Ramsey’s move comes as he is trying to generate consensus to build the Interstate 26 Connector in Asheville, and it could lessen the city’s influence over the project.

Legislation he filed requires that each of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners’ appointments to the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization come from different commissioner districts.

The bill cleared the state House this week.

Commissioners already have appointed Vice Chairwoman Holly Jones and Commissioner Brownie Newman, who have criticized state plans for the connector in the past.

Jones and Newman, both Democrats who live in Montford, both represent commissioner District 1, which covers most of Asheville.

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The House gave final approval Thursday to measures that rejected the use of Islamic Sharia law in North Carolina and prohibited coverage for abortions in the new state health insurance exchange, both marked by a heated debate. The Senate, by contrast, spent 14 minutes in session, declining to consider legislation to repeal local bans on smoking in public parks and beaches and study the expansion of midwifery that leaves the measures essentially dead.

But the chaos of the so-called crossover week – in which most legislation must pass one chamber to remain alive for the two-year session – became eclipsed later in the day as attention turned to the two most significant debates still looming over the final weeks of lawmaking.

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The bills would repeal rules for managing pollutants in Jordan Lake and a host of restrictions on new jetties along the coast that critics say can shift damage to neighboring properties. Bills that don’t require tax changes or spending and fail to clear at least one chamber by Thursday night are essentially dead through the end of the session in 2014.

The Jordan Lake bill would repeal a set of rules for local governments along the 1,686 square mile reservoir that took effect in 2009 as well as all related laws. Many of those rules for curbing harmful nutrients in the lake have been delayed by the legislature since and have drawn criticism for their cost and potential effect on development.

The lake, which includes parts of 10 counties in the Piedmont region, was created 30 years ago to provide flood control and water supply. But it has struggled from the outset with high nutrient levels that cause harmful algae buildup.

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County officials said that “Project X” will more than pay for itself over time with added revenues from leases, property taxes and paychecks.

The company’s identity wasn’t revealed Tuesday at the public hearing on “Project X” — the code name for both the company and the complex deal to lure the manufacturer to Buncombe County.

“We are not trying to create a mystery here. We’re fortunate to have several economic development projects underway, but this is a fragile situation,” County Manager Wanda Greene said. “It’s critical to treat this project with the confidentiality that this company requires.”

Greene pointed to the county’s purchase of the old Volvo plant two years ago, which lead Linamar, a Canadian truck parts maker, to build its first U.S. plant here.

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Instead, Proulx usually waits until after his last class to smoke a Camel Crush in his Hyundai because Wake Tech is a tobacco-free campus.

But Senate Republicans took a step Tuesday toward striking down local rules governing where smokers like Proulx can light up.

Senate Bill 703, which passed the Senate Agriculture, Environment, Natural Resources Committee, prohibits local governments and community colleges from regulating outdoor smoking in a manner that’s more restrictive than state law. It is just the latest way state lawmakers are taking action to overturn or limit local policies they oppose.

Because state law doesn’t impose restrictions on smoking outdoors, the measure would nullify other anti-smoking laws for publicly owned open spaces such as parks, beaches and community college campuses.

“Around the state, a number of localities and other institutions are trying to take this legal product and say you can’t consume it outdoors,” said Sen. Buck Newton, a Wilson Republican, the bill sponsor. “I just personally find that objectionable.”

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House lawmakers voted 110-5 to remake the grievance procedures for about 90,000 state workers, moving the key link in the appeal process from the hands of an independent administrative law judge to hearing officers named by political appointees of the governor. The House is expected to give its final approval Wednesday, sending the bill to the Senate.

At the same time, the bill would increase the number of political hires – positions exempt from the civil service protections of the State Personnel Act to 1,500. Six months ago there were just 400.

“What North Carolina is proposing to do, is happening in other states,” said Rick Kearney, a public policy professor at N.C. State University and an expert on government personnel policy.

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A judge in Raleigh granted a city request Tuesday afternoon for a temporary restraining order preventing a state law mandating the transfer of the water system to the Metropolitan Sewerage District today from going into effect.

The city filed suit in Wake County Superior Court on Tuesday, saying it would suffer irreparable harm if the transfer occurred today as directed by a bill that became law this week.

Details of the restraining order were not available Tuesday, but they typically last for a relatively short period of time, like 10 days or two weeks. The city will seek a preliminary injunction to prevent a transfer while its lawsuit is decided.

The city’s complaint asks that the law be struck down as a violation of the state and federal constitutions and a state law designed to protect holders of bonds issued by local governments like the city.

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Since the end of the Civil War until the 1930s, most forests in the eastern United States were clear-cut. However, some tracts were able to escape that era of industrialized logging and continue to grow.

But they were few. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of forests in the eastern United States is old growth. Out of the 1.1 million acres in the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests, about 80,000 acres contain old growth. There, 150-, 200- and even 300-year-old trees can be found.

“To find little portions that have escaped, that is pretty special,” said Jill Gottesman, the southern Appalachian outreach coordinator for The Wilderness Society.

