Michael Lee, Republican incumbent
NC Senate District 7
Career: Attorney, founding partner of Kaess Parker Lee, PLLC
Education: B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; J.D., cum laude, Wake Forest University School of Law
Q: What qualifies you to serve in the North Carolina legislature?
A: I help write the state budget. That is the short answer, and it matters more to this county than any title after my name. I have represented New Hanover County in the Senate for 10 of the last 12 years, and since 2023 I have been one of the chairmen who write the Senate’s budget. That is the difference between asking Raleigh for something and being in the room where it gets decided.
The budgets I have voted for and helped write have brought nearly $1 billion home to this county and the Cape Fear region — the harbor and the port, water and sewer, UNCW and Cape Fear Community College, the airport, our beaches, and the first behavioral health urgent care this region has ever had.
It is also how the water work got done. I have authored a Water Safety Act in every term I have served since GenX surfaced in 2017, and every one of them was enacted through that cycle’s budget — most recently $45 million for the Emerging Contaminant Mitigation Fund and a moratorium on new interbasin transfers out of the Cape Fear.
I also know how this county’s biggest projects get built because I have served on the boards that build them — the Board of Transportation, the State Ports Authority as its chairman, and the UNCW Board of Trustees. I know how a bridge gets funded, how a university grows, and how long each one really takes. I started my own law firm, so I read the fine print and I know what making payroll feels like.
Heidi and I raised our four children in this county, and the things I hear about at the grocery store are the things I work on in Raleigh. I listen first, I do the homework, I work with people I disagree with, and I deliver results to our region.
Q. What is a bill you would like to sponsor or co-sponsor and what is a bill you want to repeal — or even amend? Why?
A: Sponsor: Another Water Safety Act. I have authored one in every term we have had a budget since GenX surfaced in 2017 — 2018, 2021, 2023 and 2026. The next one has a specific job: responding to the federal retreat on PFAS standards, which I address below.
Beyond that, the work I want to continue is not a single headline bill and I have alluded to a number of important issues in these questions. Competency-based learning is one piece — letting students move forward when they have actually mastered the material rather than when the calendar says to, which is a multi-session reform rather than a one-bill fix.
Another is the work I have done with the intellectually and developmentally disabled community and the families who care for them; waiting lists, the shortage of direct support professionals, and what happens when aging parents can no longer provide care are problems this state has to address. And expanding access to health care while doing something real about affordability — provider supply, price transparency, and the cost drivers behind premiums — touches every household in this district.
Beyond any single bill, the work I care most about continuing is the appropriations work outlined above. That does not happen automatically, and it does not happen for a county without someone at the table when the budget is written. New Hanover County spent years sending more to Raleigh than it got back. Keeping that turned around, through infrastructure, education and coastal resilience, is the priority I would carry into another term.
Q: What will you do to hold industry accountable for pollution of toxic chemicals, such as PFAS or 1,4 dioxane, in the water or air? Will you support enforcing additional maximum contaminant levels of PFAS compounds, aside from PFOA or PFOS; how, if so?
A: Polluters should pay for what they discharge and the people downstream should not be the ones financing the cleanup. That principle has driven every Water Safety Act I have written since 2018.
What that has meant in practice: dedicated funding for treatment and monitoring, research capacity through the UNC Collaboratory so our standards rest on North Carolina science rather than borrowed assumptions, and this year, $45 million for the Emerging Contaminant Mitigation Fund, plus a moratorium on new interbasin transfers out of the Cape Fear.
The September settlement with Chemours, DuPont and Corteva sends $600 million into this state, including $55 million to that mitigation fund and roughly $380 million to local governments across the basin. That is real money, and it exists because the legal and regulatory pressure was sustained rather than abandoned after the news cycle ended. It is also not sufficient. CFPUA’s separate claim is still pending for the $43 million granular activated carbon system it installed in 2022, a cost its ratepayers absorbed through rate increases for contamination they did not cause. On additional maximum contaminant levels: yes, and the need is now urgent.
