Kevin Crutchfield

North Carolina should compete for this investment. We should not pay for it twice.

My standard is simple: large users pay their own freight. If a data center needs new generation and new transmission to operate, that company should build it, bring it, or buy it — not shift the cost onto the families and small businesses who were already here. I support establishing a large-load rate structure at the Utilities Commission that puts those costs where they belong, and I would apply the same principle to water and wastewater capacity.

Second, siting is a local decision. Cabarrus County and its towns understand their own water systems and their own neighborhoods better than Raleigh does. I would protect local zoning authority rather than preempt it, and I would expect an honest accounting up front — projected power draw, projected water use, and what happens to a site if the project never materializes.

Third, we have to add supply. You cannot serve growth by rationing it. That means reliable baseload generation, including nuclear, and a permitting process that does not take a decade. Done right, this is investment and good jobs. Done carelessly, it is a bill that lands on a retiree in Concord who never had a say in it.

Cabarrus County is already doing this well, and the model is a few miles from my front door. The North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis and Rowan-Cabarrus Community College’s biotechnology and advanced technology programs train people for jobs that exist right now, at wages a family can live on. This county lost thousands of textile jobs when Pillowtex closed, and the way back was retraining people for the economy that came next. That is not theory here. It is living memory.

So my answer is to fund what works and get out of its way. Expand Career and College Promise so a high school student can walk across the stage with a credential already in hand. Keep investing in community college lab space and equipment — that is the expensive part, and it is the part that goes obsolete. Pay instructors enough that a working lab technician will consider teaching. And build employer-run apprenticeships, because industry knows what it needs faster than any curriculum committee does.

I would also say plainly that the young person who becomes a lab technician, an electrician, or a maintenance technician on that campus has a real career in front of them. We ought to stop treating a four-year degree as the only respectable path.

Government’s core job here is the physical infrastructure: clean water, safe food, hospitals that stay open, and the capacity to respond when something goes wrong.

On contamination, I am direct. The company that put a chemical in the water should pay to take it out — not the ratepayer. PFAS testing and treatment are expensive, and smaller water systems cannot absorb that cost alone. I support state cost-share for treatment upgrades paired with real financial responsibility for the manufacturers. The same principle applies to asbestos and lead remediation in older schools and housing.

On preparedness, I speak from some experience. I serve on the board of Patriot Relief, a Cabarrus County-based nonprofit founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene to move volunteers and supplies into western North Carolina — and to keep showing up long after the news trucks left. What that work taught me is that the failure point is almost never good intentions. It is local capacity: water systems, communications, road access, and the ability to move people and material in the first seventy-two hours. That deserves standing investment and agreements signed before the storm, not a scramble afterward.

On vaccines, my position is that they should be available and affordable to every family that wants them, and that the decision belongs to parents in consultation with their own doctor rather than to a mandate from Raleigh. Access, yes. Coercion, no.

Trust was not lost. It was spent.

During COVID, guidance changed without anyone explaining why it changed, disagreement got treated as heresy, and value judgments about tradeoffs were announced as though they were scientific findings. People noticed. You do not win that back with a better communications strategy.

You win it back three ways. First, honesty about uncertainty. “This is our best estimate, and here is what would change it” holds up over time. “The science is settled” does not, and when it turns out it was not, you have spent credibility you needed later.

Second, a clean line between what the evidence shows and what we ought to do about it. The first is the researcher’s work. The second is a political judgment belonging to officials who answer to voters. In my experience, scientists are more persuasive, not less, when they respect that line.

Third, local messengers. People in Cabarrus County trust their family doctor, their county extension agent, and the researcher who lives down the road far more than they trust a federal agency. I would rather fund ten of those relationships than one more national campaign.

And I would be glad to sit down with the researchers in Kannapolis. Showing up is most of it.