget time.

And the average individual in North Carolina can't understand why the legislature being composed of almost one party can't get together.

But it's just an old habit.

- Has the pressure been relieved with just the mini budget?

I know one senator said it's great.

We don't feel like we really need to come back and be so pressed to pass anything else.

- I think there's still some pressure and it's gonna come from teachers and state employees because you're going into the new school year.

Nobody's gotten a raise this year.

And you're also looking down potentially a state health plan premium is about to go up.

So realistically between that and inflation, most state employees, assuming they don't do a little bit more, maybe a mini budget that has raises in it, are gonna take essentially a pay cut ultimately at the end of the day.

- And remember, they're also gonna have to do something maybe on Medicaid.

I mean, they put in this mini budget $600 million, but some are saying that that's still-- - DHHS says more than they need.

So we'll see how that plays out.

- So we have that to come back to August 28th or ninth.

They're coming back in later this month.

And then also the governor has given Republicans a nother reason to call us, you know, another small session because he added a veto to a list of the bills, Republicans may try to override in a few weeks.

Legislation to register North Carolina under President Trump's School Choice Scholarship Tax Credit plan was vetoed.

Lawmakers have override intentions on other bills.

We're watching the DEI bans across public education, the universities and local government as well as this Second Amendment concept of removing permit requirements from concealed firearm possession called Constitutional Carry and a darling bill for the grassroots gun rights movement.

They've gotten so close so many times, and this happens to them every session.

It gets punted, handicap the veto override race here, five bills were left.

And I don't know if Josh Stein's veto this week makes it six or makes it five, but it's almost a half dozen.

- Yeah, that's six with the new one.

And remember there were 14 bills that they initially had on their plate.

They overwrote, the general assembly overwrote eight of the 14, there was another bill that was vetoed.

They took out a provision that was controversial about pet shops, sent it back to Stein, he signed it.

So that's basically nine that are taken care of.

Of the five bills before the one that you just mentioned about the signing up for President Trump's school issue, those five, not one of them had a single Democratic vote.

So the only way that you're gonna get those passed is if you can convince a Democrat who voted no the first time to flip in the House, which is not impossible.

We saw Cecil Brockman do that on the donor privacy bill.

He voted no on the conference report that came out, but then voted yes on the override.

So someone made him mad about something and he flipped his vote and maybe they get a Democrat to flip, but that's probably not terribly likely.

The other way it could pass is if House Speaker Destin Hall, who's not signaled that he's gonna do this, but if he tried to play some games and say, you know, Democrats go out for the bathroom, let's vote on the override.

And if they had some missing Democrats, they might be able to pass it.

I haven't heard that anyone is thinking about that, but that would certainly keep Democrats on their toes.

And then there's the bill that was just vetoed that had support from Carla Cunningham and Shelley Willingham among Democrats.

And it's likely based on how they voted on the first overrides, that they would vote with their initial vote as well.

- Speaker Hall has said publicly he's not going to call a vote when people are gone.

People might remember the September 11th budget override in the House, and that did not play well for Republicans.

But Speaker Hall said he's gonna get there in an honest way.

So I wouldn't expect that to happen calling a vote when people are gone or something like that.

- Colin, if it's allowed by the rules, why not call a vote?

That's not dishonest.

That's following the rules is allowed by, I guess, legislative policy.

- I feel like he still see, he's the potential to, I think, persuade maybe one or two Democrats to cross party lines on some of these issues, and that's why he'd like to do it that way 'cause that just feels a little bit less sneaky than the other way.

But as you mentioned, it's perfectly allowed.

And all it takes is all the Republicans to be there.

And I think two of the Democrats to be absent.

And then he's got what he needs to get those final vetoes across the finish line, because I'm not sure, I mean you'll look at what's left 'cause the concealed carry permit bill several bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Those don't seem to have the support from those key swing democrats yet.

But certainly, I mean, we just talked about the budget.

There's often wheeling and dealing that happens behind the scenes and maybe somebody gets something they want in the budget and exchange they vote with Republicans on some of these remaining veto overrides.

- And to your point about using this sort of strategy, remember that's why we have a state lottery.

