Murdock

DURHAM – Affordable housing, livable wages, utilities, economic development, education and public safety are priorities for Durham’s legislators.

North Carolina state Senator Natalie Murdock and Representative Zack Hawkins recently gave a legislative update at Zafa Temple #176. 

“We’re collaborating, but we’re fighting very hard for Durham,” Murdock said. “Some of the changes we’ll talk about came because of the people in this room. They’re slowing those bills down. There were bills that were removed from the calendar because people showed up.” 

Murdock and Hawkins shared the importance of collaborating with organizations like the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, the Zafa Temple, the Durham chapter of the NAACP, the Greater Durham Black Chamber of Commerce, and others. Collaboration is also important when it comes to bipartisan issues. 

One such issue is data centers, which places high demand on fresh water and energy companies. Hawkins sits on N.C.’s first Artificial Intelligence Caucus. He says that statewide, Republicans and Democrats have said no to companies seeking to build data centers without bringing any economic benefit to the counties. 

“We’ve made it a bipartisan issue because my majority colleagues could not just say, ‘we’re going to do what we want to do. We can’t just listen to these big energy companies,’ because they knew that they’d lose seats,” he said. That’s why the Ratepayer and Resource Protection Act (HB 1063), which Hawkins co-sponsored, regulates water usage by large-scale data centers. Both Hawkins and Murdock championed Durham City Council for putting a moratorium on data centers within the city. 

“What was happening is that they would come in, they would take energy, increase energy costs but not bring a single job, and they benefited without bringing community benefits,” Hawkins said.

Murdock said more is being done long-term to make affordable housing easier to build, but the issue is not taken seriously in the General Assembly. To start, there is no standing committee for zoning, housing or land use in the Senate. 

“We give it a lot of lip service every year,” Murdock said. However, she said, “there is a coalition that is building.” More importantly, though, wages should be raised. “How about we raise the minimum wage and pay people more so that they’ll be able to afford a place to live?” she said.

Hawkins

One part of the conversation on raising wages is ensuring economic development attracts high-paying jobs. Murdock said the federal Department of Government Efficiency cuts meant Durham lost jobs. Federal money “trickles down to Durham” for global work that is done there.

“There were folks at Duke that were a year out from possibly having life-saving cancer drugs go to trial, and they lost their money. Again, that’s jobs,” she said.

Government crackdowns on diversity, equity and inclusion programs made it more difficult for small, minority- or women-owned businesses to accrue capital to provide jobs to locals. Murdock said local schools should be tapped for talent, and companies should be creating pipelines for workforce development. 

“Most of these folks are not some big 5,100-person firm that has two or three people dedicated, it is one person that is handling the accounting and also trying to navigate the state’s system,” Hawkins said. At the same time, there are companies bringing jobs to the district that “are not fully fleshed out,” he said. 

“We have to work with them and say, if the state of North Carolina is giving you an incentive, you should be working with historically minority businesses,” Hawkins said. Employers in Research Triangle Park, which is within the legislative district, told him they didn’t know how to connect with and source local talent except through Durham Technical Community College.

Hawkins procured $25,000 in last year’s state budget to recruit Black science teachers to learn about RTP companies and form curricula modeled toward developing employees for those companies. Southern High School of Energy and Sustainability now has a Biowork Career and College Promise course, which was the first of its kind in the state, to allow students to graduate with a certification to attain gainful employment with a salary up to $80,000 at graduation.

“Sometimes we have to come in and get our hands dirty to help set up the systems so that, when we get control, we can fund them big time,” Hawkins said. 

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