EPA has proposed rescinding the enforceable federal limits for GenX, PFHxS, PFNA and PFBS, and delaying PFOA and PFOS compliance from 2029 to 2031. GenX is a Cape Fear problem before it is anyone else’s — it came from one facility on our river. If Washington will not set an enforceable limit on a compound discharged into our drinking water supply, North Carolina should set its own. The mechanism is available. DEQ and the Environmental Management Commission can adopt state standards, and the Collaboratory research we have funded for years exists precisely to support numeric standards that will survive challenges. I have committed to developing those numeric standards, and that is what the next Water Safety Act should carry.
On 1,4-dioxane: a Superior Court judge upheld DEQ’s authority this February to write limits into wastewater permits, over the objection of upstream dischargers. That authority should be used, and if litigation continues to chip at it, the General Assembly should make it explicit in statute. The principle is identical — a utility in Wilmington should not be taxing its customers to remove what a discharger upstream chose to put in the river.
Q: Is the public school allotment formula sufficient or does the legislature need to change it? Explain what your plan is for this issue.
A: It is not sufficient and I have started the process to change it.
North Carolina still funds public schools through dozens of separate allotments, most tied to positions rather than students. The formula is opaque even to the people administering it, the money does not follow the child, and a superintendent cannot give a parent a straight answer about what is spent at their school. It also produces perverse results: districts with similar students receive materially different resources for reasons nobody can defend on the merits. The State Budget included a provision from Senate Bill 990 which directs a work group through the Collaboratory’s Office of Learning Research to design the transition to weighted student funding, consolidating non-teaching support into per-pupil allocations, moving teacher pay from position-based to dollar-based allotments, folding need-based funds into per-student figures. The transition has to be phased so no district falls off a cliff, which is exactly why it needs to be designed before it is enacted rather than after.
But the formula is only half of it — and I have written about the other half publicly. If we are going to send dollars on a per-student basis, taxpayers are owed four things alongside that change:
First, accountability that measures growth across multiple indicators rather than a single proficiency score, so a school serving students who arrive behind gets credit for moving them.
Second, postsecondary outcome tracking: employment, wages, credential completion; so we know what a North Carolina diploma is actually worth rather than guessing.
Third, school-level budget transparency. If the money follows the student, a parent should be able to see the spending at their child’s school without filing a records request.
Fourth, recalibration every four to five years. Any weighted formula reflects assumptions about cost that drift. Building the review into the statute prevents the weights from calcifying into another set of numbers nobody can justify. Funding reform without the accountability half is just moving money around with a new label on it.
Q: State law allows law enforcement agencies, including the State Bureau of Investigation, to store data captured by license plate reading cameras (Flock cameras) for up to 90 days. Since the CEO of Flock cameras has now recommended agencies reduce the time camera data is stored down to seven days, would you make it a priority to change state law to follow this recommendation?
A: Seven days deserves serious consideration and I am open to shortening the window. Here is the test I would apply: What retention period do these cameras actually need to solve the crimes they were deployed to solve? That question belongs to the SBI, sheriffs and district attorneys who work these cases. If investigators can demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of usable hits come within days of an incident, the statute should reflect that reality rather than a number chosen for administrative convenience.
The existing structure already handles the longer cases; data tied to a specific investigation can be preserved by search warrant or sworn preservation request identifying particular cameras, plates and dates. Shortening the general retention window does not touch that.
What concerns me more than the retention period is misuse and here I would go further than current law. The statute requires written policies, access controls, training and audits, and the data is confidential and cannot be used for traffic enforcement. Those are meaningful guardrails. But guardrails without consequences are advisory. If someone uses a statewide surveillance network to track a private citizen for their own purposes, that should carry real penalties, including criminal exposure and certification consequences, not an internal reprimand.
The legitimacy of this tool depends entirely on public confidence that it is being used for the purpose authorized. Every misuse case spends down that confidence and no retention period fixes that.
So: open to a shorter window, informed by what investigators need and paired with stiffer criminal penalties for abuse.
Q: Do you support how the film grant program currently operates? Do you think the $31-million annual cap on award disbursements should be lifted? Do you think the General Assembly should allocate more money to the program?
A: I tripled North Carolina’s film incentive from where I started in the NC Senate and made it recurring, so let me be direct about what actually went wrong this year: It was not the design of the program, it was the accounting. The Department of Commerce had obligated roughly $106 million against a $31 million annual appropriation.
