We think of the past as a simpler time, and indeed it was — specifically 2008, when private companies offered cable service and Internet access, cities contented themselves with matters like zoning issues and sign ordinances, and never did those twains meet. Well, they have now. The city of Wilson borrowed $28 million to build its own fiber-optic communications system, other cities have similar plans in development, and the General Assembly has been called upon to sort out the rules. Trouble is, this is one of those bizarre moments when everyone on all sides of the issue is wrong. Or, if you have a sunnier view of the world than I do, everyone is right.

It’s helpful to recall that our modern era isn’t really all that far removed from the time when electricity and indoor plumbing were absent from great chunks of the country. In fact, whenever I feel the need to establish my bona fides as a common man, I point out that childhood weekend visits to my grandparents’ home in rural Georgia involved trips to the outhouse and baths in a galvanized metal tub on the back porch. It’s odd, then, that just a generation or two later the absence of a top-speed Internet connection is considered a societal failing on par with that level of impoverishment — a void so unacceptable that government feels compelled to fill it. (Finland, in fact, has declared broadband access a legal right.) Odder still is the notion that Wilson County, where the state’s first municipally owned cable TV/phone/broadband Internet system became operational two years ago, has a poverty rate 50% higher than the rest of North Carolina. Those two facts, when joined in the same sentence, have a certain Marie Antoinette-ish quality to them: What to do when so many find it hard to meet basic needs? Why, make sure they can download video files quickly!

But the chronic urge among politicians to spend money and time on lesser problems as larger ones go unresolved is a topic for another day. Instead, let’s do this debate-style. I’ll pose the question — should local governments compete with private suppliers of cable TV/Internet access? — and argue both sides myself. (I’m a reflexive contrarian, so taking any opposite position, even simultaneously, is second nature.)

Yes, absolutely. Aside from anarchists — and affected property owners — no one objects when government undertakes big projects that benefit all: roads, dams, water and sewer, etc. A fiber-optic system is just another ambitious betterment of society. Besides, the legality of this was hashed out in the 1930s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Tennessee Valley Authority could muscle into the power business, competing directly with private companies. Furthermore, the cable/Internet access business isn’t one that lends itself to vigorous competition, considering that both the up front capital costs to hard-wire a community and the ongoing tech upgrades to the system are discouragingly steep — meaning that consumers rarely have an actual competitive choice. And don’t forget that the company with the most to lose when North Carolina towns get into that business is Time Warner Cable, which many people find easy to hate. (Such is the fate of every near-monopoly; it comes with the territory.) Except for the most committed free-marketer, the prospect of Time Warner facing competition from a publicly owned system would seem like rough justice.

No, of course not. Anyone with the power to levy a tax tends to be a terrible businessman, because he is protected from the laws of supply and demand. Wilson’s two-year-old-fiber-optic system, called Greenlight, demonstrates how an operation that allegedly is entirely subscriber-financed in fact is cushioned by public money. To break even, Greenlight needs at least 30% of the city’s roughly 19,000 households and businesses signed on as customers, or about 5,600. To date, it has 4,900 or so — not enough to cover operations and debt service. To make up that shortfall, the city has dipped into its nest egg and borrowed money from its publicly owned natural-gas utility. Needless to say, a private company has no access to that comforting pool of public money. It has to cover a financial shortfall on its own or pass the cost along to customers. And to underscore the point that the game is rigged in favor of government, the city of Wilson also decided to triple the amount it charges Time Warner to hang cable from city-owned power poles — which would simultaneously saddle its competitor with higher costs and generate more income for a city budget stressed by Greenlight’s financial shortfalls. That’s a move any robber baron would be proud to sport on his résumé.

Having argued both sides, I’ll also award myself the right to cast the tie-breaking vote. But first, one final fact: Wilson built its system without asking voters whether they wanted it. In fact, a move in the General Assembly to require approval from voters before a city launched any such project died when municipal lobbyists pushed back. In the business world, executives pay close attention to the express wishes of their financial backers. In the political world, those financial backers are known as “taxpayers” — and if politicians want to run businesses, they ought to let their investors have a say in the matter. If they’re unwilling to do so, then the Nays have it.

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Not long ago, a crowd in the hundreds — large by the standards of your usual Raleigh political protest — showed up at the Legislative Building. A few milled about the halls. Others tried to buttonhole lawmakers. Some stood outside waving signs, a few reading: “Ban the NC Senate.” They had come to try to save video poker — or rather its latest incarnation, those “Internet sweepstakes cafes” popping up across the state. Many of the protesters must have had no inkling of recent Tar Heel political history, else they would have known, standing outside in the oppressive heat, the only thing they would accomplish was working up a good sweat.

