Henderson’s cleanup effort would get a $200,000 boost under a bill Vance County’s two state House members filed last week.
Democratic Reps. Jim Crawford of Oxford and Michael Wray of Gaston are the primary sponsors of House Bill 1639, which was introduced Tuesday and sent to the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday.
The bill is only a couple of sentences long. It would appropriate $200,000 in the fiscal year that starts July 1 “to be used to clean up substandard neighborhoods.”
Clean Up Henderson Committee Chairwoman Lynn Harper said the proposal is one positive outcome of her committee’s lobbying of the legislators. Harper has taken Wray and Crawford on cleanup tours of the city, and a committee delegation visited Wray last month.
During that trip to Raleigh, Wray held a special showing of the cleanup video created last year by students of Kerr-Vance Academy. The audience included Wray and two other members of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Natural and Economic Resources, Chairman Howard Hunter Jr. of Ahoskie and Vice Chairwoman Lucy Allen of Louisburg. Crawford, who was out of town for the University of North Carolina’s victorious run through the men’s basketball Final Four, appears in the video.
Allen is a co-sponsor of the legislation.
The language of the bill is curious. Rather than designate the money for the city of Henderson and the Clean Up Henderson Committee, the legislation specifies that the funds should go to Vance County to be allocated to the “Henderson-Vance Cleanup Committee.” No entity with that name exists.
Harper couldn’t explain the wording of the bill, which she knew about through Wray’s weekly e-mail update to constituents. She did not offer specifics on how the money would be used, although the city has hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of neighborhood-cleanup needs in the demolition of abandoned structures alone, not to mention the possibility of land banking and the renovation of entire neighborhoods such as the David Street area.
Wray introduced two other appropriations bills last week to benefit Vance County. Wednesday was the deadline for filing most legislation.
One, House Bill 1691, would provide $5,000 in each of the next two fiscal years to the Henderson-Vance Downtown Development Commission for operating expenses. The other, House Bill 1694, would give $5,000 each of the next two years to the Vance County Public Schools Foundation for operating expenses.
“I remain committed to adequately funding education, health and human services, transportation, public safety and efforts to further strengthen our economy and create jobs,” Wray wrote in his e-mail update.
Both bills were referred to the Appropriations Committee. Crawford is one of the chairmen of that committee.
Two bills filed by other legislators would directly benefit Vance County Schools:
* Reps. Doug Yongue of Laurinburg and Rick Glazier of Fayetteville introduced House Bill 1745, which would help at-risk students get a “sound, basic education” by spending $116 million in the coming fiscal year and $258 million in 2006-07. Much of the money would go to increase the supplemental funding to poor school districts, including Vance, by 50 percent to comply with the Leandro school-funding lawsuit.
* Rep. Paul Luebke of Durham introduced House Bill 1770 to spend $30 million over two years to raise teacher salaries in poor districts to the average of 11 metropolitan districts.