A veteran legislator in the NC House, Alma Adams makes it a point to talk about her experience. And she argues that members of the Guilford County delegation have effectively represented local constituents’ interests.
“We work together,” the state lawmaker said. “We’ve got two people in 612, myself and Maggie Jeffus.”
Room 612 is where the House Appropriations Committee meets. Adams and Jeffus, who represents District 59, are both chairs of the committee.
“Everybody’s not in 612,” Adams said. “I worked my way up there.”
Then serving on the Greensboro City Council, Adams was appointed to her seat in the NC House in 1994, and has won eight elections since then. This year, she faces a primary challenge for her District 58 seat from Ralph Johnson, a community leader in east Greensboro.
Adams and I talked for about an hour this afternoon in her office at Bennett College, where she works as an art professor. We talked about the difficult budget decision facing the state this year with what Adams estimated to be gap of $700 million to $800 million, the process of shepherding controversial bills such as the Healthy Youth Act through the legislature and bringing dollars back to the district.
Sometimes it takes persistence and position, and that was the case with an allocation for NC A&T University.
“I recall $2 million we fought over that A&T needed for its engineering program,” Adams said. “It’s not really a lot of money. We put it in the House budget. The Senate took it out. We put it back in. The Senate kept taking it back out. But they needed our support on some other things. I ended up getting what we needed.”
Another time, when Adams co-chaired the House Appropriations on General Government Subcommittee, she teamed up with another Guilford County legislator in the Senate to appropriate $8.2 million for the Charlotte Hawkins Brown historic site in Sedalia. Her counterpart was Sen. Katie Dorsett, who is retiring this year from her seat representing Senate District 28.
Adams’ opponent has been asking the classic political question to voters in District 58 of whether they are better off now than before, and he is highlighting east Greensboro’s lagging economic development. Adams told me that job creation and economic development are largely driven by local officials on the Greensboro City Council and Guilford County Commission.
But she points to several initiatives that are addressing those challenges, including $53 million allocated to the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering slated to open near Greensboro’s eastern gateway on Lee Street, and the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in downtown Greensboro.
“The nanoscience campus is going to bring a lot of jobs in here,” Adams said. “I had a lot to do with sitting in on the negotiations for that.”
Over time the state has allocated $3.5 million to the civil rights museum.
“We had to bring people to breakfast a couple times so we could educate them about how important the civil rights center is to the state,” she said. "Yes, it lives here in Guilford County, but it's important to the whole state."
Adams has supported the use of economic incentives to create jobs such as the FedEx facility coming online at Piedmont Triad International Airport, but she said state government is unlikely to make any grants this year considering the state’s severe budget shortfall. Adams said she expects the budget to be closed through cuts to spending. The appropriations subcommittees are meeting with department heads to identify expenditure lines in their budgets that can be cut, and they will send their recommendations to the appropriations committee.
Adams said she does not anticipate that the state will raises taxes this year.
“This is not the time for that,” she said. “We have to be sensitive to people. My grandmother used to say, ‘You can’t squeeze blood out of an onion.’ We do need to restructure our taxes. I don’t think we’ve taken any genuine steps for that.”
Adams is rated an A+ legislator by the NC Association of Educators. She said she disapproves of talk about reducing the number of teacher assistants in public schools, but spending on education will have to be reined in this year. Gov. Beverly Perdue has proposed raising teacher salaries, but Adams said she doubts that the House will support the request.
“We’re saying, ‘The way the economy is going, do you give anybody a raise?’”
Other bills sponsored by Adams have not required allocations of state funds.
In 2006, then-Gov. Mike Easley signed a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage by $1 — from $5.15 to $6.15. The increase was the culmination of about a decade of effort on Adams’ part. Subsequently, Congress raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25. Since then, Adams has filed bills to annually index the minimum wage to cost of living increases, but those initiatives have stalled in committee.
During the last election, Adams said that many of her colleagues wanted to take credit for the state minimum wage increase, modest as it was.
“A lot of what I have done has been like that,” she said.
As an example, she mentioned a university equity bill passed in the late 1990s. That lead to a study tucked into a budget that ended up identifying more than 700 buildings in the state university system that needed to be replaced or repaired.
To pay for the campus upgrades, voters across the state approved a $3.1 billion bond referendum.
“That’s why you see all the growth at UNCG and A&T,” Adams said. “We’re still seeing that today. It produced not just buildings, but jobs.”
Adams introduced six bills last year that were signed into law. Among the most controversial and difficult to pass was the Healthy Youth Act, which provides sex education to students in grades 7-9 while allowing parents to opt their children out. Previously, public schools across the state had taught an abstinence-only curriculum.
“Sometimes people are lead and guided by things that are misguided,” Adams said. “We had to get people to understand that teen pregnancy is very high. We’re not encouraging promiscuity. A lot of people want to make it about sex. It’s really not; it’s about health.”
Triad Elections ’10
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