The key event of that history, as it related to their cause, revolved around the previous speaker of the North Carolina House, a man who held that post a record-tying four terms. Jim Black, the mumbling optometrist from Matthews, a Charlotte suburb, became one of the most powerful people in the state. He was once the legislative champion of the video poker industry. Today, he’s in prison. Those two facts aren’t unrelated.

The probe that sent him to the pen was wide-ranging, and the criminal charges to which he ultimately pleaded guilty in 2007 had to do with taking cash from a trio of chiropractors looking for legislative favors. That exchange in a restaurant bathroom may be the basis behind the public-corruption charges, but the FBI investigation began with video poker and the thousands of dollars in donations he took in from an industry operating on the fringes of the law. As much as Black’s former colleagues in the General Assembly would like to forget about it, they haven’t. In 2006, a year before he would resign his House seat in disgrace, legislators voted to ban video poker. A year later, the machines began appearing again in convenience stores, operating as computer sweepstakes games, with customers buying prepaid cards. In 2008, legislators outlawed them again.

But like Ahab trying to kill his white whale, legislators can’t seem to strike a final, fatal blow. Court decisions in three counties last year helped to revive the machine operators and their games. (One ruling has been overturned. Two others are on appeal.) The judges ruled that the ban didn’t cover Internet sweepstakes cafes, where purchasers ostensibly paid not to gamble but for Internet time to play the games. Before long, “cafes” could be found in once-shuttered clothing stores, old warehouses and in strip malls built a few years ago at the height of the real-estate boom.

Operators say they employ 10,000 people in 900 parlors across the state. In trying to save those businesses, they did something rare for any industry: They asked for regulation and taxation, touting the tax revenue that the machines could generate — as much as $500 million a year — as a way for a cash-strapped state to balance its budget.

If the Black corruption probe still haunts the state House, the will of Marc Basnight still prevails in the state Senate. The Dare County Democrat and longtime president pro tem of the upper chamber has never been a fan of video poker. A decade ago, he pushed the Senate to pass legislation prohibiting the games, telling about seeing a child left alone by a parent plugging quarters into a machine. Black and the House blocked the legislation. Ten years later, the House appeared poised to act first to undo those court rulings and ban video gaming a third time. Then House Democrats hesitated, some swayed by e-mails from the machine owners and their employees.

Basnight and his chamber were having none of it. In three days, the Senate stripped the contents from a House bill, rolled new language responding to the court rulings into it, moved the bill through a committee and passed it. A few days later, the protesters showed up at the Legislative Building. They failed to understand that the game was already over. A ghost, the revenant of a man who still lives but is no longer there, haunts the House. On July 7, it passed the Senate bill 86-27.

Even before the House acted, industry officials predicted that the effort would be futile, that technology would again offer a loophole, a way around the ban, which takes effect Dec. 1. People who want to gamble are going to gamble, you know. Some machine owners also argue that legislators are only protecting their own gambling enterprise — the state lottery.

Perhaps the industry will prove correct about the futility. If so, state legislators will have at least made their intent clear to the courts. They don’t want small-scale casinos, no matter what you call them, popping up anywhere and everywhere. They also don’t want to be reminded of a past path to corruption by failing to make that intent clear.

Scott Mooneyham is the editor of The Insider, www.ncinsider.com.

Dad was the original bean counter,” says Jon Burns, president of Riverview Inn, a Charlotte restaurant that last year sold about a million dollars worth of seafood, fried in some 10 tons of oil. From his no-nonsense office, which is in stark contrast to the cheesy faux pirate fort of a restaurant his father opened on the banks of the Catawba River 64 years ago, Burns produces a spreadsheet.

“Going across and coming down is every item we have on the menu, every combination item, every child’s plate, every soft drink, every iced tea, every Coke, every toothpick,” says Irwen W. Burns Jr., who upon retiring earlier this year sold his share of the restaurant to his younger brother. “Our dad started it, and it’s gotten more extensive since then.” Like father, like sons. “This is probably 90% of our success. While most people wait till the end of the month or the end of the year to look at their figures, we do it every week. We take it down every day.”