When it went through the state Senate, the Senate was sent home for the year and told they weren't gonna vote on anything else.

And then they were called right back.

Two Republicans weren't there.

And that was enough for the Democrats to pass it.

Beverly would Beverly produced tie breaking vote.

- Produced the vote - And she became Governor, Rufus.

- Yeah, maybe.

- Vote for the lottery you become Governor.

- What is it?

- Why didn't I think of that?

- Is it easier Rufus for Republicans to persuade a Democrat to crossover with goodies or whatever you want to call it, pork or other policy preferences?

Or could Democrats push a caucus member in the house over to the Republican side with some of the more public attacks and more disagreements?

- Yeah the Democratic leader is, Robert Reeves is a very decent man.

And he's not one to arm twist and say, you've gotta do this to do that.

And some folks just vote their conscience and he says, that's allowed.

And so I think that's a very fine gentleman to do that.

- And we'll watch this.

It's the gun bill, the anti DEI bills and then the school choice bill.

- I predict immigration bill.

There's immigration, I'll predict one that will not survive the vetoes, that gun bill.

How ridiculous for an 18-year-old to carry a concealed weapons somewhere, two- - House Republican, Republican.

- Good lord.

- Right, and remember, so of those five bills, not a one of 'em had a single vote from a Democrat in neither the house or the Senate the first time.

- From your experience, do you think that that democratic caucus will be calcified on a certain issues and they just, they would just have no chance of flipping that one vote?

- It's gonna be hard because you're basically gonna have to say, you got it wrong the first time.

Now join us against your party this time.

I don't think they're gonna do it.

- Or don't show up at all.

- That's right.

Could have that if they don't show.

- North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction is launching a strategic plan to improve learning for all of our kids in public schools.

Here's the goal.

Our state will have America's number one public education system by 2030.

Teacher pay, test scores, maintaining public school enrollment numbers and high school graduation rates will guide the grading for DPI.

Here's some actual goals.

They would like to have a 92% graduation rate from high school and they would like to see elementary school enrollment rise from 84% of all fifth grade or fifth, five year olds going into kindergarten up to 89% of students choosing public school options.

In the era of competition, Mitch, with private schools and vouchers, five years to become number one.

How do they get there?

- Well, they're gonna have to have a lot more money flowing in.

And I think that was one of the concerns.

This was obviously voted on by the State Board of Education, I believe it was unanimous.

But you did hear a couple of members, the Republican members say, look, we haven't said anything about finances and how we're gonna pay for this.

That could be a stumbling block.

So when I looked at that document, the main thing I saw was, this was good aspirational stuff.

There's almost nothing on there that you look at and say, I questioned that.

Although one piece that was, was this goal of raising the percentage of students who are actually in the public schools, which is not necessarily a goal you would have to do if your goal is for helping the students rather than the system.

But other than something like that, most of these are good things.

You wanna raise the graduation rate, raise the scores.

All of those things are good, but it's all gonna come down to money and making sure that enough money is there to do it.

And that's not really part of the plan, but needs to be.

- Rufus, is that the escape hatch for this, if it doesn't happen, if they don't reach their goals, become number one, it's because state lawmakers aren't budgeting enough for public education.

- Well, they never have, even under Democrats.

I had four brothers who were teachers, and they're all doing something else now after years.

I'm a great believer in teacher aids.

Physicians have physician's assistants.

Everybody has an assistant.

One thing I like, Mitch, in the program is that it cut out some of the paperwork.

I taught the third grade for a year, by the way.

Paperwork, every teacher tells you, "I want to use my time teaching.

Stop all this crazy bureaucratic paperwork."

We test and test and test.

I think we're just testing ourselves to death.

- Colin, you could actually pull this down as a reporter and just watch it unfold over the next, this would be what, for the next 2 1/2 legislative sessions to see if North Carolina can get to number one.

But what makes it get to number one?

Is cash king?

- I think that's one element of it.

You know, obviously, keeping teachers and school staff in place is gonna be part of it.

What do they focus on?

I mean, I think this is sort of interesting.

One of the things that stuck out to me in this report was that they wanna do more on training teachers to teach elementary school math.

That's an area they seem to think they need to make some improvements on.

