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Last week, Gov. Josh Stein signed the state budget, sent to him from the General Assembly, into law.
In a statement released when he signed the document, he praised the legislature for fully funding Medicaid for the coming year, giving raises to teachers and significant pay hikes to public safety officers.
He also said that the bill has flaws. “The legislature slashed more than 1,000 state government positions, making it harder for us to keep people safe and healthy.
“It also includes a number of unconstitutional and wrong-headed provisions like those shifting power from the executive branch or those that are hostile to local governments, especially Charlotte.”
Something he didn’t mention is the more than 900 earmarks totalling close to $1.6 billion. In case you didn’t know it, earmarks are a nicer way to say “pork,” those parts of the budget requested by lawmakers eager to “bring home the bacon.”
These expenditures are aside from the other spending items listed in the budget plan, which weighed in at about 1,350 pages total, and the purpose behind many of them lack detail or rationale.
Reporters had about 36 hours to try to find things in that budget to write our stories about before votes during the week of July 4th. Suffice it to say, there’s plenty we missed and you’ll be seeing budget stories coming from us and others for weeks, maybe months, as the implications of all this spending become clear.
Like this one, that was flagged to us by several readers: Item 505, a half million dollar grant to the Charlotte Healthcare Coalition, Inc. The notation says that it’s a “directed grant,” nothing more.
The first stop is to do a search for the Charlotte Healthcare Coalition, Inc.
Searching the NC Secretary of State’s website for business registration tells us that the entity was incorporated in October, 2023. The IRS website tells us that it received federal non-profit status in January, 2024 (I searched for the IRS Form 1023, the application document, but it was not available on the IRS website.)
No website. No financial data available. No Form 990 viewable on the federal Internal Revenue Service website, although if the organization has total revenue of less than $50,000, it’s only required to file the postcard Form 990-N (NC Health News did that our first year). It appears that in 2024, the first full year the organization was designated, they did just that (you can check for yourself, go to the link above and enter in the Employer ID Number: 93-4902706). Whereas most 990s are public documents, 990-Ns are not listed on the IRS website.
The physical address? It appears to be a UPS Store in East Charlotte with a “suite” number that’s likely a box. This kind of thing often happens with so-called “dark money” groups that want to preserve anonymity. When filing corporation papers, entities are required to have a physical address, in part because if someone files a lawsuit, there needs to be a place where a process server can deliver papers.
There’s no charitable Solicitation License listed on the state Secretary of State’s website either, it’s a process that allows a public charity to legally raise money.
I looked at the home address (which I won’t reprint here) of the purported chief officer of the organization, who is listed on the corporation papers as President and Chief Strategic Officer. (There are no other officers or board members listed.) Checking the tax records at the address listed shows there’s an 80-year-old living at that address who goes by that name.
Turns out there’s another state entity, CAI Public Strategies, LLC listed at the same “suite” (actually a mailbox) at the UPS Store in Charlotte. That entity is a for-profit entity, again, with the same person as the only officer, the CEO.
There’s a LinkedIn profile for a person by that name who looks much younger than 80 years old. There’s little other information on the profile, other than the fact that he lists himself as a “Client Advisor Institutional Consultant,” a job title that could be a coincidence with the name of the LLC listed above, or he could be completely unrelated to either the Charlotte Healthcare Coalition or CAI Public Strategies.
In the past, earmarks listed which lawmaker had requested the appropriation, now, earmarks are anonymous, so there’s no way to know what lawmaker requested this expenditure. There are 908 such earmarks, and there’s a good chance that this grant is completely on the up and up.
But with scant transparency at the legislature, it’s impossible to know what this not insignificant expenditure of taxpayer dollars is going towards.
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