“I don’t see how they do it,” says Raymond Stowe, who runs Catfish Cove — across the river in Gaston County — by the seat of his tan khakis. He insists that he has no idea what his margins are and, after all these years, is not about to start keeping track of them. His accounting method is pay as you go, something he learned from his mentor, Luther R. Lineberger, who started Gaston County’s legendary Lineberger’s Fish Fry in 1948. “I know when I get through every week, I got extra money. I pay for everything every week.” If there’s still money in the cash register, he’s doing OK. “We make money, and that’s the bottom line. And if you don’t make money, you don’t stay in business.”

Like Catfish Cove and Riverview Inn, homegrown fried-seafood restaurants across North Carolina are thriving. “We’ve been extremely fortunate, and our sales have been doing very well in this economy,” Irwen Burns says. And that in the face of rising seafood prices, the deepest recession in decades and the encroachment of fast-food outfits like Long John Silver’s and Captain D’s. One of the prime reasons is they give you so much food for the money, says Don R. Lineberger, the son of Luther Lineberger. “You need to serve your customers the kind of food they’re accustomed to, prepared the way they want it, for a reasonable price, delivered in quantity.”

But there’s another tradition that goes much deeper than the Carolina-fried, megaportion-plus-value formula. As North Carolina fish camps and fried-seafood restaurants have shifted into second- and third-generation ownership over the last six decades, those that have survived have owners who have followed the formula of the men who founded them in the 1940s. Just as Stowe or the Burns brothers would never dream of changing the recipe for the homemade tartar sauce, the slaw or buttermilk-batter, they would never think of tinkering with their mentors’ recipe for financial success. They run their restaurants just like their kitchens — the old-fashioned, fiscally conservative way.

Fish camps are a great example of the principle that a region’s distinctive cooking is often its working people’s food,” says Tom Hanchett, staff historian of the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. Just as Gaston County’s rivers and streams were once full of catfish and bream, its mills “had more looms and spindles than any other county in the U.S. — meaning more mill workers with a few coins to spend on a restaurant meal on Saturday nights.” It’s not surprising that fish camps took off there, Hanchett says, “nor surprising that they are found today anywhere in North Carolina where people value lots of good food for their dollar.”

And just what is a fish camp? “A family-oriented restaurant where they fry everything they see,” humorist Bill Melton wrote in a guide for Yankees in the Gaston Gazette. “I’ve been going to the same one [Riverside in Dallas] all my life,” he says. “I grew up going there every Friday night, and you saw everybody you knew.” (As Burns Jr. says of customer loyalty, “Fish camps in this area are very much like churches. People who go to the Baptist church won’t go to the Episcopal church.”) But aren’t people eating less fried food these days? “Lord, no,” Melton says. “Not here. Absolutely not.” Some might order grilled salmon for a week or so after bypass surgery. “But they’ll ease back after a while when they forget they’ve been that close to death.”

No story about fried fish would be complete without mentioning Calabash, the self-proclaimed Seafood Capital of the World, with only 1,400 residents but two dozen restaurants beneath its shady oaks. Calabash clearly came first, says Cathy Altman, a native of the coastal town who is president and CEO of the Brunswick County Chamber of Commerce. “Arguments often ensue over who opened the first fish camp here, the Becks or the Colemans. In the ’30s, both families already were holding outdoor oyster roasts. Both had moved inside by 1940 and had added the now-famous fried seafood to their repertoire.”

Wherever fish camps started, North Carolina can lay claim to the first use of the words “to designate a restaurant specializing in fish dishes,” according to Dictionary of American Regional English. “Often the lake on which the camp was situated provided the fish for a nearby restaurant, to which the term ‘fish camp’ came also to be applied. Later, other fish restaurants, many having no lake to draw upon, took on the name of ‘fish camp.’”

Eloise Armstrong Buthe, who is 77 and grew up on her father’s farm on the edge of the South Fork of the Catawba River, has no doubt about where Gaston County fish camps got their start. In the mid-1930s, she says in a short memoir that has not been published, her father, “Buck” Armstrong, along with Luther Lineberger and others working at Cramerton Mills “got together a big seine to skim through the river.” They caught mostly carp and catfish — no “high-society fish like tilapia, grouper, salmon and other yuppie-type fish.” As word got out and the Friday fish fry became a regular event, the men “tore down an old log barn from our home place, brought the logs down to the site and put together a long rectangular building, with a large rock fireplace at the north end.” (Someone’s house in Cramerton’s Lakewood neighborhood likely sits atop the site nowadays, she speculates.)

