theCLog

From our friends at ProPublica.org:

As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House are trying to minimize their differences, a brewing battle at OSHA over a workplace injury reporting rule illustrates how tough that could become given the administration’s pro-labor leanings.

While bureaucratic clashes over subtle rule changes like this one are usually waged outside the public’s view, they can have big ramifications for business and workers.

At issue is a regulation that would force employers to identify when a workplace-related injury or illness is considered a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD), a term broadly used to describe ailments caused by repetitive stress, like carpal tunnel syndrome or strains from frequent heavy lifting.

Figures gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that MSD-related problems accounted for nearly a third of the 1.1 million workplace injuries and illnesses in the private sector that led to days off work in 2008.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wants to include an additional column on the federal surveys employers are required to fill out, to identify when a worker’s injury is musculoskeletal in nature. Currently, these injuries are recorded in the same category as problems like hearing loss, making it difficult for OSHA to collect accurate data. Union representatives and OSHA officials say the data could help the agency find opportunities to reduce injuries.

But business representatives, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say the move is the Obama administration’s first step toward developing sweeping regulation of ergonomic safety, which could cost employers millions.

The spat harks back to the final days of former President Bill Clinton’s administration, when, on Nov. 13, 2000, OSHA released more than 1,600 pages of ergonomic rules that took three years to draft.

The rules covered everything from the amount of time a construction worker could spend using a jackhammer to requiring breaks for people using a computer mouse.

The Chamber and other representatives of large employers persuaded Republicans in Congress to pass riders on appropriations bills that would delay the rule’s release.

When the rules were finally issued a week before Clinton left office, employer trade groups responded by persuading the Republican-controlled Congress to shoot them down with the never-before-used Congressional Review Act. ProPublica included this anecdote in its “midnight regulations” coverage.

Now the same groups are worried that with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama might try to introduce similar rules.

“Attempts to put this recordkeeping requirement in place represent the first efforts to return to the ergonomics question,” said Marc Freedman, the Chamber’s director of labor law policy. “We will be very involved in this rulemaking as it goes forward. We have a history with this issue.”

The Chamber held a closed-door meeting on Jan. 25 to discuss how to approach the new proposal. Freedman wouldn’t reveal who attended the meeting or discuss the Chamber’s plans. He said the only reason people outside the Chamber’s membership even knew about the meeting is because he accidentally e-mailed an invitation to someone who shouldn’t have been on the list.

The change proposed by the Obama administration is far narrower than the rules Clinton proposed at the end of his term. This one would merely provide OSHA, the public, and employers with a more accurate count of how many MSD injuries are actually occurring, OSHA officials say.

“The industry is just looking for a fight,” argued Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO. “As soon as Obama was elected, it was clear that immediately there would be a war on ergonomics. This gives you a sense of how rabid they are that they don’t even want these injuries identified.”

Freedman countered that the Chamber is concerned about how musculoskeletal disorders will be defined and how OSHA will determine whether these injuries actually occurred inside the workplace.

“In the previous regulation, the definition of musculoskeletal was very broad,” Freedman said. “That’s definitely one of the reasons why the regulation was considered so offensive.”

Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of labor, told ProPublica that OSHA will use a definition similar to one the Bureau of Labor Statistics has used for years to record these injuries. But the proposed OSHA definition will also include three problems that aren’t on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list — Raynaud’s phenomenon, tarsal tunnel syndrome and herniated spinal discs that aren’t caused by slips, trips and falls.

The Chamber doesn’t have an alternative definition in mind. Freedman said that’s not the Chamber’s job.

OSHA has consistently stated that workplace injuries and death are steadily declining. But in 2008, ProPublica reported that the decline is not so dramatic if incidents involving violent crime or transportation, which are actually overseen by other agencies, are removed.

This story was co-published with Politico.

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If you haven’t been to the U.S. National Whitewater Center yet, you should go and find out what all the fuss is about. Don’t want to kayak or raft? Don’t. Watch those who do. Check out the trails where you can walk or bike. Enjoy a meal. In the summer, there’s plenty of live music. Go once and you’ll be hooked. With their new rate plans, a day at Whitewater is more affordable than ever.

The bad news: The center opened just in time for an economic collapse, which has made it difficult for its administrators to pay its debts. While it hurts to find out the center needs a bailout, it’s no surprise. As any business owner can tell you, it takes years to turn a profit. When a business starts with tens of millions of dollars in debt, that profit slope is all the more difficult to climb.

The bottom line: The U.S. National Whitewater Center may be struggling now, but this is one attraction the Q.C. will be proud of for decades to come.

