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Paradigm Shift
This week, New Hanover County commissioners finally had a real debate about the budget. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was honest — in a way that seemed to render the hours of work during four previous workshops as preludes, at best, or pointless, at worst.
Some of this delay had to do with conservatives struggling to get their hands on the actual budget levers of government, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. And a large part had to do with the prevarication of Republican Chair Bill Rivenbark, who in mid-May threw in his lot with the board's two Democrats, Rob Zapple and Stephanie Walker, supporting a 33.9-cent tax rate that was framed as a bi-partisan compromise.
Zapple did most of the talking when this was announced. It was a bit of a surprise, basically an audible called towards the end of the May meeting where County Manager Chris Coudriet presented his initial 35-cent tax rate budget. As I’ve written elsewhere, the 35-cent budget seemed to make almost no one happy, with Republicans wanting deeper cuts and Democrats lamenting reductions Coudriet had included to pencil the budget out. Zapple asked Coudriet to go back to the lab, so to speak, and pare the budget down a bit more, but stave off the deeper cuts. Since Democrats are the minority on the board, it seemed like a politically savvy compromise.
There was no official vote, but Coudriet took it that this was the will of the majority of the board. Walker noted that she would have supported a higher rate to provide more services, but accepted this as a compromise. Rivenbark was less vocal, and seemed almost sheepishly to go along with the 33.9-cent request.
Then, last week, it appeared Rivenbark changed his mind. He denied he’d yielded to political pressure, which is a little difficult to believe, given the well-organized public push by the county GOP for a lower tax rate. He did acknowledge he’d heard from a lot of constituents (having read plenty of county emails, I can confirm that).
In any case, after over four months of debate and revision, on Thursday the Republican majority laid out the clearest expression of their budget priorities. Rivenbark, Dane Scalise, and vice-chair LeAnn Pierce engaged in over three hours of debate, but they seemed confident this budget was pretty close to where it needed to be – and were ready to vote on it at the end of the meeting.
This was the budget conservatives actually wanted, reduced by around $36 million from Coudriet’s initial proposal, $24 million less than Zapple’s request.
It felt like a paradigm shift. Last year, Republicans also had a majority, but despite some modest wins on tax reduction they seemed unable to really move the needle on spending in the way they had wanted. In part, that had to do with how removed the commissioners are from the granular details of county finances. And, in part, it was because they hadn’t mustered the political will to go all in — putting big cuts, layoffs, and policy changes on the table. (Ending Port City United, remains an asterisk here, but PCU’a demise became essentially a fait accompli after some high-profile arrests.)
The result of that shift, as we reported earlier this week, was a 30.6-cent budget passed on party lines that made deep cuts: ending the five-year, $15-million workforce housing program (currently in its third year), cutting over $2 million for the Northside Co-Op, removing half of the current pre-K classrooms, ending an anti-truancy program for the public schools, scaling back social worker staffing, and a host of other reductions. It also cuts 5% of county operations across the board. That’s 100 positions, including 30 vacancies that won’t be filled and 70 active employees who, it appears, will be laid off, through no fault of their own.
It also eliminates support for non-profits, cutting the $1.6 million that had already been green-lit by the Non-County Agency Committee (headed by GOP chairman John Hinnant) for this year, but also in general ending the county’s policy of funding non-profits (or NGOs, non-governmental organizations, as the GOP has referred to them of late).
Notably, this was not a complete surprise to the county, which sent an application to The Endowment on June 7 asking for $1.6 million. The Endowment, for its part, told me they had been watching the public discussion and saw this coming – and were thus prepared to quickly process and award the grant (which it did on Thursday morning).
[A quick note here, though it’s probably worth revisiting at greater length later: It’s not surprising that, having essentially been thrown a baby, The Endowment caught it — but some will wonder whether this is a one-off or a shift in the relationship between the county and the putatively independent Endowment. This week’s $1.6-million grant is obviously a better outcome than ripping the rug out from under nonprofits who’d already essentially been told they were funded, and it gives them a year to adapt. But what other babies might the county throw at The Endowment, essentially shifting the cost of funding popular programs — and the opprobrium of not funding them — to the unelected leaders of the private foundation?]
It’s also important to note the budget increases funding to a number of areas, including public schools and public safety, which together represent roughly half of county spending. It also doesn’t touch spending for the senior resource center and veterans services.