Don Lineberger, vice president of business development at First National Bank in Gastonia, vividly recalls “Armstrong’s hut,” as it was known. He helped his father, who generally did the frying, by cleaning fish and making slaw. (Adding a little apple to the cabbage was the secret ingredient). During World War II, the mill was the primary provider of the khaki uniform material used by the Army, and catching fish provided the hands a much-needed diversion. In 1948, Luther Lineberger started frying fish on weekends at his own place on New Hope Road, charging by the plate. “After 19 years on third shift at the mill, Dad decided he had enough business to quit his job and go full time into the fish-fry business.”

It was a rustic establishment, with fish fried over an outdoor brick fireplace and customers eating at picnic tables under a tin roof, cedar shavings underfoot. As the operation expanded, one thing never changed: Lineberger’s Fish Fry was always closed on Sundays. And it certainly didn’t serve beer; Gaston County was dry at the time. Don Lineberger, now 77, remembers painting a sign in the 1940s that said: “No Cursing, No Drinking Allowed.”

At the restaurant’s peak in the 1960s and ’70s, as many as 8,000 people a week ate there. The Linebergers had to hire off-duty cops to control traffic on Fridays and Saturdays. In 1998, 20 years after Lineberger’s death, the family sold the place to Angelo and Maria Spero, who refurbished and reopened it as Mayfair Seafood. Within a year of the sale, it burned to the ground, as wood-frame restaurants using a lot of hot, boiling oil sometimes will. (Riverview Inn burned down in 1972 and was rebuilt in the fall of 1973).

In 1958, 13-year-old Raymond Stowe had taken a job washing dishes at Lineberger’s. “When I got to be 18, I started cooking fish, and I cooked fish there until I was 45,” he says modestly. Don Lineberger, however, says Stowe was the restaurant’s general manager for many years until 1989, when he left to open Catfish Cove. Like Lineberger’s Fish Fry (and unlike Riverview Inn, which has a bar and buffet), his Belmont restaurant is a bare-bones, no-frills establishment. He credits the elder Lineberger for much of what he knows about running a fish camp. His recipe for slaw, cocktail sauce, catfish batter, fried shrimp and oysters — you name it — all came from “Paw” Lineberger. “All these fish camps up and down the road do the same thing,” he says. Success in the fried-seafood business does not involve secret recipes: It comes from working hard, making sure you get a good raw product at a decent price, whether it’s fresh or frozen, continuously taking care of it and not straying from tradition in the kitchen or at the cash register.

Stowe uses fresh oysters from the Gulf, fresh North Carolina catfish from the Pee Dee River, fresh whole flounder from up and down the Eastern Seaboard when it’s available and frozen flounder from the same place when it’s not. Shrimp, perch, flounder fillets and scallops are all flash-frozen. Food industry insiders say that few, if any, diners have palates sophisticated enough to be able to tell the difference between properly handled frozen and fresh seafood. “I’d say less than 5% of the dining public can tell the difference between fresh and frozen shrimp if they’re fried,” says Jay Pierce, who learned to cook seafood from Emeril Lagasse in New Orleans. Now the chef at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen in Greensboro, he says the popularity of fried seafood is why the fishing industry is geared toward providing frozen shrimp, flounder fillets, perch and other seafood from around the world at volume discount.

But buying seafood is tricky and requires years of experience, he adds, experience that gives veteran fish-camp owners an edge — especially when prices go up, as they have since the Gulf oil spill. Stowe says he always tries to buy enough shrimp in November — quite literally tons of it — to last him at least through May. (His wholesaler stores and delivers it as Stowe needs it.) Around May, with shrimp season beginning in June, he sometimes buys excess inventory from his suppliers to take him into summer, gambling that prices might come down then. He also buys flounder fillets by the ton since he uses 300 pounds in a week. What’s essential, he says, is having a good relationship with your supplier.

Stowe makes the most money on flounder fillets, freshwater perch and shrimp — all of which are frozen, volume-oriented products. For instance, all last winter and spring he used frozen medium-size, peeled and de-veined Gulf shrimp, which he had bought for less than $3 a pound. A whole order of “green shrimp,” as fish camps call them, weighs about a pound and is priced at $12.50 — giving him a protein-cost-to-menu-price ratio of 25%, a good number. (Since this is all-you-can-eat fare, diners can reorder, but given the size of the portion, Stowe says, no more than one in 10 will.) The smaller Calabash shrimp he served last winter and spring cost him less than $2 a pound. A whole order sells for $10.95 — an even better margin. “He’s getting fast-food, global-domination prices because he’s doing that sort of volume,” Pierce says.