The program has operated since 2019 on a cash-flow basis, approving grants against projected future appropriations rather than cash in hand. This is contrary to the law that governs the program. Even so, that worked through the pandemic and the strikes, when fewer productions were drawing down. It stopped working when production returned to normal volume, and the department discovered it had committed roughly three years of future appropriations. I secured an additional $15 million this year on top of the $31 million recurring, which shored up existing obligations to some extent.
Going forward, I would support a combination: additional non-recurring appropriations layered on top of recurring dollars, paired with policy changes that impose genuine accountability on how commitments are made. The second half is not a throwaway. A program capable of obligating three years of future appropriations in violation of the State Budget Act is a program that will break again. Commitments have to be matched against available funds, with reporting the legislature can see in something close to real time.
On the annual number: I am not opposed to more money and this year I put more in. But I want the structure fixed in the same bill. The enhancements in this year’s budget — feature caps from $7 million to $20 million, television seasons from $15 million to $25 million — make North Carolina genuinely competitive for large productions, and they also draw the fund down faster. That combination makes the accounting discipline more important, not less.
I have consistently championed North Carolina’s film industry and backed that support with action by tripling the incentive and making its funding recurring. For four decades, this industry has helped sustain our region’s economy and provided careers for the talented crews who call it home. These are people I represent, and I will keep fighting to ensure they can build their futures here.
What the industry needs most is predictability across multi-year productions, and predictability is a function of a program that does not run out of money halfway through a commitment. I did not spend years increasing and supporting this incentive into something that competes in order to watch an accounting failure send our crews’ work to other states. I intend to fix both the money and the mechanism.
Q: Would you support rolling back the sales and use tax exemption for data centers to build in North Carolina? Explain.
A: It needs a serious review and I expect the General Assembly to take that up.
The exemption was enacted in 2006 for internet data centers and expanded in 2015. Picture what the legislature was looking at then: server farms storing and serving data, a moderate power draw, a facility that fit inside the existing grid without anyone rethinking generation. An AI training facility is a categorically different use. And the permanent employment per dollar of capital investment is low compared with nearly any other use we incentivize. The statute did not contemplate this because, in the form we are now seeing, it did not exist. The words “data center” carried forward; the thing behind the words changed entirely.
The legislature repealed the electricity exemption this year, effective for billing periods starting in August. What remains is the exemption for equipment, software and support infrastructure. Whether that should continue to reach AIscale facilities — and on what terms, with what job and investment commitments attached — is the question in front of us.
Separately from the tax question, there is a principle I would hold to regardless of how the exemption review comes out: an AI data center located in North Carolina should not shift its costs onto ratepayers. The customers who pay that bill are households and small businesses who had no say in the decision and get no benefit from it. Whatever the General Assembly decides about the sales tax exemption, the cost of serving these facilities belongs with the facilities. If a company wants to build here, it should pay the full cost of the power it takes.
To be clear about what I am not saying: I am not against these facilities locating in North Carolina and I am not looking to punish an industry. If they come here on their own economics, that is a market decision and a good one. The question is narrower and fairer than that — whether an incentive written for one use should carry over automatically to a fundamentally different one, without the General Assembly ever revisiting it. My answer is that it should not carry over automatically. It should be reviewed on the facts as they exist now.
Q: The current gas-tax funding system for the NCDOT no longer seems to efficiently support necessary projects – including the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge replacement. Is tolling the answer; what other funding mechanisms would you support? Would you vote on legislation to allow the Turnpike Authority to toll the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge if it comes before you?
A: The premise deserves one correction before the answer because the General Assembly has acted. Combined Highway Fund and Highway Trust Fund appropriations have gone from $3.16 billion in FY 2011-12 to $5.95 billion in FY 2026-27 — an 88 percent increase. A large share of that came from redirecting general sales tax revenue into transportation, phased from 2 percent to 4 and then to 6 percent; that transfer is now $705 million a year, roughly 12 percent of DOT revenue. And for vehicles that use the roads without buying fuel, we added annual registration fees: $214.50 for electric vehicles and $107.25 for plug-in hybrids. What that growth largely did was keep pace with construction cost inflation. It did not build the capacity to absorb a billion-dollar bridge on top of everything else.