Depending on who you ask, this was either a long-awaited victory of fiscal responsibility or a betrayal of the county’s progressive vision. I’ve certainly heard measured arguments and inflated claims on both sides (and I’ve been accused by both liberals and conservatives of ‘both-siding’ this issue but, in my defense, it’s pretty clear there are at least two sides here).
Doing the math
Now, before I go any further, it’s worth laying out what the financial implications are here.
In revenue terms, every cent of the tax rate (per $100 of property value) is worth around $8 million. So, as several commissioners have pointed out, negotiating a tenth of a cent might seem needlessly granular, but that translates into nearly a million dollars – roughly the cost of the pre-K classes that were cut this year.
The impact on property owners is more variable, of course, depending on your property value.
Take a home that is valued at $500,000 after this year’s revaluation (which dramatically increased property values, increasing them by around 67% on average). This is less than the average home value of $581,000, but – if I’m honest – the math is easier this way.
Here’s the breakdown of annual and monthly tax bills for a $500,000 home based on last year’s tax rate (which was a non-starter, but I’m including it for reference), the original 35-cent proposal from staff, the 33.9-cent rate requested in May, and the final 30.6-cent rate approved this week:
- 45 cents – $2,250 or $187.50
- 35 cents – $1,750 or $145.84/month
- 33.9 cents – $1,695 or $141.25/month
- 30.6 cents – $1,530 or $127.50/month
So, the final budget proposal adopted this week saves someone with a $500,000 home about $220 annually (or about $18.34 monthly) compared to staff’s initial budget, and $165 annually (or $13.75 monthly) compared to the compromise budget requested by Zapple in May.
If you want to get your own precise figures, take your property value, divide it by 100, and multiply by .306 and that’s your annual tax bill. Multiply it by the other values above and you can see what you would have paid under the other tax rates.
For example: if you’ve got a more modest $250,000 home, divide that by 100, and you get $2,500 — take that and multiply it by .306, and $765 is your annual tax bill ($63.75 monthly). That means the 30.6-cent tax rate saved you $110 annually ($9.17 a month) versus staff’s initial 35-cent rate, or $82.50 ($6.88 monthly) compared to the 33.9-cent compromise budget.
Are these sayings meaningful? Frankly, it depends on who you ask.
I’ve heard from people who say, absolutely yes. Seniors whose homes are appreciating in value but remain on a fixed income (where the 2.5% cost of living increase lags behind inflation) have spoken at public meetings, and told me personally, that even $10 or $20 a month makes a difference. And I’ve heard from people who say they’d happily adjust their own budget by $14 a month to preserve some of the things that were in May’s budget.
Whatever you think of the impact, this is essentially what’s at stake financially for property owners. (And if you’re a renter like me, you likely remain at the whims of property management companies and their secretive pricing algorithms. You’re paying into the county tax pool indirectly since your rent goes to pay property taxes for the complex you live in, but your actual housing costs float on a much more unpredictable sea.)
Policy in real time
I do think it’s fair to say that there were significant policy shifts made during Thursday’s agenda meeting and significant uncertainty about how they’ll play out. By the county’s own admission, they’re still working through the specifics of the adopted budget.
That uncertainty has to do, in large part, with how quickly the budget came together.
While commissioners have been in frequent communication with staff about their personal budget priorities, the final proposal for a 30.6-cent budget was only delivered to commissioners on Wednesday night, less than 24 hours before they’d ultimately voted on it. (And there appears to have been some effort to mark communication about that budget ‘private,’ to prevent it from getting out in the press prior to the vote. I’m still looking into that.)
So brisk was the timeline that staff acknowledged they were still working out details in the hours leading up to Thursday’s budget discussion, which started at 2 p.m. Walker and Zapple both said they were blindsided by some of the cuts in the budget, and the fact that some of their arguments were hyperbolic or less than fully reasoned probably had a lot to do with the fact that the county was, in effect, rewriting large swaths of policy on the fly.
That’s also, at least in part, why the board’s Democrats objected so strenuously to the Republicans’ decision to take the vote right then and there at the end of Thursday’s agenda meeting instead of waiting until Monday, when the vote had initially been planned.