Most diners opt for “half” orders of shrimp, with a serving size of about a third of a pound. Half orders of green shrimp go for $10.50 and of Calabash shrimp, $8.95. Flounder fillets, generally from China, and perch from the Great Lakes carry an even more favorable cost-to-price ratio. Granted, dinners come with potatoes, slaw, hush puppies and salad bar, but since Catfish Cove and most other fish camps make their sides from scratch, their cost is almost negligible.

Shrimp prices started rising in May after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — and that was for shrimp caught last year. But Stowe refuses to get all hot and bothered just yet. “Nobody knows how this thing is going to turn out yet. I still got green shrimp from last year, from where I got some in November.” In early July, he hadn’t raised prices for that item. Running out of Calabash-style shrimp, he found the price had gone up $1.50 to $2 a pound from what he had paid last year, so he raised the menu price by a dollar an order — his first increase in two years. In June, he took oysters off the menu when he could only get frozen ones. “They just have a real strong taste,” he says. Riverview Inn did likewise. “We have not raised our prices at this time,” Jon Burns said in late June, “but who knows what the future will bring?”

Whatever happens, customers seem to be getting a better value than ever before. Gluttons can get all the green shrimp they can stuff their faces with at Catfish Cove for $12.50, and that includes a visit to the salad bar. In 1979, Lineberger’s all-you-can-eat green-shrimp dinner cost $5 a plate. Adjusted for inflation, that would cost you $3.50 more than the same plate at Catfish Cove. In 1951, Lineberger’s sold a catfish plate for $1.50. In today’s dollars, that would be $12.56, a dollar more than Catfish Cove charges.

Across the river in Mecklenburg County, Riverview Inn couldn’t be more different from Gaston County’s spartan fish camps. Originally from Pennsylvania and married to a Charlotte girl, Irwen Burns Sr. opened the restaurant in 1946 after moving back to the Queen City from New York, where he had covered the entertainment industry for a trade paper. “Dad was doing fine, making 25 bucks a week,” his namesake son says. “He asked his boss for a $5-a-week raise, and his boss said he couldn’t afford it, so he got mad and moved down here.” Brother-in-law Bill Leigh, who ran Leigh Sandwiches in Gastonia, had an idea. “He told dad if he’d open up a family-friendly fish camp he thought he could make a good living.”

Reporting on show business apparently had rubbed off on Burns, and the Riverview Inn’s dining-as-entertainment concept was carefully considered and ahead of its time. With the war just ended and materials still in short supply, the restaurant was constructed of old slab oak. “The facade was built with a stockade effect like a fort, with fake cannons and a crow’s nest with a lookout.” Burns even hired a man with a genuine peg leg who dressed up as Captain Windy and served as a greeter. The restaurant provided coloring books and comics to amuse the kiddies and was the first in those parts to offer them free dining. Although it struggled for two or three years, it took off in the late ’40s and early ’50s as Charlotte grew.

But in many ways, Riverview Inn resembles its cousins on the other side of the Catawba and across the state. “The key is, we give you more food for the amount of money than anywhere in the world,” Jon Burns says. Half orders of perch, catfish, whitefish, flounder and deviled crab are value-priced at under $10. Today, Riverview Inn, which can seat 600, fries something like 100 tons of seafood a year. And uses word-of-mouth to move it. “We’ve gone for years and years without advertising,” Irwen Burns says. The brothers don’t believe in coupons, though they give discounts to “Riverview Regulars.” Community involvement is their best marketing, Jon Burns says. Every Wednesday night, a classic-car “Cruise In” attracts thousands, with proceeds going to the Shriners Hospital for Children.

Last year was not the greatest Riverview Inn has had, but the restaurant is doing OK, considering the economy: “Sales were down last year like everyone else,” Jon says. “We were right around a million.” One thing is for sure, he adds: “Our margin is too close.” How’s this summer looking? “A little better. We are seeing a small improvement.” Looking forward, Irwen, who is 67, says, “Unfortunately, we’ve run out of family. I’ve already retired.” Says his younger brother, who is 55: “I have thought about selling the restaurant, but we are not actively pursuing that right now.”

Having family working in the operation is a huge advantage, Don Lineberger says. “I was once talking to this Greek restaurateur, and he said the way to make money in a restaurant is keep your food cost at one third, the cost for your labor and all other expenses at one third, and take one third home.” After a pause that says wait for it, he adds: “And in order to be sure to accomplish that, you need one family member on the cash register at all times and another at any door that’s unlocked.”