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State law requires counties and towns to publish notices of meetings, public hearings and contracts going out to bid in the local newspaper of record. Newspapers charge a fee to print the notices, which add up to $20,000 to $30,000 a year for Haywood County alone.

A bill aimed at saving those local tax dollars would let counties and towns opt out of putting notices in the paper and instead post them to a website where they could be viewed by the public.

The bill would only grant the exemption to a handful of counties in the state — a mere 10 in fact. Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, inserted Haywood, Macon, Jackson and Swain counties into the bill. Any towns within those counties would also be exempt from putting public notices in the newspaper.

Haywood leaders might end up telling the state “thanks, but no thanks,” however.

“I feel like we are here to save money for the taxpayer,” said Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick. But, he added, that must be balanced against the responsibility of government to be transparent.

In rural counties like Haywood, there are still a number of people who don’t have access to Internet at home and must use the library to get online. On the other hand, anyone can subscribe to the local newspaper.

Kirkpatrick and Chairman Mark Swanger both said they would like Haywood County taken out of the bill.

“The cost savings is not so great that I feel comfortable,” Kirkpatrick said.

The rationale for printing government notices in the paper is to keep the public apprised of when elected leaders are meeting and when hearings on public policy changes are scheduled so citizens can monitor and participate in their local government.

Relegating them to a website opens the door for information to be concealed from the public.

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IRS agents singled out dozens of organizations for additional reviews because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their exemption applications, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, said Friday. In some cases, groups were asked for lists of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

The agency — led at the time by a Bush administration appointee — blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. But that wasn’t good enough for Republicans in Congress, who are conducting several investigations and asked for more.

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Mitigated tolls provide North Carolinians with a 50 percent reduction in toll rates – an estimated $20 to travel the entire state.

Last year, the state Department of Transportation introduced a plan that called for tolling travelers every 10 miles along the 182-mile highway in order to pay for widening the highway to six or eight lanes, raising or rebuilding overpasses and improving safety.

The idea did not go over well with residents, businesses and county governments along the I-95 corridor, nor its legislators, who instructed the department to study alternatives to tolling.

The study – prepared by Cambridge Systematics of Atlanta for $1.6 million – evaluated five alternatives:

Business as usual: ongoing maintenance and operations with no capacity expansion.

The study said this scenario would result in worsening traffic conditions, $66.9 billion in increased transportation costs through 2050 and a loss of more than 16,000 full-time jobs annually.

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As members of the state House of Representatives tended to business, North Carolinians dissatisfied with tax plans, education policies, health care proposals, welfare cuts, environmental deregulation and new voting policies grew louder and louder.

General Assembly police used bullhorns to tell the protesters to quiet down. “You have five minutes to leave,” an officer called out to the demonstrators gathered in the second-floor rotunda.

The crowd, diverse in age and backgrounds, was in Raleigh to take part in a growing protest movement organized by the state NAACP and others to highlight widening concerns about the impact of political initiatives coming out of the Republican-led General Assembly and governor’s mansion

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Senate Bill 127, sponsored by Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, the Senate’s majority leader, would force AdvantageWest and three other regional partnerships to disband or reorganize as nonprofits, losing their state funding. The full Senate was scheduled to debate the bill Monday night.

That rural counties in the west could lose out to larger urban areas in the quest for new industries worried Tom Alexander, chairman of the board of AdvantageWest. “I don’t know how the Senate bill would address that discrepancy.”

He said the proposed bill seemed to “be at a disconnect” with plans announced by Gov. Pat McCrory to turn the Commerce Department into a public/private partnership.

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Hagan, D-N.C., visited the South End barbecue hotspot to gain support for a bipartisan bill she’s co-sponsoring that would allow businesses to write off more of their commercial improvement projects each year.

“I hear too often from business owners that they’re putting off (improvements) because of uncertainty in Washington,” Hagan said. “We need to give them the certainty they need to … recoup their investments.

“… Small businesses like Mac’s are engines of economic growth.”

Hagan and Mac’s managing partner, Wynn Davis, 48, chatted in front of the polished bar while servers set out napkins and barbecue sauce on patio tables.

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Sheriffs Eddie Cathy of Union County, David Carpenter of Lincoln, and Terry Johnson of Alamance, among others, criticize what they consider a lack of border security.

They say the proposal “tolerates both past and future criminal activities,” according to a letter sent Thursday to Sens. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, and Kay Hagan, a Greensboro Democrat.

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Chipp Bailey and Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison are not on the list of sheriffs who signed the letter.

The letter, obtained by McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, listed more than a dozen concerns with the proposed legislation.

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But it was terse — and enough so to signal troubles were mounting.

“I’m not a happy camper,” Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College President Hank Dunn told Greene in that voicemail in February 2012.

County officials were not happy, either.

Emails and other correspondences obtained by the Citizen-Times show county and college officials were divided over how to implement an ambitious college building program almost as soon as voters in November 2011 narrowly approved a sales tax hike to pay for it all.

Those exchanges, obtained through public records requests, include the Dunn voice mail in which he objects to the county’s role in hiring an architect.

The quarter-cent sales tax increase is expected to generate $83 million to pay for new buildings, renovations and other facilities at A-B Tech.

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