NC Treasurer Brad Briner

March 29, 2026·1 hr·4 clips

One in six North Carolinians has unclaimed property sitting at nccash.gov — including six-digit and seven-digit amounts that Briner personally calls people to claim, and still gets hung up on.

The show starts with state finances. Don Curtis introduces the guest as North Carolina's state treasurer and asks for practical updates on government pocketbooks. The pension system comes first. The guest says it is well funded, and he ties that to North Carolina's habit of fiscal conservatism and lawmakers doing the routine work year after year. He reaches back to 1941, but the point is not trivia. Public retirement promises only hold up when the contributions keep showing up. Then Curtis moves to public assets. He asks whether universities may have more classrooms than they need, with old scheduling habits making cuts hard to make. The guest is careful on AI but interested. Large data sets and optimization, he says, are natural fits, as long as a person stays in the loop when the machine gets something wrong. UNC gives the conversation something concrete. The guest remembers serving on a 2024 AI task force for Chapel Hill that looked at use cases. Scheduling was near the top. Facilities optimization was there too, because enrollment growth can reveal bottlenecks that new buildings do not automatically fix. The lab space story is the best example. As UNC considered adding 5,000 students over ten years, chemistry lab capacity first looked like a hard limit. Then the team looked at use. Saturday labs seemed possible, until they found the bigger problem: the labs were not even open on Friday. That changed the answer. For the guest, North Carolina should use public assets better before asking taxpayers for more. The broadcast wraps in familiar local radio style, sending listeners to carolinanewsmakers.com for repeats and longer versions, then credits and the next week signoff.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at North Carolina's books, pensions, health care, and AI-assisted scheduling.

Carolina Newsmakers keeps its focus on North Carolina's finances, starting with the pension system and the state's long record of making its full required contribution.

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm, policy-first conversation about where North Carolina's money actually goes.

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