Stowe, who’s 65, says he’s fortunate to have his son and daughter-in-law working with him. In October, Catfish Cove will celebrate its 21st anniversary. He’ll be in the kitchen, frying the flounder, shrimp and perch. Kent will be broiling fish and, with Summer, running the front of the house, seeing that customers are taken care of. Twenty years from now, if someone comes back and orders a seafood platter, will his son be serving it? Without missing a beat, Stowe says ,“Yes, I think he will be.” Paw Lineberger’s legacy will live on.

For the president of Greensboro-based Libby Hill Seafood Restaurants Inc., the reputation that his grandfather and father established is a tough act to follow — quality fare at rock-bottom prices. “One of the challenges we have today is people are used to seafood being an inexpensive protein,” Justin Conrad says.

In 1953, Luke and Elizabeth Conrad opened the first one in a roadhouse on the outskirts of Greensboro that the sheriff had padlocked because of “bawdy activity.” Over the years, various family members worked there and at other places they opened. Like his uncle and father, Conrad managed one for many years. Now owner-operators run the nine restaurants — four in Greensboro and one each in High Point, Hickory, Reidsville, Mount Airy and Danville, Va. It’s an arrangement Conrad likens to convenience stores where operators buy gasoline from the company that owns the buildings.

“We own every building where there’s a Libby Hill. We own everything, the equipment, the furniture, the plates, everything except for the inventory.” Think of the owner-operators as contract employees, he says. “The operators have the right to operate the business at that location on a yearly basis. It gives them a very good incentive for working hard because, obviously, at the end of the day whatever’s left over in the cash register belongs to them. Their bonus structure, so to speak, is only regulated by how hard they’re willing to work toward their numbers and profitability.”

With degradation of the marine environment — Conrad blamed the recent closing of the Galax, Va., restaurant on the Gulf oil spill and weak economy — pressure from governments worldwide to limit overfishing and rising cost of diesel fuel for fishing boats, running a value-oriented seafood restaurant has become a challenging proposition. “The product price is considerably more expensive than it was way back when,” Conrad says.

He should know. He buys all of Libby Hill’s seafood at the source — whether that’s in North Carolina, Alaska or South Africa — cutting out the middleman. “We deal directly with the producer, the person who owns the boats or owns the plant.” Seafood is shipped straight to the commissary and distribution center in Greensboro, 30,000 pounds per truckload. The trout comes from African waters off the Cape of Good Hope. Perch and clams arrive from New England. Flounder and whitefish are from Alaska, scallops from Canada, oysters from the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic, the shrimp from the Carolina coast, Gulf or Guyana.

The restaurant’s low prices are an economic reality he inherited and can’t change: “We do it out of necessity because our customers can’t afford higher prices. They are blue-collar workers for the most part, senior citizens or people raising families.” Has he raised prices yet in response to the Gulf spill? “Not yet, but unfortunately it is unavoidable.”

Keeping prices low means a never-ending quest for low-cost seafood, which turned his father — Marshall Conrad, now chairman of the board — into a global traveler. “Dad spent a lot of time traveling to places like Canada or Alaska, the West Coast and Seattle, sourcing product for us. Many of those relationships are still with us and are very good relationships.”

He recalls his father getting a call seven or eight years ago from a longtime supplier who had a deal that seemed to be too good to be true. “It was cold-water shrimp — a very good, high-quality product.” And the price was right. “Somebody at McDonald’s in Europe had this great idea that they were going to offer a shrimp burger. Well, at the 11th hour, after the packer had already produced this product, McDonald’s canceled the order.” Marshall Conrad bought all of it.

“With this facility, we were able to take them. What we got was a Cadillac for a Chevrolet price. It was the best shrimp I ever ate in my life, and we had it for about six months. But that’s how the relationships we’ve developed over the years benefit us.”

The ship that is the $3 billion megaport planned for near Southport has run aground. As reported in last month’s Business North Carolina, legislators declined to provide the state’s $4.7 million share for a $10 million study required for the deepwater, cargo-container port to proceed. Soon afterward, the agency that runs North Carolina’s two existing seaports said it was mothballing the project. “The N.C. State Ports Authority has heard and respects the concerns voiced by local communities and our elected officials and is placing the proposed N.C. International Terminal (NCIT) project on hold, ” the authority announced a couple of weeks after the General Assembly adjourned.

So the the legislature’s decision and local opposition sealed the megaport’s fate? That’s one way to interpret events. Another is that the 11-member authority never really sought out a captain to take the helm.

