‘A lot of this job is making bad legislation less bad:’ A Q&A With State Sen. Mike Woodard

After a failed bid last fall to become Durham’s next mayor, longtime state Sen. Mike Woodard is running to maintain his seat in the North Carolina General Assembly.

Woodard has spent almost 20 years in public office. He was first elected to the Durham City Council in 2005, and held that position until he was elected to the state Senate in 2012.

For the first time in 12 years, Woodard faces a Democratic challenger for his state Senate seat. Sophia Chitlik, his opponent, is running as a more progressive alternative to Woodard. 

Some voters have criticized Woodard for not taking a harder stand against Republicans in the state legislature, while his defenders, and Woodard, believe his experience and relationships in the General Assembly help strengthen bipartisan efforts to pass legislation.

The INDY spoke with Woodard recently to learn more about his campaign for reelection to his District 22 seat. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose to run for re-election?

There’s still a lot of things that I’ve worked on over my 12 years that I’d like to see through on transportation, environment, and economic policy.

2024 is going to be a crazy election. There’s just no doubt about that. Realistically, you’re gonna have six or seven brand new people in the Council of State. Who knows what January 2025 is going to look like. For me, in representing Durham and thinking about the region and the state, it needs an experienced leader who knows a lot of the players already in the cabinet and the council of state level down into the departments.

How have you adapted your approach to policy making over time in the state Senate?

This place runs on seniority, just like [U.S.] Congress and many other places. So it helps to build your knowledge and those relationships in the legislature and the departments you work with. Now, I am able to pick up the phone and call secretaries and often have them pick up the call right away. I can think of three or four secretaries who I talk to a few times a month on policy matters.

When I first got here, Gov. [Pat] McCrory was the Republican governor, he had his cabinet secretaries. Although I knew some of them, I had to build relationships with them and actually got to work with some of them even though they were difficult to work with because of their policies.

Political polarization has increased across the country, including in North Carolina. How have you managed to get legislation passed in a polarized environment?

A progressive group asked, ‘How do you get progressive things into legislation?’ There’s no science to it. It’s an art. But it starts with that personal relationship. I’m the third-most senior Democrat and the eighth-most senior senator in the whole chamber.

I work with somebody very closely in the Republican caucus. He has family members who live in Durham and I know his family. So we start there on that personal level. And this is a guy I disagree with vehemently on some issues. And we have fought in committee famously. There’s videotapes of us going at it. At the same time, he and I have written five or six bills that have been really good bills. Some of them are really important: COVID funding, energy, life sciences, revenue bills. But on some of his other policies like LGBTQ issues and education, we’re not even close. So, what I’ve learned over time and how I’ve evolved is agree when you can, work together when you can, and when you can’t, be able to look that person in the eye and say, we just won’t be able to work on this.

One of the bills that the INDY criticized me for [in its endorsements for Durham mayor last fall] is one of those bills. I was asked to work on a bill with a guy down the hall. He came to present it to me and said, “Hey, I’m working on this bill. We’d like you to be a Democratic cosponsor,” and I looked at the bill and said I can’t do it. It’s not a bill I can support. But because I had a relationship with him, when the House version of the bill came over, I sat down with [Republican state Senator] Steve [Jarvis] and negotiated with him on that bill at the request of the Sustainable Energy Association and the Environmental Defense Fund. They asked me to help negotiate the schedule of the implementation. We got it down from a three-to-five year implementation to a mandate that they had to take up one section of this bill in a year and three months. That was a huge win for us. So, that’s an example of, because I have a relationship with Jarvis, I told him what I can do and what I can’t do and we negotiated.

You’ve been criticized for overriding Gov. Cooper’s veto and co-sponsoring Republican-led legislation. How would you respond to constituents who believe you aren’t representing progressive values?

When we’re in a super minority, as we’ve been these last couple of years, bills are going to pass. Yeah, it would’ve been easier to sit on the sidelines and just push the no button. But when you’re approached, as I often am, by groups who say, ‘Do you mind helping us negotiate this?’ The Center for Responsible Lending and the Justice Center both came and sat right here [in my office] and asked me to go negotiate that bill. We negotiated for a year. We couldn’t get it done in a short session. So we spent a year negotiating that bill. And I got exactly what they wanted. Not a great bill. But we all agreed, held hands, and sang Kumbaya. You know, oftentimes, a lot of this job is making bad legislation less bad. But how do you explain that on a bumper sticker or a mailer or in the People’s Alliance questionnaire? It’s a lot easier for a critic or a political opponent to say, “He overrode the governor’s veto. That’s why I’m running against him.” It’s not that simple. It’s a lot more nuanced.

What piece of legislation are you particularly proud of putting forward?

An early bill that I worked on that I’m particularly proud of the outcome was when we had the coal ash spill in 2014. When we started working on the bill, we had a bipartisan group figuring out how we were going to handle the coal ash cleanup. Republican leadership pulled the Republicans off of our bipartisan committee and went to write their own bill. So we had two versions: a Republican version and a Democratic version. They were 60-70 percent the same. Ultimately, I worked with my caucus to support the Republican bill being that we were in the super minority in 2014. Would I have liked more? Absolutely. The crazy thing about that was in the final negotiation, which took a few years, Michael Regan, our [U.S.] EPA administrator, then our DEQ secretary, called me on New Year’s Day 2018. He had been negotiating all through the holiday. They were sending out a press release on January 2, that in their final negotiation with Duke [Energy], they had gotten probably 90 percent of what was in our first Democratic bill.

How will your approach in the General Assembly change with the turnover in leadership after this year’s elections?

Let’s start with the Council of State. I’m scared to death thinking about the kinds of people that Mark Robinson would appoint to those boards. We could turn back years of good policy and progress that we made just like that. Now, what is interesting is that this session, we passed a couple of bills that take away some of the governor’s power to appoint those boards. We flipped the DOT boards. The General Assembly currently appoints six seats, the governor gets 14. They flipped that so now the General Assembly gets 14, the Governor gets six. That still scares me a lot. Who’s going to be sitting there making the final decisions on what projects get approved?

What did you learn from your experience running in last year’s Durham mayoral race?

I always represented Durham. So the question, “Oh, you’re coming home?” I’m like, I never left. My job has just been in Raleigh. It’s a lot of the same constituents, just the parts of the county that I represented in the legislature were not obviously part of the city election, and I ran in parts of the city that were [state Senator Natalie] Murdock’s district. But those are the neighborhoods where my wife pastors a church in Southeast Durham near [NC] Central campus. That was not in my Senate district. But I know those neighborhoods and I’ve represented a lot of those folks. It’s all the same people and organizations and issues.

Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on Twitter or send an email to jlaidlaw@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com. 

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