The structural problem is still real. The motor fuels tax funds about half of state transportation revenue and erodes as the fleet gets more efficient. The highway use tax — 3 percent on title transfers — has not changed since 1989 and is among the lowest in the country. The federal gas tax has not moved since 1993. Modernizing those sources is the honest conversation, and it is the only path that does not end with tolling every major crossing in the state one at a time.
On this bridge: Nobody here wants a toll and I am not going to pretend otherwise about where I start. The replacement runs roughly $1.1 billion, with about $242 million federal and $85 million state committed, leaving roughly $770 million unfunded and a WMPO decision due by February 2027 to keep the federal grant. My effort goes to closing that gap — more state commitment through the STI process, a harder push on our congressional delegation for a crossing that carries freight for a state port, and a regional option if one works on this timeline.
Would I vote to authorize the Turnpike Authority to toll the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge? Not over the objection of this community. If the people who cross it to go to work are against it, that should settle the matter in Raleigh.
Q: Would you vote to implement an independent commission to draw legislative and congressional lines? Why or why not?
A: I would consider it, under conditions. The state constitution assigns redistricting to the General Assembly. I do not think that assignment should be changed by ordinary statute because a statute can be repealed by the next majority that finds it inconvenient. If North Carolina is going to move this authority, it should be done by constitutional amendment ratified by the voters. Otherwise we will simply add another item to the list of things that change every time control of the chamber changes, which is the opposite of what proponents say they want.
The harder question is what “independent” actually means in practice. Every commission proposal I have reviewed still requires someone to select the commissioners and the selection power is where the politics migrates. A panel that appears balanced on its face but is chosen through partisan channels has not removed politics from redistricting. It has relocated it somewhere less visible and less accountable, and voters cannot remove a commissioner they never elected. Other states have run this experiment with mixed results, and the litigation has not stopped in any of them.
So my conditions are these:
First, constitutional amendment with voter ratification, not a statute.
Second, criteria written into the amendment itself — contiguity, county and precinct integrity, compliance with federal law — rather than left to the commission to invent.
Third, a selection structure that does not quietly advantage either party, with the appointment mechanism spelled out in the text.
Fourth, a defined path for what happens when the commission deadlocks or its maps are struck down, because that contingency is where these systems usually fail. If a proposal meets that standard, I will look at it seriously and say so publicly. What I will not support is transferring a constitutional responsibility to an unelected body through a statute, on the theory that this year’s appointment process will stay fair after the people who designed it are gone.
Q: In terms of economic development, North Carolina gets high marks for business, but middling and lower marks for worker satisfaction and quality of life. What would you do to improve these metrics for state residents?
A: I would start by asking what those rankings actually measure. Most of these indexes blend together things like commute times, weather, cultural amenities and survey sentiment, weighted according to the judgment of whoever built the index. They are worth reading, but they are not a report card, and I would be careful about accepting a middling grade from a methodology nobody voted on.
The measure I put more weight on is where people are choosing to live. North Carolina has been among the fastest-growing states in the country for more than a decade, and this region has grown faster than the state as a whole. People move here from places that score well on those indexes, and they bring their families and their businesses with them. That is a judgment about quality of life made with a moving truck, and I trust it more than a composite score.
None of that is an argument for complacency because growth creates its own pressures and those pressures are exactly where the state can help. Housing is the first one. It is the largest line in most family budgets, and the constraint is supply — lot sizes, permitting timelines and local rules that make it hard to build anything a teacher or a paramedic can afford.
Second, health care access, where the durable fix is training capacity because clinicians practice near where they train. That is why I have supported UNCW’s medical school and the nursing and allied health programs at CFCC and UNCW.
Third, child care, which is a workforce issue as much as a family one.
Fourth, water quality, which is why I keep returning to PFAS — quality of life here is not abstract, it is whether you trust what comes out of the tap.
Fifth, wages, where this year’s budget delivered the largest teacher and law enforcement raises in nearly two decades, and that work is not finished.
I would add one thing: Most of what makes a place worth living in is not produced in Raleigh. It is built by employers who invest here, teachers who stay, churches and nonprofits that fill gaps no agency reaches, and neighbors who show up after a storm. The state’s job is to get the fundamentals right — safety, schools, water, and infrastructure. Then, let this community be what it already is, which is a place people are working hard to get into.
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