In fact, as part of their protests, Zapple and Walker voted against several economic development contracts that have to be procedurally approved before the final budget decision. Because Rivenbark was recused from two of those votes – for the Chamber of Commerce and Wilmington Business Development – the decisions were deadlocked two-to-two. Based on his conversation with staff after the vote, Zapple appeared to have believed a deadlocked vote could forestall the main budget vote – but that was not the case.
It’s not completely clear what will happen to the roughly $725,000 that was earmarked in those contracts. During the meeting, Coudriet said the money would be moved to an administrative reserve and that staff would “execute the contracts according to the proposal.” I asked the county for confirmation – basically, does this mean the Chamber and WBD will still get the money – a spokesperson told me that was still being worked out.
The rapid development and approval of the budget left a number of other things unclear, as well. For roughly 70 employees, that means when and how they’ll lose their jobs. Will they be let go on July 1? Phased out over the year? There was no mention of a buy-out, but maybe the county will scrounge up a severance package. I don’t know because, when I asked the county, they didn’t know either.
Or, take the pre-K classes. These were six classrooms, with about 100 children, added with the use of ARPA (federal Covid-relief) funding, basically doubling the county’s capacity. Some commissioners, including Zapple, had advocated for increasing the capacity prior to the pandemic, but it had never materialized as a budget priority, even with a Democratic majority on the board under Chair Julia Olson-Boseman (whose own priorities remained murky, at best, it’s fair to say). Like many pandemic-funded programs, the expiration of federal money prompted a reality check. As Scalise noted, this wasn’t dissimilar to the tough staffing decisions New Hanover County Schools dealt with last year when ESSER funds (the education version of ARPA) ran out.
The application period for the upcoming pre-K year has been open since February, with NHCS encouraging early applications. I don’t have official confirmation, but I’ve heard at least some families had already enrolled and may now be de-enrolled.
Superintendent Dr. Chris Barnes put out a statement the day after the vote, trying to thread the needle between gratitude – “we are grateful for the support our County Commissioners continue to provide” – and frustration — “we understand the uncertainty this creates.”
Barnes promised no Pre-K employee would lose their job, and said the district would revise its own budget in a way that would minimize the disruption to families. He said NHCS’s goal was to “honor the commitments already made to families who have enrolled their children,” with the caveat that, “if this becomes financially impossible, we will work on finding as many solutions as possible.” That seems like a considerable task, and one imagines the clock is ticking.
Northside Co-op cuts
It's also worth taking a moment to look at the uncertainty around cuts to the Northside Co-op, which was already in theprocess of reevaluating its situationafter the announcement that a grocery store (likely a Publix) was coming to downtown Wilmington. This apparently led to a three-year, $6.8-million grant from the Endowment being placed in escrow at the county while the Co-op reviewed its business plan.
There were no cuts on the table for the Co-op in any previous budget proposal, including a slew of proposals sent to commissioners before last weekend. As I wrote in last Sunday’s edition, a week ago the county was considering a relatively austere 30.9-cent budget that made a number of the same cuts we ultimately saw this week. But the Co-op was not in there.
Instead, the last-minute cut came towards the end of Thursday’s meeting, as Scalise returned to Zapple’s earlier request to restore over $2 million in funding for 911 software updates.
Earlier in the meeting, as part of a heated debate, Zapple proposed a scenario involving, “a choking child and I'm trying to get through and that software breaks down,” which Scalise called “heated rhetoric.” Staff ultimately deflated Zapple’s claim. Coudriet agreed that the software needed to be updated – and had, in fact, said earlier in the year that it would be a bad policy decision to delay the update – but conceded, “there is not an operational risk to delaying the transition [..] the question is, will someone answer 911, in properly dispatch, with or without this software? Yes. But as with any system that is 30 years old, at some point, a transition must take place.”
Still, Scalise later suggested that Zapple’s argument for the 911 updates was a “point well made” and proposed swapping the Northside Co-op funding for it, since the line-items were roughly the same cost.
Pierce then noted the “pullback from The Endowment.”
Coudriet responded, “I’m not sure how aware [sic] that is. I think I’ve shared that with you informally,” which to me implied Pierce had let the cat out of the bag.
