Premature optimism about a budget deal

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch, August 21, 2015.

Earlier this week the office of Gov. Pat McCrory sent out a press release announcing that after a breakfast meeting with McCrory, House and Senate leaders had come to an agreement on a spending level for the final budget they are trying to negotiate that is already seven weeks late.

That prompted a plethora of news stories hailing the breakthrough and quoting legislative leaders talking about the light at the end of the tunnel and predicting a final spending plan by August 31 when the latest continuing budget resolution expires.

House Speaker Tim Moore said last week that once the spending number was decided, budget subcommittees would begin meeting to iron all the differences between the House and Senate plans.

All systems were on go it seemed to finally pass the long overdue budget that has left local school officials in the dark about how many teachers and teacher assistants they can afford to hire with school starting next week.

Not so fast.

No subcommittee meetings have yet been announced and reportedly the chairs of subcommittees won’t even be in Raleigh this weekend to meet with legislative leaders and get their marching orders and the amount of spending their committees have to work with to come up with a final spending plan.

The end of the tunnel is still apparently far away.

The much ballyhooed agreement on a spending number was only the first step. The House and Senate now have to agree on how much to spend on each area of the budget and that may be even harder to come up with than the overall number, especially since House and Senate leaders agreed to spend far less than the House proposed.

That means that the final spending plan is not likely to include the two percent raise for state employees the House approved or keeping the same level of teacher assistants in the classroom that the House also included in its budget. The Senate budget would eliminate 8,500 TAs over the next two years.

There may still be a way for lawmakers to pass a budget by August 31, but it now seems very unlikely. Even some conservative supporters of the Republican legislative majority have said that a budget delay that runs into September will cause serious problems.

That’s ridiculous of course. A budget that is not passed before school starts causes massive problems and school starts Monday.

But it’s worth noting that the dysfunction in the General Assembly has risen to the level that even some folks on the right are beginning to talk about it.

- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/08/21/the-follies-233/#sthash.s90JOUJJ.dpuf