Former Gov. Mike Easley and then-Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue sat on the Council of State in 2006 when it gave Ports Authority the go-ahead to buy 620 acres on the Cape Fear River. Neither jumped up and down to proclaim the project the salvation of Eastern North Carolina or to make the project their own. None of the high flyers in the legislature — not Senate leader Marc Basnight, not House Speaker Joe Hackney — decided the megaport and the massive public investment it entailed was a must-have item on the state’s economic-development to-do list.

The authority, though, quietly proceeded. It conducted studies. It jumped through required federal hoops. It wanted the state to position itself to take advantage of changes coming to the shipping business. With improvements to the Panama Canal, shippers would be building bigger cargo-container craft and more would come to the East Coast. If North Carolina could build a modern port capable of handling those ships, it could capture a portion of the new traffic. The Ports Authority produced studies showing that the megaport would create 6,500 direct jobs — employment for truckers, longshoremen and railroad workers — by 2030. An additional 10,000 indirect jobs would be created from the associated spending.

CEO Tom Eagar and crew never sought the broad political support reason would suggest is needed for a $3 billion public investment. The authority, with the ports in Wilmington and Morehead City, has its own revenue stream, and only rarely has it come hat-in-hand to the legislature. It was used to doing things its own way, without attracting a lot of attention. As governor, Perdue said she supported the project, but she wasn’t the cheerleader former Gov. Jim Martin had been for the N.C. Global TransPark nearly two decades earlier.

And there was that opposition. Local critics created NoPort Southport, countering the authority’s claims with their own study suggesting that the project would never live up to the hype and that North Carolina would never catch ports in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., with their rail and highway advantages. Nearby towns joined the fray. The Baptist State Convention, which operates a camp and conference center on nearby Oak Island, came out against it, too, sending a letter to Perdue calling the economic projections “unrealistic and unattainable” and the environmental impact severe.

For the Ports Authority, a bad summer got worse when the region’s congressman, Mike McIntyre, weighed in against the project. The Lumberton Democrat called it “too risky and too costly.” There was quiet opposition as well. Some existing businesses in Eastern North Carolina worried that rail changes associated with the project might cost them money or hurt their service. Progress Energy Inc., whose Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant is adjacent to the site, took no public position. Word around Raleigh was that company brass wouldn’t be unhappy to see the project go away.

Despite the pronouncement about putting the project on hold, the Ports Authority hedged a bit. Chairman Carl Stewart told one newspaper it had no plans to abandon the site. Eagar told another paper that the project wasn’t dead. Then came news that the authority had hired CapStrat Inc., a Raleigh public-relations agency known for its pull in state political circles. A Ports Authority spokeswoman says CapStrat will not be lobbying legislators about the development of a deepwater port but offering advice on business development and handling media promotion of the existing ports.

Those words didn’t soothe opponents, who saw the $375,000-a-year contract as a sign the authority will try to revive the project. If so, CapStrat or anyone else advising the authority might want to begin with a critical piece of advice: Find a captain and get him or her on board.

Scott Mooneyham is the editor of The Insider, www.ncinsider.com.

More than 500 pages into the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act lies a nine-page section on executive compensation at public companies. It’s a small part of the new law — about 1% of the total — but it could have a big effect on how CEO pay is set and reported. Among other things, it mandates nonbinding shareholder votes on executive pay and golden parachutes, and it forces companies to compare CEO compensation with the median pay of all other employees in a single ratio. “It will make all publicly traded companies become more diligent in determining how they pay,” says Hank Federal, principal and vice president at human resources consultant Findley Davies Inc. “The overriding philosophy behind it is: Be more transparent.”

The act comes at a time when CEO pay, in North Carolina and nationwide, is trending downward but not fast enough to suit many observers. “The decrease in CEO pay has not been anywhere near commensurate with the loss of value that shareholders have experienced over the last 36 months,” says Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at The Corporate Library, a Portland, Maine-based research company specializing in corporate governance.

In North Carolina, the picture is a little more complicated. More than half of CEOs at the state’s 75 largest public companies took pay cuts in their latest fiscal year, according to data compiled for Business North Carolina by Findley Davies, with the median change being a decrease of 6.7%. Though the median one-year total shareholder return was a healthy 18.7%, that was largely because many stocks were trading abysmally low the year before. The median total return for the past three fiscal years was an 8% loss.

Cash compensation — salary and bonus — rose at more than half of the companies; earnings per share fell at about that many. At 15 companies, both happened: Cash compensation rose while EPS fell. “If EPS — basically profit — goes down, you would think that cash compensation would go down or at least there would be no increase,” Federal says.

