RALEIGH — The North Carolina Senate began to let some of its fiscal ideas for FY 2004-05 trickle out during some committee meetings on Monday. From the standpoint of state taxpayers, the proposals constitute some steps forward, some steps backward, and a few to the side.
Basically, the annual budget dance has begun.
Here’s the not-so-creative choreography. Both legislative chambers and the governor agree on the major priorities in the state budget, but disagree — or pretend to disagree — in the margins. For example, one side offers a new idea. The other rejects it, at first. Eventually, everybody’s indispensable and really quite remarkable ideas typically get funded to a degree sufficient to allow political credit to be apportioned and all involved to congratulate themselves on their hard and patience public service. Of course, this elaborate ritual shimmy causes the final state budget to cost taxpayers more than the earlier versions would have.
The steps forward in the Senate budget seem to be in the area of new programs. Senators say that the state can’t afford to fund Gov. Mike Easley’s class-size reduction for the third grade (and indeed question its importance and practicality). They offer only half the amount that Easley wants to expand his More at Four preschool initiative, arguing that some of the need can be picked up by the federal Head Start program.
The governor’s response wasn’t long in coming.
“I am disappointed that the Senate Appropriations Committees are playing little games with our children’s education,” he said. “While I will continue to work with the Senate on these important issues, our citizens are quickly losing patience.”
Yes, they are likely losing patience. Some of the restaurant lines in the mountains and at the beach are getting pretty long.
Steps backward by the Senate include less willingness than the House had to save taxpayers money in the Health and Human Services budget and non-teaching expenses in the public schools, a “discovery” of $28 million in unforeseen sales-tax revenue that appears to be immediately expended, and a somewhat smaller deposit in the state’s rainy-day fund, which might have come in handy in 2005-06 when another budget deficit is likely given the use of one-time money to fund recurring expenses in 2004-05.
One step sideways was $12 million in supplemental funding to help the neediest school systems in the state under the Leandro school-finance mandate, in part by reducing class sizes below 15 students per teacher. Given the available research about which interventions are effective for disadvantaged students in public school, this is probably a good idea (scholarship assistance for poor students to attend schools of their choice would be better, at least in less-remote areas) but the proposal should have been funded by savings elsewhere in the education budget.
In the coming days, expect Easley to perform some more of his election-year two-step, Senate leader Marc Basnight to keep on shaggin’, House Speaker Jim Black and House Co-Speaker Richard Morgan to do-si-do and promenade (lobbyist Don Beason is the caller), and other key legislators to continue their fiscal fandango for a while until it devolves into a full-fledged budget boogie.
You can thank me for these delightful mental images at your convenience.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.