In just over a month, voters across North Carolina will head to the polls in local elections. One of the biggest items on Mecklenburg County's ballot is Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools' $2.5 billion bond referendum. And this week, a group of 20 faith leaders came out against that referendum. For more, we turn now to Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: So, CMS Superintendent Crystal Hill will hold a town hall meeting later this morning at South Meck to discuss this referendum. Tony, if approved, what would the money be used for?
Tony Mecia: Marshall, it would go to a variety of projects around Mecklenburg County — build new buildings to create new schools in fast-growing parts of town, to replace some schools that are decades old and that the district says are in disrepair. And they say it would be helpful for students’ safety and student well-being and student achievement to have newer facilities at a lot of these locations.
Terry: OK. So who are these faith leaders who are opposed, and what's their argument?
Mecia: So it's a group of about 20 Black pastors that had a news conference on Monday. Qcitymetro reported that (the pastors) were out there and they were making a case against the bonds. This is something we don't usually see in Mecklenburg County. Bond referendums usually passed pretty easily without any kind of controversy. A couple of the pastors who spoke were Dennis Williams of Faith Memorial Baptist Church and Ricky Woods of First Baptist Church-West. They were saying that they think the higher taxes that are going to be required to pay for these bonds are going to disproportionately affect vulnerable communities, the Black community. They said they worried about the county's bond rating. And so they were sort of making economic arguments about it. This is the group of pastors, incidentally, that have sort of been at odds with CMS leadership, really wanting more influence on CMS decisions and more of a seat at the table.
Terry: Well, how's it looking on whether or not the bond referendum will pass?
Mecia: It's hard to know. There's no public polling. You know, pastors tend to be influential people in their communities. You'll also recall, Marshall, there was a split on the County Commission on the vote on whether to put the bond on the ballot. So you had three county commissioners vote against putting it on the ballot, citing some of the same issues on taxes and the bond rating. But I think the pro-bond advocates feel pretty good about their position, about where they are. They're gonna be making their case, I think, over the next few weeks. And it sounds like this group of Black pastors is going to be as well.
Terry: All right. Well, let's move over to colleges and universities now. The Ledger this week looked at the data and found that Charlotte area schools, just like schools across the nation, saw an enrollment drop during the pandemic. But you report enrollment is slowly climbing back up. So does that mean the pandemic was just a minor bump in the road or an accelerant to a long-term trend?
Mecia: Yeah, it's a good question. It was certainly a bump in the road. You had people that decided not to go to college during the pandemic. But it's also a longer-term trend of sort of a little bit of a move away from enrollment. And that is a little bit reflected in the data looking at some of the local colleges whose enrollment is still down compared to the pre-pandemic times. You know, Queens University, Wingate, Winthrop — they're all down a little bit. There's this change in people's minds on the value of going to college. Then you also have demographic shifts in which you're going to have fewer people coming out of high school.
Terry: And you point to the year 2025 in your article as being significant. Why is that?
Mecia: Yeah, that's the year that demographic data suggests that high school graduations will peak before declining later in the 2020s. And so with fewer graduates coming out of high school, the pressure is really going to be on some colleges to try to jockey for some of these students to attend their schools.
Terry: All right. Well, let's move on to the business of the Mega Millions jackpot. North Carolina lottery officials say despite the increasing number of big jackpots, ticket sales are going down. That seems counterintuitive. What's happening?
Mecia: It's sort of interesting. The North Carolina Education Lottery Commission met last week, and officials there described the phenomenon in which there have been so many big jackpots in the last 15 months or so that that's not having the same effect on people as it used to. It used to be when there was a billion-dollar jackpot on Powerball or Mega Millions they would really see a big spike in lottery sales. It still increases when there are big jackpots, but it's not quite as much. So it's a little bit of lottery jackpot fatigue, Marshall.
Terry: Are they doing anything to try and counter that?
Mecia: Well, they don't depend a whole lot on these big multi-state lotteries for their revenue. About 70% of the lottery's revenue comes from scratch-off games. And, you know, they do some marketing when the jackpots hit $500 million. But the odds are still pretty long, regardless of what the jackpots are. I think they're about 1 in 300 million. So if you're playing, good luck to you.
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