OK, so we are going to take a quick break from talking about the election to look at the latest Charlotte-area business news — business news about animals. Maybe the kind of lighthearted break we need for a moment? Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business News joins me now for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: OK. Let’s start with a swim club for dogs in east Charlotte. Why take your pooch to the pool, Tony?
Tony Mecia: Marshall, to be clear, I don’t take my pooch to the pool. But this is a business near Matthews called AquaPups that for $75 will give your dog a 30-minute swim lesson. They also have open swim. They have memberships. A lot of people like this, the owner says, because it tires the dogs out. It’s something for the dogs to do. It exposes them to the water. Maybe if [owners are] going boating and they want to take the dog on the boat, you wouldn’t want to go out on the lake and just do that cold turkey, so to speak. Maybe you want some training for your dog. They say they’re getting more and more customers.
Terry: It seems like more businesses are popping up to cater to dogs like dog bakeries and high-end groomers. You and I even spoke at one time on the segment about a dog hotel, I remember. Why are people continuing to treat their dogs to these kinds of perks?
Mecia: If you talk to people in the pet industry, they will tell you there has definitely been an evolution in the way people treat their pets. It used to be you had a dog or a cat, it was the family pet. Now really they’re being more viewed as members of the family. And so instead of taking your dog to boarding, you’re taking them to a pet hotel. Some of the names of these really make them sound like luxury resorts. They’re boarding facilities, a lot of them. And they’ve started adding things like enrichment — you can pay extra to have someone play with your dog. You don’t just want your dog sitting there in a crate. [It’s] sort of making the family pet a little bit more human and a little bit more part of the family. So in this case, just as you would maybe take your kid to soccer practice or chess lessons, now you can take your dog to swim lessons.
Terry: All right. Well, the next animal is bees. A Charlotte church recently found out it is home to a rather large congregation of bees and is looking to turn it into a fundraiser. Which church?
Mecia: Yeah. St. Matthew Catholic Church in Ballantyne recently discovered when some roofers were working on the building, a 5-foot-by-7-foot beehive with an estimated 100,000 honeybees. They called in an expert who removed it and then resettled the bees on another spot on the church campus. They’re now getting ready — the church is — to harvest the honey. They say they expect to have 25 gallons of honey that they will then turn around and sell.
Terry: Are they going to come up with a catchy name for the honey?
Mecia: They are, Marshall. They’re going to sell it to parishioners or whoever wants to buy it. Members of the congregation have started voting on it, and the two finalists sound like they’re going to be Holy Honey or Heavenly Honey.
Terry: All right. Well, as fun as the animal stories are, let’s end on a more serious note. You report thousands of Charlotte drivers could be getting a payday following a judge’s ruling. What was the ruling, and who qualifies?
Mecia: A federal judge in Charlotte recently ruled that a Charlotte driver could proceed in her lawsuit against the City of Charlotte and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police. And [the driver] had alleged that the city had allowed her accident report to be released to personal-injury law firms, who then marketed to her. She said that’s a violation of federal law. There is a 1994 law that says you can’t release DMV records to unauthorized people. The judge granted her summary judgment — which said, basically, she’s right without having to go to trial, and certified it as a class-action lawsuit. The class of people is about 6,000 Charlotte drivers who have been involved in wrecks and had those accident reports released. CMPD used to release those to the public up through 2020. They stopped doing that after a series of these lawsuits. And so the law provides that it could result in $2,500 per occurrence. You multiply that by 6,000 people — that’s a $15 million lawsuit potentially against the City of Charlotte. This was just a ruling from late September. The city has appealed.
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