Conservatives Arise! Group Hears From Dale Folwell

When you go to listen to people who are running for public office, you rarely hear a story that is really unique. Tuesday night at the dinner in Greenville for the Conservatives Arise! PAC, Dale Folwell told a story that got everyone laughing. The background to the story is the number of investigations going on into political corruption where lobbyists have paid for lavish meals and other fancy benefits to our elected officials. The background is impacted by the new lobbying law which makes it unlikely that anyone in the legislature will take anything because of the uncertainty of what is legal in this new enviroment.




One of the best stories going around is about State Representative Dale Folwell, who is well known for refusing PAC money, and for being a frugal individual. He is one of the few representatives who still eats free! How does he do it? Dale frequents one of the local sandwich shops and hangs around talking until someone he knows shows up to get in line. Following them through the line, when Dale gets to the cashier, he gives his friend a two for one coupon to give to the cashier so that Dale gets his sandwich free.

The story was first reported in the Winston-Salem Journal in a article by Paul O'Connor "From fancy fare to meat and potatoes".

This is the type of man we need for State Treasurer, which is the office Dale is running for.

Another story about Dale involves one of the bills he worked hard to get passed. The State of North Carolina has for quite some time spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each year notifying people whose insurance has lapsed by mail . . . . asking them to mail in their license tag. Of course it is clear most of them already knew about this from their insurance company. The mailing notice did nothing to stop people from driving . . . because no tags ever got mailed in. With a minor change in the law requiring three computer systems to share information, the police now have this information promptly when they check a license tag. The police can therefore seize the tags themselves, stopping the people from driving uninsured. The cost is a fraction of the previous useless process and resulted in 29,000 tags being picked up the first year. The secondary result is fewer North Carolina citizens being damaged financially when these uninsured motorists get involved in accidents.

Dale Folwell has a knack for finding cost effective improvements to government like this. It seems to stem from a natural attitude of being frugal. It also helps that he is very smart with the kind of common sense ability that you find in someone whose background includes being a motorcycle mechanic among a number of other blue collar jobs.

Later Dale got an advanced degree in accounting and worked as a financial consultant, so he has the technical knowledge to go with his common sense.

Dale was a wealth of knowledge about the workings of the North Carolina legislature Tuesday, and everyone came away from the evening quite impressed.