So a lot of this is, do you get all these different school districts with different school boards, different administration, on the same page in terms of what do you prioritize with what resources you do have, and how do you improve schools that way?

But certainly, funding is always gonna be an element.

- Skye, can North Carolina have the best public or the best education system in North Carolina and fully embrace a public option, and now the private school voucher plan?

Of course, DPI is gonna look for public education only to be number one.

How should a parent or someone who supports the schools view a strategic mission such as this?

- Well, you have to look at the best school for your child.

Maybe your child does great in public schools, and that is awesome, or they might need something a little bit different, and you put them in a different kind of school.

I think that the state has to come to the realization that we're not in the education system of 1980.

We are in a new era, and they're gonna have to adapt to some of that, all of the students using AI to answer questions, to really integrate what is 2025 instead of 1985.

- And remember, one other thing that's lingering over here that's not in the plan but needs to be addressed in some way is the Leandro case.

We've been waiting a year and a half for the State Supreme Court to say whether it's gonna throw out an earlier ruling on Leandro.

Once that's resolved, I think you can say, "Okay, either the courts are gonna force us to do this, and we can adapt to that, or the courts are getting out of this, and now we can turn to other plans."

- Well, Mitch, the state has never paid any attention to that case anyway, so - Definitely.

- Is ruling or ruling?

- Well, I mean, they're gonna have a ruling at some point.

- They have to have a ruling.

- I mean, they took the case.

- Yeah, they accepted the appeal.

- And a year and a half ago, they had the oral arguments, so there will be a ruling and really it'll probably decide whether the case ends after 30 years, or if the courts are gonna be able to tell the state government, "You've gotta spend this money in this way."

- Let's touch on one last topic out of the State Treasurer's Office.

Been rolling out the news this month on the retirement system's health and some state health plan reforms.

Brad Briner's team says it's launching a free surgical option where the state will directly link qualified surgeons with members of the state health plan, reducing the, quote, "middleman" and linking us with our preferred surgeons.

The state pays on insurance claims uses Aetna as the manager to pay those claims.

It's also next week expected state health plan premium rates will be announced.

The state retirement plan also earned $8 billion, Rufus, in investment returns to first half of 2025, only $3.5 billion more than he expected.

Brad Briner's getting action.

- Good for Brad Briner, and also I congratulate him on doing something unique.

I learned, much to my dismay, that we have the highest medical cost of any state in the union.

That astounded me.

And so it goes to show you that if you get these physicians to volunteer, now remember, he's having to have them volunteer, and it's not gonna be free unless they get the mass do it, but it shows you that if they're willing to do this, that we do have extremely exorbitant medical costs, and I congratulate Brad Briner, and of course premiums are going to have to go up.

Nobody wants to say, "Yes, I love a premium," but if you want to get good medical care, and I think the state health plan has done a good job.

- Colin, we got a minute and a half left.

Max, fundamental changes, I mean, and some good news, I would presume, statistically, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

- Yeah, I mean, I think some of this is Briner trying to figure out a way to offset these premium increases that are coming.

As Rufus said, it's not really an option for them, that's gonna have to go up, and so are there ways to, even as you increase premiums, offset the damage that does to people's bottom line by figuring out ways to make surgeries less expensive.

'Cause a lot of times, I look at what I pay for healthcare, the premium's not that bad, but once you go and have minor surgery or something, you end up thousands of dollars in the hole, and if there's a way to fix that, then that makes people better off at the end of the day.

- Skye, I know for a fact, Senate policy leaders are watching this favorably.

I mean, I think this mini budget had some stability funds for the state health plan.

- Yeah, I think that the state treasurer is doing all that he can to make sure that North Carolina is gonna be in a good financial place, and when you're doing that, you have to think of those employees first, and so I think this puts the employees first.

- 15 seconds, last word, Mr. Kokai.

- If you really wanna help with healthcare in North Carolina end certificate of need, you'd have much more supplies.

- Hit the talking points!

- You know, I set myself up for that.

Thanks gang, thank you so much for being on the show.

We are out of time.

Email me, statelines@pbsnc.org.

We wanna hear from you.

I'm Kelly McCullen, see you next time.

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