Democrat Gladys Robinson is the candidate to beat in NC Senate District 28. Robinson is the hand-selected successor to Katie Dorsett, the sitting senator, who withdrew within an hour of the close of filing. While Republican candidate Trudy Wade holds government experience on the Guilford County Commission and the Greensboro City Council and widespread name recognition, District 28’s voter registration is heavily tilted towards the Democrats.
According to the latest statistics posted by the NC General Assembly, 56.8 percent of District 28 voters are registered Democrats, while only 27.5 percent are Republican. In contrast, District 27 — the only other state senate district exclusively located in Guilford County, which is represented by Democrat Don Vaughan — is only 50.3 percent Democratic.
Robinson faces Evelyn Miller, who serves on the Greensboro Zoning Commission, in the May 4 Democratic primary.
We sat down for a conversation that lasted about an hour this morning in the conference room at Piedmont Health Services Sickle Cell Agency on East Market Street in Greensboro, where Robinson is the executive director.
Robinson told me her campaigns three top priorities are economic development, education and, naturally, healthcare. The Piedmont Health Services Sickle Cell Agency serves six counties, and provides education, screening and case management services for sickle cell, HIV/AIDS and other high-risk diseases.
Robinson views a commitment to education and healthcare as an investment in economic development. “Without people having an education and good healthcare,” she said, “people can’t get good jobs.”
Robinson is a member of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, where one of her central preoccupations is leveraging higher education into economic development and job creation. As an example, she said that Greensboro hotelier Dennis Quaintance credited the Center for Energy Research and Technology at NC A&T University with helping the Proximity Hotel attain LEED Platinum status. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and is US Green Building Council’s top level of certification. The Proximity was the first hotel to attain the designation when it opened in late 2007.) She said she would like to see the state pump more money into such academic programs to promote the growth of green jobs. Similarly, she supports retraining low-skilled workers to make HVAC systems more energy efficient.
As another example of aligning workers with economic opportunities, Robinson reported that she attended a meeting of the NC Institute for Minority Economic Development that included several small business owners in the fields of construction and daycare services.
“Our population has become more gray and brown,” Robinson said. “How do they develop jobs and products? I’m almost 61. In a few years I’ll be Medicare eligible. People are living longer and reaching their 80s and 90s. How do we develop floors that they won’t skid on? We’re browning. As we are getting more immigrants, what are the needs? What are their needs for daycare?”
Robinson’s thinking about healthcare reflects the axiom that one should avoid being penny wise and pound foolish.
“What I know clearly is people walk into my clinics in Greensboro and High Point, and they don’t know they have high blood pressure and diabetes before they go the emergency room. We teach preventive health, nutrition; we teach how you can have an enjoyable diet, but a healthy diet.”
Robinson said she co-chaired a committee to bring a healthcare clinic to southeast Greensboro, and she recognizes a need for a clinic in High Point. She added that visits to community clinics are less expensive than to hospitals, in part because clinics employ student interns from area medical schools such as the program at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
“It’s going to decrease the costs in the long run, but you’ve got to invest in front,” she said.
Similarly, she said an improvement in K-12 education would allow the state to eliminate more expensive remedial programs that are currently necessary to get students up to speed once they enter college.
No one has much enthusiasm for raising taxes in an economic climate in which many property owners are financially strapped, so I asked Robinson how she would deal with the likelihood of another severe budget shortfall in 2011, if she is elected.
Robinson responded to the question by discussing personnel restructuring actions she signed off on as a member of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to cut costs while preserving service levels.
“We made some hard cuts in administration in higher education,” she said. “We wanted to preserve teaching. Some of the administrators that had been there for awhile, they might have to teach some courses.”
As a first-time candidate, Robinson told me she has enjoyed campaigning, but the downside is the inordinate amount of time required to raise money. She favors campaign finance reform to cap the amount of money candidates can raise and spend, and to provide public financing for candidates that demonstrate viability.
We talked about political mentors.
Robinson described her friend, Katie Dorsett, as “stellar, in my mind.”
She learned just as much from the late Bill Martin, who held the seat before Dorsett. Martin gave Robinson her job at the Piedmont Health Services Sickle Cell Agency, and appointed her to the NC Commission on the Achievement of Minority and Low-Income Students about 15 years ago.
“He also taught me about workforce and getting people off of welfare,” she said. “We talked about, how do we develop a support system, especially for single mothers.”
Robinson met former Gov. Jim Hunt many years ago at L. Richardson Memorial Hospital when she was involved in eldercare services.
“Of governors, he really did a super job,” she said.
She told me she also admires Henry Frye and former Gov. Jim Holshouser, respectively a Democrat and a Republican, who served together in the NC House.
“Those two guys worked together so that we could have a UNC system for all of the state,” Robinson said. “If we’re going to have a quality university system, we need to fund all of our institutions, not just UNC-Chapel Hill. They really took a leap across party lines.”
Triad Elections ’10
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