“I THINK HE’S GOT STRONG
CONVICTIONS AND HE’S WILLING TO
GO OUT OF THE NORM AND DEFEND
HIS POSITIONS AND HIMSELF.”
other. “That’s a real bright idea...
Did you come up with that one
on your own?”
In response to claims that he’d
been a cheap boss, LaRoque contended that he himself made very
little money from his part-time
job as a state legislator. His annual statehouse salary of $13,950,
divided by the number of hours he
worked, he said, amounted to an
hourly wage of $6.71.
“If I were to make $8 an hour
that would be a 19% increase
and I don’t think the taxpayers of
North Carolina would appreciate
the legislature giving itself a 19%
wage increase,” he wrote. “My
net pay each month is $44 and
change. That equals about $1.50 a
day or about 19 cents an hour.”
But being a state rep wasn’t,
of course, LaRoque’s only gig.
His online antagonists quickly
started seeking more information. Several readers looked up
the East Carolina Development
Company’s tax forms online and
discovered that LaRoque earned
a low six-figure salary from that
organization alone. They emailed
the documents to journalists, including Sarah Ovaska, a reporter
who had been covering the unemployment standoff at the statehouse for N.C. Policy Watch, a
local, left-leaning think tank.
After receiving the tip, Ovaska
began digging deeper. Over the
course of a two-month investigation, she discovered that LaRoque
had paid himself hefty salaries
for a decade, mainly from ECDC,
and that he loaned federal money
to friends and political allies. He
put his wife and brother on his
two nonprofit companies’ boards
of directors, and kept other board
members uninformed about his
pay. (Having family members on
a board isn’t illegal, but it’s
frowned upon by the IRS for conflict-of-interest reasons.)
Ovaska also found the same
USDA audit criticizing LaRoque’s
use of the Intermediary Relending Program that Braxton’s lawyers