The U.S National Whitewater Center announced Monday that lenders have forgiven roughly two-thirds of its $38 million debt, a move that the center’s director said would position the center for long-term financial success.

Since its opening in 2006, the nonprofit center has been able to turn a small operating profit – but hasn’t come close to making a dent in its construction debt.

That has prompted local governments in Mecklenburg and Gaston counties to pay the center $1.7 million annually, as required by the original agreement that helped build the center in northwest Mecklenburg.

The center has been in default on its loans. It has paid no principal and very little interest.

After the bailout, the center will still owe its lenders $12.4 million. Executive Director Jeff Wise said that debt will be paid off in five years …

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Steve Harrison, here.

Frustrated by the bailout? I get it. Why don’t you go work off some of that excess energy on the water?

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Ever wondered who pays their taxes and who doesn’t? It’s not hard to find out since that information belongs to the public and the county publishes a list of tardy tax payers (due in March or April). You might be surprised, however, to find out how much money is owed and what has, and hasn’t, been done to correct the situation. (Mostly what hasn’t.)

Thousands of property owners in Mecklenburg County owe a total of more than $70 million in unpaid taxes, according to a Charlotte Business Journal review of delinquent bills.

That’s more than this year’s combined budgets for the county’s library system ($31.8 million) and its parks and recreation department ($37.4 million).

As of Feb. 1, there are 38,323 unpaid tax bills, or about one out of 10. The number of county tax notices each year typically totals about 371,500. With interest, the delinquent bills add up to $70,616,298.59.

County taxes on land, buildings and equipment were due Sept. 1, but many property owners hold off paying until the first week of January, which is when interest is applied.

Many on the delinquent list are developers, commercial property owners and home builders with unsold lots. Scores of other unpaid bills are for projects that have fallen into foreclosure or bankruptcy, such as Tim Crawford’s South End Silos, the failed 210 Trade condo project uptown and scattered Crescent Resources sites.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Business Journal article, by Susan Stabley, and get the low down on the most outrageous delinquent bills here.

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Turns out Diageo isn’t just stirring things up in Mecklenburg County, the London-based liquor company is stirring the pot in Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, too.

A transfer of billions of dollars in federal aid from public projects in Puerto Rico to one of the world’s largest liquor conglomerates over the next 30 years continues to move forward without any objection from Congress.

As a result, money that’s now being used to build schools and restore tropical forests in a U.S. territory is being turned into what is essentially a $3 billion tax break for London-based Diageo, whose $20 billion in sales last year were powered by Dom Pérignon, Captain Morgan and other popular brands.

Diageo’s windfall at Puerto Rico’s expense wouldn’t be possible were it not for pricey lobbyists, the complexity of the nation’s tax laws and Congress’s ability to approve politically embarrassing deals with a sleight of hand that leaves little trace.

On K Street, Diageo has an in-house team of lobbyists that was paid $2.25 million last year. Diageo also has the help of DLA Piper, one of the world’s largest legal and lobbying firms, which has an office seven blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Last year, Diageo paid DLA Piper $770,000 to lobby on this and other issues.

Read the rest of this ProPublica article, by Marcus Stern, here.

What liquor products does Diageo sell? Too many to list here. Here’s the brand list from their Web site.

Here’s one of the company’s recent commercials:

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The Charlotte Business Journal has no fewer than three articles about hirings and firings today, expansions and retractions. Here they are:

Sun Chemical to lay off 75 in Charlotte

Kewaunee Scientific expands, adds 120 jobs

MedCath posts quarterly loss

Solaris to invest $3.2M in Kings Mountain

And, then — of course — there’s more news about the fat cats at Bank of America getting fatter: BofA execs get boost in base salary. This seems like a good time to refresh my argument from yesterday: BofA is out of touch with reality.

Hopefully this news helps you job seekers decide which companies to send your resumes to — and which ones to avoid. And, sorry to tell you, the top jobs at BofA are already taken.

Joe Felice offers his unemployment forecast:

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Yeah!! Traders and bankers at Charlotte-based Bank of America are getting $4 billion in bonuses. Woo hoo!

Wait.A.Minute. What?! Are they paying any attention to what’s going on in the world? Hell no. Of course they aren’t. They barely even see the real world from their perches in their giant towers.

AND, get this: Not only are they bolstering the bank accounts of their top execs, they’re back to the same ‘ol games that nearly destroyed our country’s economy.

Obama’s banking czar just delivered his reform proposal, and the big banks finally have something to snicker about—because he’s leaving untouched the risky trades that played a leading role in the financial crisis.