Asked about this, The Endowment offered a characteristically squishy response to Port City Daily, saying, “While the situation regarding the Northside Food Coop project is dynamic, the Endowment’s commitment to food security is steadfast, and our interest in supporting efforts that address food insecurity in the Northside community is unchanged. To that end, we will continue to work with our local partners, such as Growing Resilience,” apparently referring to a recent award of just over $9,000 to a small nonprofit, a fraction of a percent of the $6.8-million Co-op grant.
The Endowment’s pullback appears to have happened very recently, within the last couple of weeks. According to sources familiar with the situation, that appears to mean The Endowment plans to renege on the $6.8-million grant and issue a substitute grant of around $2.1 million to the county to use for the general issue of food insecurity, but not the Co-op specifically. I’m still vetting this out, but that appears to be what Pierce was referring to on Thursday when she said, “We still have $2.1 million that The Endowment is giving to the county for food insecurities.”
It’s unclear if any of that Endowment funding could still go to the Northside Co-op. It’s also unclear how much remaining funding from the county will still be applied. At one point, the county had suggested dedicating around $2.4 million for construction and around $1.5 million to support cashflow (as the Co-op is not expected to be profitable in its early years – something conservatives, including Scalise, have voiced concerns about).
A county spokesperson put this in the bucket of “specifics” that are being worked through.
“We’ll have to see”
Other policy shifts have yet to sink in or have an impact. There are lots of questions to keep an eye on. As NPR’s Scott Simon joked when he was in town last year, journalists hate the cliche, “time will tell” – even when that’s essentially the only answer. For the sake of variety, I’ll go with “we’ll have to see.”
Will spending down the county’s fund balance and shifting policy to lower the floor impact the county’s prized AAA bond rating? Staff doesn’t think so, but the county will have similar fiscal dilemmas next year. Where does the current policy take us, longer term? We’ll have to see.
Will shifting non-profits to The Endowment be a net negative? Or could The Endowment offer more funding, and more stability, with multi-year grants? Will The Endowment simply tack $3 million onto its annual spending on affordable and workforce housing (which has already exceeded what the county has spent in three years)? It certainly could. Will The Endowment support universal pre-K, an idea that's been suggested repeatedly but never embraced? We’ll have to see.
Will staff reductions in the planning department frustrate developers and builders with longer waits for permits and approvals? Maybe. Will that deter the rapacious development in the Cape Fear region? Probably not. If there are logjams, will they hurt small contractors and small businesses more than big ones? Likely. But I don’t know, we’ll have to see.
Will cutting the anti-truancy program lead to a spike in absences? Will cutting social workers let families fall through the gaps? Or can these issues be addressed in other ways? Will the Northchase library flounder with four fewer employees? We’ll have to see.
Will delaying court-video software spark an overflow in the jail, creating pressure for a costly facility expansion? I kind of doubt it, but we’ll have to see.
All of this to say, uncertainty is the watchword of the week – maybe the month, even the year.
Will the county be able to do more with less? And, more importantly, how will people feel about a leaner county more focused on core services?
Folks on the right say they’ll be just fine, happy to have a few extra dollars in their pockets. Folks on the left say the cuts will hurt people – and hope that’ll send people to the polls in 2026. Some more moderate folks tell me they wish the county had taken a more gradual approach to cuts.
One colleague of mine said would have preferred an approach more like the Clinton administration’s – which phased out over 400,000 federal jobs across seven years as part of a bipartisan buyout plan – and less like DOGE – which, well, DOGE’d a path of scorched earth through multiple agencies over four months, only to have officials scrambling to rehire key employees once they were determined to be, you know, key. I think that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
Long story short, this budget represents a paradigm shift that happened in less than 24 hours, at least as far as the public could see. What will it mean? Much as it pains me to say it: we’ll have to see
Letter to the Editor
We welcome letters to the editor’s desk on any topic. Our ideal length is around 400 words or less, but if they need to be a little longer, that’s fine. We reserve the right to edit or add context when necessary. We ask that submissions come with your name and where you live (no street address necessary, just your neighborhood, town, city, etc.). Criticisms are welcome, but we ask you to try to keep it civil.
Send your letter toBSchachtman@whqr.org — or by mail, if you're old school, to WHQR Public Media 254 N. Front Street, Suite 300, Wilmington, NC 28401.
