5 Things to Know: Company Loses $100K After Truck Spills Cash
...and four more stories from Sept. 10-16, 2023
Company Loses $100K After Truck Spills Cash
A CMPD report on Friday confirmed that $100,000 went missing after an armored truck spilled boxes of money onto the street in north Charlotte on Thursday.
Queen City Nerve arrived on the scene just a matter of minutes after an armored GardaWorld truck reportedly dropped three to four boxes apparently filled with cash onto Sunset Road near the I-77 exchange. A witness who came upon the scene before police arrived said that one of the boxes opened and bystanders flocked to the scene to grab cash.
The witness told Queen City Nerve they say people running from the scene “hugging bundles of money” before police arrived.
The incident occurred around 10 a.m. on Thursday in front of the Starbucks. The truck attempted to turn onto I-77 but stopped on the entrance when the driver realized they had dropped the boxes. It eventually turned around and parked behind the boxes, helping to block off traffic on Sunset Road.
The incident was reported as theft by CMPD, which wrote that “suspects stole money that had fallen off a vehicle,” in its report.
Michael Morgan Enters Gubernatorial Race
Michael Morgan, the former NC Supreme Court Justice who stepped down from his seat on the NC Supreme Court earlier this month, announced Tuesday that he will run against NC Attorney General Josh Stein in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
“My vision is to provide all North Carolinians with fair opportunities in which they may thrive and succeed,” Morgan wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “I am running on a platform that calls for a change to the system that allows the working people, children and families of North Carolina to be ignored and taken for granted.”
As broken down on his website, his platform focuses on education, health care, gun violence and criminal justice reform.
Born in Cherry Point, Morgan later moved to New Bern, where he integrated Trent Park Elementary School as an 8-year-old fifth grader in 1964. He was elected in November 2016 to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina and is the only person in the history of North Carolina to have served in four different judgeships.
Gov. Roy Cooper has already endorsed Attorney General Stein to replace him. The primaries are scheduled for March 2024.
North Charlotte Killing Expected to Be Ruled Justified
Charlotte saw two homicides this week, including one that is expected to be ruled as justified.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. on Monday, police responded to a shooting call on Highlander Court in the Derita area of north Charlotte, where they found 58-year-old Saffire Pok Insomphou dead from a gunshot wound. In CMPD’s report, investigators stated that they are not looking for any suspects in this case and no charges are being sought.
Shortly after 3 p.m. the following day, police responded to a shooting call on West 9th Street near the Pinewood Cemetery in Uptown, where they found 56-year-old Kenneth McKinnon dead from a gunshot wound. Police on Friday announced the arrest of a 27-year-old man who’s been charged with first-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon for McKinnon’s killing.
McKinnon’s murder is the 6th homicide tracked by Queen City Nerve in Charlotte this year.
CMS Releases MWSBE Numbers
A presentation at Tuesday night’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) Board of Education meeting gave a glimpse at the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
According to the presentation, given by CMS DEI director Chiquitha Lloyd, CMS spent $120.3 million with minority-, women- and small business-owned (MWSBE) firms in the fiscal year that ended July 1. Overall, MWSBE firms accounted for 23.4% of eligible CMS spending, which is tracked in four categories: construction, architecture/engineering, contracted services, and goods.
According to Lloyd, nearly half of the district’s construction spending in 2022-2023 (44.2%) was with MSWBE firms. In architecture/engineering, it was 9.5%; in contracted services, 13.3%; and just over 10% of CMS spending for goods went to MWSBE firms.
New State Poverty Statistics Released
New poverty statistics released by the NC Budget & Tax Center (NCBTC) on Thursday showed that North Carolina’s poverty rate declined from 13.4% in 2021 to 12.8% in 2022.
“While this was a statistically significant decline,” read a release from NCBTC, “still too many people in North Carolina are living in poverty.”
“To seize the momentum of NC’s poverty rate decline, policymakers must shift their focus from cutting taxes for the wealthy and profitable corporations to the work of passing proven policies that fight poverty and make life better and more affordable for more North Carolinians,” stated Alexandra Sirota, executive director of NCBTC, in the release.
The findings came from preliminary analysis by the NC Budget & Tax Center of new data on poverty, income, and health coverage in 2022, released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The poverty rate for children in North Carolina is 17.2%, statistically unchanged from 2021, according to the Census Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure (OPM), but the OPM doesn’t account for factors like the cost of living, essential expenses, regional differences, or changes in tax and social safety net policies in 2022, when pandemic relief programs were allowed to lapse.
For that reason, the release states, researchers suggest using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which paints a more comprehensive picture. While the OPM shows poverty remaining flat nationally — as with North Carolina’s child poverty rate — the SPM reveals poverty’s sharpest increase in more than 50 years.
The SPM is not available on an annual basis at the state level.
The expanded federal Child Tax Credit was believed to be responsible for a major portion of the record reduction in child poverty in 2021 across the country, lifting 2.1 million children out of poverty. Congress’s decision to let it expire at the end of 2021 is a major contributor to increase in national poverty levels in 2022, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).
Had Congress continued the American Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit increase in 2022, about 3 million fewer children would have experienced poverty in 2022, preventing more than half of this year’s countrywide increase, the release claimed.
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