At first, at least, it sounded so promising: After months of being ignored by President Obama and his senior staff about how to prevent another financial meltdown, economic adviser Paul Volcker got his due. The former Fed chairman’s plan to prevent banks from having their risky trading activities subsidized by the taxpayer was being taken seriously, finally, by the man who matters most to Washington, the president, who has endorsed what is being called the Volcker Rule as the centerpiece of his bank regulatory agenda.

But looking deeper, one soon discovers that “The Volcker Plan” isn’t much of a reform plan at all. (Congressional staffers cannot even get details of the proposal and have been directed by the White House to press releases.) Instead, what we are left with is a series of statements made by a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided Volcker about how he wants new legislation that would prohibit banks that are considered “too big to fail”—i.e., Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase—from engaging in so-called proprietary trading activities. This means they would no longer be able to use firm capital to make wild bets in esoteric markets, the kind of stuff that allegedly caused the financial collapse of 2008.

Read more from The Daily Beast’s Charlie Gasparino here.

Click here for more on Bank of America’s outlandish bonuses from The Charlotte Business Journal.

In other out-of-touch news from Qcitymetro.com: Judge decides hiring at BofA is biased

Former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer was on The Colbert Report last night discussing the banking industry … and he was right on.

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There are a few things that don’t rest well with me about the news that the state plans to force Duke Energy to conduct further groundwater testing around their coal ash ponds. Here they are, in no particular order:

The state has known about contaminated groundwater at these sites for quite some time. The moment they discovered the water was contaminated they should have demanded further testing, but they didn’t.

You should know, Duke Energy took eight whole years to install the first groundwater testing wells at their Riverbend plant (map), the one that’s sitting on the edge of Charlotte’s main drinking water source — Mountain Island Lake.

Here’s the skinny on that: The E.P.A. was trying to decide whether or not to re-classify coal ash as hazardous waste — what with its mix of toxic ingredients that reads like the dark side of the periodic table and all. The E.P.A. has, by the way, been trying to re-classify coal ash as a hazardous waste for the better part of 30 years. But, in an agreement with industry lobbyists, back in 2000, the E.P.A. agreed not to re-classify the slurry if the industry installed groundwater testing wells.

Riverbend’s wells weren’t installed until December 2008, eight years later and the same month nearly a billion gallons of slurry smothered several hundred acres in Tennessee. What took so long? Duke will tell you that they were working on it, that it takes a while to install wells, that it was a voluntary effort anyway. (The new regulation is tied to their federal discharge permit — aka license to pollute — that’s being renewed this month.) I’ll tell you my step-dad drills wells for his neighbors in rural Alablama; it sure as shit doesn’t take eight years to drill a well — more like a couple days.

So, pardon me if I’m a little skeptical about this week’s smooth-the-feathers-of-the-masses news from the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Water Quality.

If both Duke Energy and the State of North Carolina were the concerned, good neighbors they’d like us to think they are, it wouldn’t take additional regulations to clean up those ponds — they’d do it because it’s the right thing to do.

Also, the photograph — of a dump truck dumping a black substance — that’s currently accompanying  the Observer’s article is misleading. Coal ash slurry is created when fly ash is watered down. It’s then pumped through long pipes into the ponds. Now, if you zoom in super close on a map of the coal ash ponds you will see dump trucks hauling coal ash around. The company has to close the first pond, built in the mid-1950s, every few years because it is so full of coal ash they have to dig some out to make room for more. If you’ll follow the truck’s tracks, you can see that the excavated coal ash is dumped near the ponds, and only a few hundred yards from the Stonewater neighborhood. Just thought you’d like to know — coal ash slurry, like that in Riverbend’s ponds that’s contaminating the groundwater, is a thick, wet sludge not a big pile of dirt.

You can read the Charlotte Observer article, by Bruce Henderson, about the new regulations here.

If you haven’t already, check out the article I wrote for this month’s Charlotte Magazine about the Riverbend ponds and our Catawba Riverkeeper’s quest to protect our river. Look for an update on this story later today.

Here’s what happened when the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal ash pond breached its dam:

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The words “task force” always sound a little daunting to me — a little too military, a little too rigid. But, that’s how it goes when the government gets involved. Charlotte’s new small business task force will require participants to adhere to a certain protocol if they want to play. However, it seems as though abundant rewards await those willing to jump through the city’s hoops.

The first step, though, involves appointed city officials. Mayor Anthony Foxx has requested a review of the Small Business Opportunities Program. The goal? Streamline the process for adding small businesses to the city’s vendor list to ensure those same businesses get a fair shake when up against the big boys for a city contract.

