Lanier Cansler does not present himself as a hard-charging bureaucrat with all the answers, or as a department head who just can’t wait to wield the biggest knife in the drawer for purposes of cleaning and dressing his part of the state budget. The soft-spoken Cansler, former Republican legislator and now secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Services, seems frustrated by but resigned to the impending closing of Dorothea Dix Hospital for the mentally ill in Raleigh.
But under state law that requires certain steps in a closure process, legislators can stop such a closure with a bill, and some members of the Wake County delegation on Jones Street – solid in their opposition to closing Dix – plan to try it when the General Assembly convenes in January under new Republican leadership.
