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Lawmakers Love Lee
New Hanover County state Sen. Michael Lee was elected Senate Majority Leader on Tuesday, replacing outgoing Sen. Paul Newton, who resigned last week to become UNC-Chapel Hill’s general counsel and vice chancellor.
The move makes Lee the third-highest ranking senator in the General Assembly. Lee will serve as Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger’s top lieutenant behind Deputy President Pro Tempore Sen. Ralph Hise, who represents western North Carolina.
Lee’s promotion also boosts the southeastern region’s already powerful bench of state representatives. Rep. Brenden Jones, who represents nearby rural Columbus and Robeson counties, serves as Lee’s counterpart as House Majority Leader. And Sen. Bill Rabon, who serves Brunswick, Columbus, and New Hanover counties, has long chaired the Senate Rules Committee—the place where bills survive or die.
Lee said in a release he was honored to have been elected and grateful for the trust of his colleagues.
In recent years, Lee has made education reform a cornerstone of his policy agenda and helped champion the school voucher expansion package last year.
Just last month, Lee has filed or been a primary sponsor of a flurry of education-related bills. They propose: banning phones during instructional time; removing DEI in public schools; protecting college tuition investment accounts for children from government- or debt-related seizure; boosting some teacher salary supplements; allowing districts to move the first day of school a week earlier; making it easier for retired teachers to return to high-need roles; and creating a 15-member commission to overhaul public high schools.
Many of those bills he co-sponsors with Berger, the Senate’s leader.
It’s noteworthy the GOP leadership selected Lee, considering how competitive his New Hanover seat has been. Gerrymandering has lately given Lee an edge in otherwise tight matchups.
For his most recent campaign, Lee raised the most money in the Senate, at $3.3 million, with the bulk donated by the GOP. Lee was first elected to the seat in 2014, then reelected in 2016, but Democrat Harper Peterson eked out a victory in 2018 with just a 231-vote lead. Lee reclaimed the seat from Peterson in 2020 and comfortably secured it again in 2022 and 2024.
Legislative influence can and often does result in more money flowing back to home districts. Earmark spending by district, when lawmakers secure funding for specific projects, doesn’t always correlate with population totals. In the latest state budget, New Hanover, the ninth-most populated county in the state, received $12.1 million in local earmarks per capita, ranking 21st.
We’ll see if the local lawmakers’ growing sway will boost that outcome next budget cycle.
– Johanna F. Still
Hit Dog Hollers
For the past two weeks, I’ve been covering a series of arrests involving the Columbus County Sheriff’s Office. Thomas Manning III and Deon Taplin were both charged with a felony for speeding to avoid arrest. Both men allege police violence and were captured in footage showing use of force or apparent injuries.
We reached out to the sheriff’s office repeatedly with questions about Taplin and Manning. When we found out a detective involved in both arrests had previously resigned from the force after kicking a handcuffed man in the head, we reached out with questions about him, too. The sheriff’s office either ignored our questions or talked around them.
Not every law enforcement agency is like this. I’ve also covered stories relating to the State Bureau of Investigation, the Pender County Sheriff’s Office, and the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, and both agencies have been extremely forthcoming.
My colleague Sarah Nagem at the Border Belt Independent put it best: “When public officials refuse to talk to the media, what they’re essentially doing is refusing to talk to their constituents.” Most of the sheriffs I’ve reported on seem to recognize that despite these concerns, the easiest way to build trust with your community is to be straight with the press. The Columbus sheriff’s office seemingly has not. In a separate case involving the former sheriff’s alleged wrongdoing, The Assembly and BBI are suing the department for failing to fulfill numerous public records requests.
After not responding to requests for comment from WECT and WHQR for several days, Sheriff Bill Rogers chose to address the coverage of the Manning arrest by posting a video on Facebook alleging he was on drugs (that detail was left out of the incident report) and calling the media “biased” producers of click-bait propaganda. Notably, the comments were turned off.
Posting this video is a gamble. I wonder if Rogers assumes that the people of Columbus County will take him at his word: that they’ll see Wilmington-based news outlets like ours as divisive.
It’s this journalist’s hope that people will understand the painstaking effort put into every story we do. We put our stories under a microscope and ask ourselves tough questions. Did we triple-check that this officer was listed on the incident report? How consistent is this source’s version of events? And so on. It’s incumbent upon us as reporters to get the facts right the first time, because even the smallest mistake compromises your publication’s credibility.
But the other part has less to do with us and more with the sheriff. For all his bluster, Rogers still dances around our key questions. There’s no mention of Taplin or the detective charged with assault. It seems like a lot of viewers took notice of that.
Rogers is in a tough position. He inherited years of distrust from his predecessor Jody Greene, who has been accused of misconduct, mismanagement, and racism. Rebuilding that trust, particularly with Columbus County’s Black community, would take a lot of time and a lot of political clout, maybe more than he’s capable of expending at this time. Maybe he sees this play on people’s not-entirely-unfounded misgivings about the press as a more politically expedient move.
Or maybe we’ve just struck a nerve.
–Nikolai Mather