Here’s a snippet from a Mecklenburg Times article on the issue, by Sam Boykin:

The program, which began in 2003, is designed to enhance competition in city contracting and promote economic growth and development.

It does this through a certification process, said SBOP Manager Nancy Rosado. The city certifies certain companies as Small Business Enterprises (SBE) based upon owners’ personal net worth and other criteria.

For example, in order to qualify, 51 percent of a company’s ownership can’t have a personal net worth in excess of $750,000. Companies must also be located in the eight-county Charlotte region, have all relevant licenses, and perform a commercial function that is useful to the city.

Eligible companies have their information added to a citywide vendor list, are notified of contracting opportunities, and receive guidance on how to do business with the city. There are currently 794 city-certified SBEs.

While the city will work with all companies, Rosado said that with many of the city’s procurement contracts, goals are established for the utilization of SBEs.

“When a project is locally funded, we require contractors to meet small business utilization goals or show they made a good faith effort to reach those goals,” she said.

Wesley Carter, a task force member and publisher of business magazine Working Charlotte, said she hopes the task force will be able to effect much-needed change.

“Small businesses and entrepreneurs have toiled in relative obscurity for far too long while providing much of the infrastructure that supports Charlotte,” she said. “I’d like for us to recognize small businesses as a powerful constituency and remove barriers to them being able to participate, especially in terms of contracts with the city.”

Click here to read the entire article.

In other news: The county is hosting an information session for non-profits looking for funding. Read about it here.

The big wigs in Washington are also finding ways to boost small business (fast forward to 1:00 to get past all of the introductions):

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There’s a new bank in town, thumbing its nose at their old-school competition while climbing the success ladder. And, I bet you already know who they are. Well, I bet you are familiar with their commercials at least. (”Would you like a pony?”)

Uptown Charlotte’s newest bank is raising its profile with the same bravado that made the Queen City a financial hub.

Online bank Ally is turning heads — and drawing fire — with a new checking account that competes with national lenders, a growing center city presence and a memorable ad campaign.

The bank, a subsidiary of GMAC Financial Services, isn’t wheeling and dealing its way to the top like Bank of America Corp. under Hugh McColl Jr.. But Charlotte’s bold banking influence is evident as Ally bills itself as a consumer-friendly alternative to traditional banking.

Ally recently unveiled its first checking product with an interest-earning account that offers customers no fees, no minimum balances, free online bill-pay and free use of any ATM nationwide. The new account also puts a fresh spin on overdraft fees, with a $9 daily charge for insufficient funds instead of a per-transaction charge as high as $35 at competitors.

“We’ve really done our research and listened to customers to develop a product that puts the customer first,” says Ally Chief Marketing Officer Sanjay Gupta, a former marketing executive at Charlotte-based BofA. “Our interest checking account is another significant step as we evolve a new business model that we hope encourages customers to expect more from their bank,” he says. “We’re developing our products with the philosophy that we are a financial partner with our customers, and we’re making money with them — not off them.”

Read more about what the bank’s up to from The Charlotte Business Journal in an article by Adam O’Daniel.

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The City Council will decide whether or not to re-zone a west Charlotte property on Feb. 15. At issue: A 1960s VW Beetle on top of an empty restaurant. Apparently it’s a cultural icon, which means it will likely get razed. (I apologize for the pessimism, but isn’t that what we do with Charlotte’s historic sites?)

Community leaders and the property’s owners hope the restaurant will open soon … as soon as they are able cut through all the red tape, anyway.

If you’d like to voice your opinion on the matter, you’ll get your chance at the City Council meeting. Note: You need to sign up to speak.

A call to action from a west Charlotte neighborhood has brought city support for saving the 1966 Volkswagen Beetle that sits on the roof at the proposed Pinky’s restaurant site.

The Freedom Drive Development Association and the city’s Neighborhood and Business Services Department found a solution by working together.

On advice from the city, the association has filed a petition asking the city to rezone the former Triple G Automotive property owned by John Nichols of the Nichols Company, said Tom Warshauer, economic development manager for Neighborhood and Business Services.

With a zoning change from B1 (Ped) to B1 (Ped-0), Nichols could keep the Beetle on the roof of the vacant building at West Morehead Street and Freedom Drive.

The public can comment on the rezoning request at the Feb. 15 City Council meeting.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Karen Sullivan, here.

While you wait for the meeting date, you can become a fan of Pinky’s Westside Grill on Facebook so you can keep up with the latest on this issue.

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