This edition’s letter comes from Chef Dean Neff of Wilmington:
For the past decade I’ve worked as a chef in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I’ve been a two-time semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast Award. Last year I was a national finalist for the foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award. Neither I nor my restaurants could have achieved these accolades without my community, especially the Cape Fear region’s farmers, fishers, shrimpers, crabbers, and foragers. As a chef, one of my most crucial duties is to forge relationships built on trust inside and outside the kitchen. In order for my guests to trust in the food my kitchen serves, my kitchen must trust the people who grow and source that food. Recognition means nothing if diners cannot trust what they’re being served.
At my restaurant Seabird our ethos is based on sustainable, transparently sourced, regional seafood. When serving our guests we enjoy telling the stories of the people whose work has brought the meal to the table, and every day these providers teach us about the complexities of the seafood industry. Each type of seafood varies in its seasonality, perishability, and sustainability, not to mention if or how it can be frozen and thawed to serve. Of all these foods, North Carolina wild shrimp is one of the most popular; it’s also one of the most complicated to source. I want to talk about why.
But first I must touch on a recent article published in The New York Times by Brett Anderson that has shaken the confidence of people who serve and enjoy wild shrimp, especially here in Wilmington. Anderson mentions my city by name as one where chefs are supposedly deceiving their guests by serving foreign, farm raised shrimp that is advertised as wild. Anderson cites the work of a company called SeaD Consulting that claims to have tested shrimp served by a sample of 44 of the Cape Fear Region’s over 600 restaurants over 3 days at the behest of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. According to a SeaD press release, 77% of Wilmington’s restaurants are misleading the public with claims of serving wild shrimp.
Anderson’s article and SeaD’s reported findings have sparked anxiety in the Cape Fear region’s entire restaurant scene, but the controversy has also sparked frustration with what Anderson’s reporting leaves out as well as questions surrounding SeaD’s testing methods and findings. For example, how were the restaurants chosen? Where were the tests conducted? Were the shrimp raw or cooked, and what were the conversations with staff on the premises?
These questions are more than relevant considering that in his New York Times article Anderson links to another piece published in (Louisiana Illuminator) about SeaD owner Dave Williams testing shrimp at the (Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival), where “Williams acknowledged his festival experiment wasn’t controlled enough to withstand scientific scrutiny.” The question now becomes, how is testing restaurant food different than testing festival food? Why trust the results of one when the founder of the company himself says we can’t trust the results of the other?
But perhaps more egregious is Anderson’s decision not to consider the complex challenge restaurants face when sourcing wild shrimp. Most diners might assume that for a chef sourcing shrimp is as simple as driving to the docks each morning when the shrimp boats come in. I wish it were so. Most North Carolina shrimp is sold frozen, often through a process called IQF that is conducted in a facility often far away from the docks. After the shrimp is purchased by a dealer, it is shipped to the specialized individual quick freeze packer, which often requires crossing state lines; and then back to the dealer’s freezer, where chefs like me purchase the shrimp, fully trusting that it has been sourced as advertised to us, despite its circuitous journey.
As a chef I rely on two things to know for certain that I am serving North Carolina wild shrimp: the first is my knowledge of what wild shrimp tastes like, and the second is the word of the dealer who has sold me the shrimp. While I only work with dealers with whom I’ve established a trusting relationship, it’s not lost on me that some dealers and packers might be willing to misrepresent foreign shrimp for local for financial gain. My invoices are and have always been open to anyone looking for assurance about the origins of the shrimp I serve, but those invoices are only as good as the word of the dealers who have sourced the shrimp. It’s disappointing that Anderson wasn’t willing to dig just a little deeper to reveal how challenging this important detail of sourcing seafood, especially shrimp, can be.
I would welcome the opportunity to work with Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC 7) and other members of the restaurant and shrimp industry to craft policies that support North Carolina shrimpers while building confidence in our restaurants and accountability in the sourcing process. At a minimum we must have a certification process so restaurants and their guests can be confident in the truth of local menus. We should explore state policy that holds restaurants, packers, and dealers accountable.
In the closing of Anderson’s article, SeaD founder Dave Williams overlooks the complicated nature of sourcing shrimp, saying, “the real problem is the restaurants.” Our kitchens and menus are the last stop on our food’s journey, and, questions regarding testing methods aside, it is shortsighted and irresponsible not to acknowledge the many stops shrimp makes before arriving in our kitchens.
