The Friday Follies

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, August 15, 2015.

A new found expeditiousness about the overdue budget 

There finally seems to be some urgency to pass a budget at the General Assembly, six weeks after it was due and just a week before school starts across the state with no idea on how many teachers or teacher assistants will be funded.

House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters Thursday that the end is in sight for budget negotiators who were close to agreeing on a bottom line spending number for the final agreement. Moore said the goal now was to pass a budget by the August 31 deadline set by the latest continuing resolution passed to keep government operating.

That’s a week after schools open in most counties.

Moore also said that “the intent is to start moving in a much more expeditious manner on the budget next week.”

It’s not clear why the new found expeditiousness didn’t surface until now. The budget is already the latest in 13 years and the second latest two year budget since at least 1961.

The extra six weeks of the legislative session has cost taxpayers more than million dollars and is creating huge problems for school officials, not to mention the teacher assistants who aren’t sure they will have a job after the final budget is approved.

It’s not clear why House and Senate leaders haven’t been working harder to come with a budget compromise, but as Rob Schofield pointed out on the Progressive Pulse a month ago, one prominent Senator once said that “a budget delay is incompetence.”

That was Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger July 14^th of 2009 when he was Senate Minority Leader, criticizing Democrats for being two weeks late with a budget.

Berger went on to say, “for the average person, when they have a deadline and they need to get something done, they are held accountable.”

And that was when the budget was two weeks overdue. The budget Berger is in charge of putting together is now six weeks late with lawmakers aiming to get it done a full two months after it was due. Incompetence indeed.

McCrory’s DMV still taking order for confederate plates

It’s now almost two months since Gov. Pat McCrory said in the wake of the Charleston church shootings that the state should stop issuing specialty license plates featuring the confederate flag.

McCrory received national publicity and praise for the statement, one that echoed comments by other southern governors like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.

But McCrory’s own DMV kept issuing the plates and ordered more when they sold out. McCrory said when asked about it that he didn’t have the authority to stop the plates, that the General Assembly must act.

Senate President Pro Tem Phi Berger said McCrory could stop them himself with an executive order. While the two Republican leaders conveniently blamed each other for the impasse, nothing happened, and they avoided antagonizing the confederate flag supporters in their political base.

House leaders also seem scared to tackle the issue. When a couple of Democrats tried to amend a specialty license plate bill in a committee to stop the issuance of confederate plates, the committee chair refused to allow it, calling it “political sabotage.”

The Democrats planned to try again when the bill was debated on the House floor, but House leaders took the legislation off the calendar and sent it back to committee, presumably to avoid the confrontation.

McCrory, for his part, has held dozens of media appearances and press conferences since his initial statement and has never brought up the issue.

So as the two month anniversary of the mass murder in an African-American church in Charleston approaches, North Carolina is still taking orders for confederate flag license plates that the Governor of North Carolina said he wanted to stop.

Quantifying the devastation of TABOR

And finally, in case you had any doubt about the damage that the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) passed by the Senate this week would cause in North Carolina, a recent Forbes editorial in support of the absurd amendment ought to clear things up.

The editorial points out that if TABOR had been in effect, the state would have spent $52 billion less from 1999 to 2009.

That means there would have been no expansion of NC PreK for at-risk kids, no real raises for teachers or state workers, and no increased investments in universities or community colleges, all of which happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Fifty-two billion dollars is more than twice the entire General Fund budget. The state could have closed every school and every university and every office and every park for two years and still not saved $52 billion.

That’s what TABOR means and that’s why folks in the House don’t seem to be in any hurry to take it up, thank goodness.

- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/08/14/the-follies-232/#sthash.DqFhZYMJ.dpuf