SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 2 2022 18 Q&A with Senator Michael Lee BEN BROWN NCLM Communications and Multimedia Strategist Senator Michael Lee represents the Wilmington area and nearby beach towns, giving him a mix of mainland and coastal issues to discuss in the North Carolina Senate. To learn their common denominators, and to break out the factors uniquely affecting individual communities, Senator Lee relies on healthy communication with the local leaders in his district. Those distinctions register. While his New Hanover County district includes one of the more populous parts of the state—Wilmington—Senator Lee has direct appreciation for the qualities of communities of different sizes, having grown up in Dunn in the 1970s—a place his family moved to simply on a positive review his father heard about the community. Senator Lee today lives in Wilmington with his wife, Heidi; together they have four children: Miles, Sydney, Sam, and Sawyer. Southern City spent some time with the senator in late April, just ahead of the 2022 short session of the General Assembly. ˘˘˘ With the short session starting in May, what do you think is important right now for the General Assembly? ML: I’m always focused on education issues. Education, mental health, healthcare, and economic development. Jobs, essentially. How do you prepare for a session? ML: It depends if you’re talking about a long session or a short session. Typically, those things that come up during an existing session, you need more time to do the research and talk to folks about it. A lot of times in the interim, that’s when you’ll do that. Because, as you know, you have deadlines for filing and crossover, and sometimes the issues don’t really come up until later, so you end up using the interim to do more research and of course you’ve got your oversight committees that you’re on. And meeting folks from around the state, and honestly around the country, about what other states are doing. If it’s an issue that we’re looking at here, sometimes we will survey other states and then I will call legislators in some of those other states and talk to them about what they looked at, what were some of the issues they had, and if they could do it differently, what would they do. That kind of thing. What are you seeing ahead for yourself? ML: When I first got into this … everything revolved around education. While leadership did not have me involved in education in my very first session, I was able to work my way into it in my first term, and then in my second term I was a co-chair for the Senate Education Committee. And so, I was just getting my legs under me because, as you know, it’s a significant piece of policy and budget. So, I’ve picked that back up and really moving forward with what I think are some significant reforms on the education front. That’s where my passion is. They bring me into a lot of other areas, especially in the context of land-use and zoning, because I know a lot about it. So, I block and tackle and help on issues that I know about. There’s a lot of healthcare stuff that I work on, but my passion lies in education. What got you into education as a focus? ML: Being father to four kids. Are you native to North Carolina? ML: I grew up in Dunn. I was born in New York. My father ended up in the Air Force. My father’s from Taiwan, my mom’s from New York. So, we moved from New York to Florida, back to New York, then to Dunn…. You know, it was different. My dad was from Taiwan moved to the states with a heavy Asian accent. My mom’s from New York, she had an accent. We moved to Dunn. And because he’s a physician, it’s a small town, the family picture is on the front page of the newspaper, “New Doctor Comes to Town.” I don’t think I appreciated how different it was in the mid-1970s when we moved there. What brought the family to Dunn specifically and what was different about it? ML: My father was a physician and a surgeon. He immigrated from Taiwan and was doing his residency here in the United States, up in New York. He ended up meeting my mom and never went back to Taiwan to live. I was born in New York and my dad at some point … was in the Air Force, for just one tour. We were stationed THE LEAGUE’S QUARTERLY LEGISLATOR Q&A continues on page 20
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