Pricey Harrison, the 51-year-old Democrat who represents District 57 in the NC House, rolled up to the Coffee Break on Spring Garden Street on a bicycle in the 95-degree heat, deposited her helmet and a sweating water bottle on a table, and headed back to the counter to order an ice coffee.An avid environmentalist, the bicycle is her customary mode of transportation within Greensboro.
Harrison was raised in a family oriented towards public service through philanthropy and nonprofit voluntarism, but she’s the first to hold elected office since her great-grandfather, Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. President Julian Price, served on the Greensboro City Council in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Harrison’s route into state politics was through the Coastal Resources Commission, to which she was appointed by Gov. Jim Hunt at a time when she was a coastal resident. In that role, she lobbied the General Assembly as a volunteer citizen advocate for environmental causes. That experience persuaded her that she could make a greater difference as a lawmaker.
Around that time, Harrison had moved back to Greensboro to take care of her ailing mother. Serendipitously, redistricting had made her district more competitive. She ran in 2004, and won.
In her three terms in office, Harrison has become known as hard-working legislator, an avowed progressive with an independent streak and a policy wonk, with a particular interest in environmental issues. She handily defeated a Republican challenger in 2006, and ran unopposed in 2008, using her reprieve that year to campaign for Barack Obama. In the meantime, she has become a prodigious fundraising, albeit a champion of campaign finance reform and someone who believes that money in politics gives corporate interests a stranglehold over policymaking.
This year is somewhat different. Harrison is running against a 27-year-old mortgage company executive who has energized Republican activists and attracted the support of former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory.
The electorate of District 57, which straddles Interstate 40 in west Greensboro, if 51.1 percent Democratic, with the remainder split between registered Republicans and unaffiliated voters. It’s the Republicans and conservative-leaning independents, obviously, that could spell trouble for Harrison in November.
“They seem angry,” Harrison said. “I used to have a lot of Republican support. I think of myself as independent minded. I’m one of the few people in my caucus who consistently votes against incentives. I have a little bit of a libertarian streak. That’s helped me, but I’m not sure I’m going to get the support of the moderate Republicans this time around.”
While Republican anger has fomented towards President Obama over the past two years, Harrison has publicly championed some of his most progressive causes: curbing climate change and healthcare reform. She has volunteered for White House task forces organized to help support legislation in both arenas. On healthcare reform, Sen. Kay Hagan was considered a swing vote, and Harrison was tasked with writing op-eds in support of the legislation and being a liaison with supportive constituents. Unlike healthcare reform, the Obama administration has so far been unable to pass any legislation to address climate change. Harrison was tasked with lobbying North Carolina representatives in the US House who were considered on the fence. (She didn’t bother much with Reps. Brad Miller, Mel Watt and Howard Coble, whose districts carve up Guilford County, because they were already staked out on either side of the issue.)
Harrison described her work in Washington as an avocation, and said she hopes voters will make their decisions at the polls based on what she’s done in Raleigh. A lot of what consumes state lawmakers, like any legislators or executives, is managing revenues and expenditures.
“The budget will be a big piece of it,” Harrison said. “We did a good job of not cutting the teachers. We raised some revenues last year. We did it through a temporary sales tax. I wasn’t all that keen on that. I don’t like sales taxes because they’re regressive. I lost that battle.”
She’s particularly proud of her role in restoring the protest petition, a mechanism by which a certain threshold of neighbors to property proposed for rezoning can force the city council to muster a supermajority for approval, to Greensboro.
“I strived hard to get our [Guilford County] delegation's support,” Harrison said. “I spoke out pretty often about it. Not everybody was on board. There was also significant resistance from the developer community.”
Another victory was passage of a bill sponsored by Harrison in 2007 that requires utilities to derive 12.5 percent of their energy portfolio from renewable sources by 2021. Since the bill’s passage, Harrison said, green jobs and solar energy production have increased in North Carolina.
Harrison predicted that Duke Energy will lead a push next year to obtain a policy in which ratepayers foot the bill for the construction of new nuclear plants — a prospect that does not please her.
“I find myself playing more defense than offense,” she said. “I wish I didn’t lose so much.”
One of Harrison’s major goals is to pass legislation to meaningfully regulate coal ash. She said North Carolina has more coal ash detention ponds than any other state. In 2008, a coal ash dam burst in eastern Tennessee with disastrous consequences. Currently, coal ash is used as structural fill in roadbeds.
“I can’t get any traction because the utilities don’t want to spend the money to dispose of the coal ash,” Harrison said, adding, “It confounds me that there’s no support.”
Harrison’s fiscal conservative side has likewise brought her into conflict with powerful opponents.
“It took me five tries to get that UNC Rams Club subsidy repealed,” she said. “Ultimately, until we get campaign finance reform I think it’s going to be difficult to do a lot.”
She said she has been frustrated about her inability to eliminate “some of the pork in the commerce budget, some of the walking-around money” that state officials spend to try to recruit companies to relocate to North Carolina. Beginning in 2007, North Carolina started granting corporate incentives to companies that agreed to stay in the state — a development that troubles the lawmaker.
Harrison’s Republican colleagues argue that the state would be better off reducing its corporate tax rate instead of using incentives to target specific companies. She agrees, to a point.
“It’s costing tens of millions up to a hundred million to pay out these incentives,” she said. “Is that a good use of our tax dollars? I don’t know. Instead we could undertake tax reform. We have a ton of expensive loopholes that cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s combined reporting, which can be used to collect taxes from these companies that are set up in Delaware. The House tried to do it, and the Senate wouldn’t let us. That could bring in hundreds of millions more. The way it’s worked out, the larger companies are paying less of a percentage of the state’s total income, and that puts the burden on small businesses.
“I’m cognizant of the argument that’s been continually made that we’ve got the highest rate in the Southeast, but when you look at the overall burden that corporations carry, we’re about 25th in the country," she continued. "We continue to get accolades in Site Selection. We created 30,000 new jobs in a year. That’s the third most in the nation.”
In past elections, Harrison has used her campaign war chest to help elect other progressive Democrats get elected. This year, she’s raised about $100,000, and she expects to spend most or all of it on her campaign.
Neither the unpredictable political climate nor the prospect of real contest in November have eroded Harrison’s willingness to take unpopular stands.
In the past, she has sponsored legislation to allow undocumented immigrants to attend community college, while some of her conservative colleagues across the aisle have filed bills to prohibit the same. The NC Community College System recently made an administrative decision to allow undocumented immigrants to pay out-of-state tuition to pursue their education past high school, and Harrison anticipates being on the defensive next year against legislation to override the practice.
“That’s not a winning issue for me,” she said. “These are often kids that come here as toddlers. I think Erskine Bowles said it best: We’re creating a permanent underclass if we don’t educate them. While these kids are here it makes no sense to deny them an education. A lot of people have very strong feelings about this, but I care more about doing the right thing than getting reelected.”
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