Pate running for re-election to state Senate
By News-Argus Staff
Published in News on October 24, 2014 2:28 PM
Louis Pate
By STEVE HERRING
Medicaid reform, lottery and highway funding, and taxes are among the major issues the new General Assembly will face when it convenes in January.
Republican Sen. Louis Pate, 78, of Mount Olive, says his experience and ability to work with others are reasons voters should return him to the District 7 Senate seat to deal with those and other issues.
Pate, who has served four terms in the House and two in the Senate, is facing a challenge by Democrat Erik Anderson of Winterville.
District 7 includes portions of Wayne, Pitt and Lenoir counties.
"Having been there for six terms total, I think I have the experience and the ability to get the things done that need to be done and have a good working relationship with people on both sides of the aisle," he said.
Pate expects Medicaid to be the biggest issue to tackle when lawmakers return to Raleigh.
"I think the argument is the Department of Health and Human Services and the governor want to see it more or less continued the way it has been," he said. "The House wants to set up several care organizations that will keep the providers leading the Medicaid effort.
"What the Senate wants to do is pull Medicaid out of the Department of Health and Human Services and set it up as its own department that reports to the governor. The governor will be much more involved, the department would focus on health for the Medicaid patient and also spend as efficiently as possible."
Pate said he is not willing to say that the system should be privatized. Rather, he said he thinks that a competitive atmosphere between the two plans could be the answer.
The state should responsible for enrollment of members and keeping up with the finances, but not running it, Pate said.
Another major issue will be the corporate income tax, he said.
"We going to try to do away with it and continue to lower income tax a little bit further than where it is right now," Pate said. "Obviously we have got to have some money coming in to do the business that government is formed to do. That money, I think, can come in if we spread the base (to include more areas) on sales taxes.
"That is what the original plan was. We made significant progress in 2013, and I think we will be able to continue that this coming year. But the emphasis will be on corporate income tax. That should really kick start our economic recovery."
Pate said he was not in favor of the lottery when it passed, but it is now the law. He said revenues from it should used as the law prescribes. In some cases, lawmakers have used it to supplant other funding just because they know that the lottery money is there, he said.
Pate has concerns as well about the new highway funding formula that rural county leaders say favors urban areas.
Gov. Pat McCrory and Transportation Secretary Tony Tata recently unveiled plans to borrow $1 billion through a bond issue for rural highway projects.
"That has received, from what I have heard, some mixed reception, depending on who hears it," Pate said. "The urban areas aren't in favor of it at all. The rural areas are concerned that we are spending money that we don't have. But on the other hand it does have some attraction to it. It would speed up the correction of some of the rural highway problems by several years."
Some lawmakers are looking at a couple of constitutional amendments during the next session, he said.
"The first is to give a person a right to farm," he said. "There are a lot of special interest groups that are really giving the farmers a tough time -- environmentalists. We have a lot of governmental agencies that are doing, in my opinion, too much out on the farm.
"Anyone who buys their own land should be able to farm it without guidance from the government or environmentalists.
"The other is the freedom to hunt and fish, which I think is needlessly, I won't say attacked, but there are a lot of questions being brought up about people who go into the woods and kill animals, or people who go down to the stream and catch fish."
Pate also pointed out what he thinks are some of the major accomplishments during the past session that affected eastern North Carolina, especially in the military arena.
"We have protected Seymour Johnson and Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune and all of these military bases with the bill that will prohibit the windmills from being so close to the Dare County Bombing Range," he said. "It is an important piece of legislation because it keeps that bombing range open."