Though most CEOs saw overall pay drop, a few received eye-popping increases. Mattress maker Sealy Corp. more than tripled the pay of Lawrence Rogers, giving him the largest percentage gain on the list, but at least the company’s performance improved in 2009 as it returned to profitability.

Tobacco maker Reynolds American Inc., on the other hand, more than doubled the pay of Susan Ivey last year — her compensation package of $16.2 million was the largest in the state — even as the company’s earnings per share fell 28%. Much of her pay came from an unusual award of stock contingent on performance; it might or might not produce any income for her. The company, in a statement, blamed the decrease in EPS partly on a big increase in pension expense and noted that its total return for the year was well above that of the S&P 500. “Reynolds American achieved solid underlying performance in 2009, despite an especially challenging economic and industry environment.”

It’s unclear whether Reynolds shareholders agree with the board’s decision to boost Ivey’s pay, because her compensation package wasn’t put to a vote. That could change with Dodd-Frank. Executive pay packages must be voted on at least every three years, starting in 2011. Every six years, publicly traded companies must ask shareholders if they want to vote on it more often.

The so-called “say on pay” provision might be the most controversial part of the law’s compensation section. Though the votes aren’t binding, they could put board compensation committees in the awkward position of having to modify pay packages that shareholders vote down or risk shareholder anger if they ignore a “no” vote. “If the company gets serious pushback or negative votes about its compensation program, it should think hard about changing its compensation practices, because these are the same people who are going to vote for directors,” says Patrick Bryant, a lawyer who handles corporate-governance and securities matters at Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson PA in Charlotte.

For most companies, pay won’t rise to a level that would cause trouble at the ballot box, Hodgson says. But shareholders at some have shown they won’t rubber stamp pay packages: This year, three U.S. companies had them snubbed. “There are some companies out there where shareholders are bitterly angry about compensation policies, and they will voice that anger quite clearly at the next annual meeting where they have a vote.”

Shareholders also get to vote on so-called golden parachute packages relating to mergers, acquisitions or other changes in control. Most boards would rather avoid the embarrassment of having proposals voted down, so the prospect of shareholder votes on executive pay and golden parachutes could weed out the most outrageous before they go into the proxy statement, says Henry Oehmann, director of national executive compensation services for Chicago-based Grant Thornton LLP. “If you have to put it into your disclosure, in the screening process people say, ‘Are you sure we want to propose that to our shareholders?’”

Dodd-Frank also requires the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to come up with rules that force companies to disclose the relationship between pay and performance. Exactly what must be disclosed isn’t yet clear, but it will involve consideration of dividends and changes in stock price. “I imagine it will be somewhat open-ended, and of course companies will want to spin that stuff as favorably as they can. But it will be interesting to see what happens,” Bryant says.

Under Dodd-Frank, companies also must report the ratio of CEO pay to the median employee pay, a move some see as another tool to help shareholders figure out how to vote on pay packages and others consider an attempt to shame boards into curbing CEO pay. “It is blatantly absurd,” Federal says. “That was the Democratic House and Senate paying their dues, if you will, to the unions, because the unions publish that.” The ratios are bound to have shock value because they’re likely to be large, but comparisons across economic sectors could be difficult. Federal expects manufacturers and retailers, which often have high percentages of low-wage workers, to report higher ratios of CEO-to-median pay than, say, banks. “The number of people in the back rooms, all the IT folks, all the bond traders — there are tons of them that offset the number of tellers you may have.”

Still unclear is how much the new law, once it’s fully fleshed out by regulatory bodies, will rein in executive pay. After all, being CEO is a tough job, requiring a rare skill set, and the market for them is competitive. Directors often have to pay more than they’d like to attract or retain the right CEO. They’ll still do that, but they’ll have to do a better job of explaining why, Federal says. “In the comp committee rooms, there will be more questions asked. I think the comp consultant’s job is going to be a lot tougher. But at the end of the day, the board will get comfortable on where it wants to go and get comfortable with all the reasons why they think it’s the right way to do it, and they’ll explain that to shareholders.”

Whether or not the new law does curb abuses in CEO pay, it’s nearly certain that most employees will still have a hard time understanding why chief executives make so much money, Federal says. “We all do this: We pick up a proxy and we go directly to the compensation table, we look at the far right and we see the total number, and we go, ‘Gee whiz! I could retire on that!’ We all do that. I do that. I don’t think this is going to take away that issue. There is always some level of jealousy.””

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