All of us within the chain must be held accountable to the truth. Chefs love to share the stories of the food they serve. Let’s create changes in the shrimp industry in North Carolina to ensure that all of these stories are true.
***
Back in late April, my colleague Johanna Still forwarded me a press release from the Southern Shrimp Alliance. Like the articles Neff referenced, it relied on genetic testing of shrimp by SeaD, in this case reporting that 34 of the 44 randomly selected restaurants in the greater Wilmington area were essentially committing fraud: serving shrimp advertised either on the menu or by staff as local and wild-caught that were actually foreign, farm-raised varieties.
The release included hectoring quotes from David Williams, who owns SeaD, saying it was “incredibly disappointing” that restaurants mislead customers. The release also implied strongly that this was a representative sample of the region’s restaurants. I shared it around the newsroom and we had a little bit of a laugh. We imagined the spinning-newspaper trope with the bold, all-caps headline “SHRIMP FRAUD.”
We did a quick write up on it in The Dive, as did WECT and others. We were clear about how many restaurants were actually tested – and, at the time, the Shrimp Alliance told us follow-up testing was expected to catch other bad actors (to date, that hasn’t happened).
But I was honestly surprised to see a couple thousand words from Brett Anderson on the topic in The New York Times, including this passage, right near the end:
“With their most recent restaurant tests, in Wilmington, N.C., producing what has become a predictably discouraging outcome (77 percent fraud rate), the team appeared taken aback by the results.”
The article focuses mainly on the Gulf Coast – specifically, several festivals – and this is the only reference to Wilmington in the piece. Several chefs, including Neff, that I’ve spoken to voiced frustration that the article didn’t expand on how SeaD arrived at that percentage. The article noted at least two occasions where SeaD visited seafood festivals, both had five vendors and, in both cases, four of the five restaurants served shrimp that were shown to be foreign, farmed-raised shrimp – not wild local variety that was advertised.
That's not a sample as much as it a complete test. But in Wilmington, SeaD said they tested 44 restaurants – out of 600 restaurants in the area. A sample that might leave some wanting.
There are also the questions Neff raised about the veracity of the testing method. To test festival shrimp, SeaD set up shop in a hotel conference room. As Neff mentioned, an article in the Louisiana Illuminator published last September notes that this method wouldn’t withstand scientific scrutiny.
There’s also the choice to name the good actors but not the bad actors.
Certainly, there are unscrupulous restaurants (I know because I’ve worked at some) that lie about key adjectives: local, organic, vegan, gluten-free, fresh, never-frozen, etc. The horror stories I could tell you.
But I’ve also known and worked with chefs who work tirelessly to deliver, truthfully, on all of those promises – chefs who would absolutely love to see liars publicly shamed. “Clowns,” we call those deceptive folks (minus a few choice adjectives of our own), running “clowntown” restaurants.
There may be legal liability concerns behind SeaD’s decision to name the innocent but not the guilty, but there’s also something of a McCarthy’s list vibe – “While I cannot take the time to name all the restaurants serving fraudulent shrimp, I have here in my hand a list…”
In the end, I think the Shrimp Alliance, like many advocacy groups, is basically coming from a good place. Their stated goals are better consumer awareness and state-level labeling laws – both to the end of strengthening trust in local restaurants and, ultimately, supporting those local businesses. Hard to be mad about that.
But that doesn’t mean their ‘evidence’ passes journalistic muster, especially if you’re not going to lay out the potential limitations of SeaD’s research, which they rely heavily on.
I somehow doubt Brett Anderson thought much about the impact a throwaway line would have on Wilmington (if he did, I’d have more concerns about the piece, not less). I will say it's not the only time I've seen NYT blow through town like a bull in a China shop when they cover a local story. In my opinion, part of that has to do with their attitude, part to do with selling off their local papers, like the StarNews, that were once part of their network, and part to do with an overly credulous reliance on advocacy groups for evidence.
And, for what it’s worth, I reached out repeatedly to NYT to give Anderson the opportunity to respond to the concerns I’ve heard from Neff and others. But so far, I haven’t heard anything back.
I think this is an issue that could use some more exploration. It’s not exactly hard-hitting government investigation, but – at the same time – it’s a sprawling economic story that touches on legislative regulation (or the lack of it), international commerce, and local business.
It’s also an issue I’d love to hear more from you about. So, send me your thoughts on all this.
