North Carolina

Travel to Raleigh and patiently sit in legislative hearings, if you want to know what lobbyists are doing, because NC fails in every basic measure of disclosure. Lobbyists do not have to disclose bills numbers or positions, or exact compensation; and NC does not provide video or written records of hearings, making it the only state besides West Virginia to fail in all four of these categories.

In 2022, Courtney Crowder of the lobbying and public relations firm APCO was a lobbyist for Duke Energy, operator of coal- and gas-fired power plants. Crowder also lobbied for the National Resources Defense Council in 2022. NRDC’s reliance on fossil fuel lobbyists was flagged by a July 2023 article in the Guardian in which Meghan Sahli-Wells, the former mayor of Culver City, California, said, “You shouldn’t be funding the people who are poisoning you.”

North Carolina’s weak disclosure system makes it hard to know what, exactly, Crowder and APCO were doing on behalf of these two clients.

Best feature: kudos to the NC Secretary of State’s office for providing one of the few state pages that asks “What can we do to improve this page for you?”

Worst feature: neither video archives or written records of lobbyist appearances before committees are available.

Additional Findings

Annual summaries of expenditures by all lobbyists are available. But as of mid-June 2024, the latest year available was 2022.