A new report from the John Locke Foundation outlines ways to improve the North Carolina General Assembly, focusing on transparency, efficiency, and accountability. Recommendations include eight-year term limits for legislative leaders to prevent power concentration, session length limits, and increased legislator pay to attract diverse candidates.
To bolster transparency, the report urges repealing provisions that shield legislative records and proposes a constitutional amendment to ensure openness across government. These reforms aim to modernize the legislature while addressing public concerns.
“By design and tradition, the General Assembly is the most powerful branch of North Carolina’s government and, traditionally, the closest to the people,” said Dr. Andy Jackson, co-author of the report and Director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation. “The reforms in our report are individually and collectively designed to keep the legislature close to the people by giving rank-and-file members a greater share of power, letting legislators spend more time in their home districts instead of Raleigh, making legislative business more transparent, and making it more possible for people who are not retired or independently wealthy to serve.”
Currently, 16 states have instituted term limits for legislators. Furthermore, many states have instituted term limits for legislative leaders, separate from limits on legislators. In North Carolina, an added caution with not placing limits on legislative leaders is that with those positions come some appointment powers that are generally associated with the governor’s office.
“Eight-year lifetime term limits for speakers of the House and presidents pro tempore of the Senate would address an overconcentration of power caused by legislative leaders clinging to their positions for a decade or more. Allowing a freer leadership rotation will enable the General Assembly to consider new ideas better and make old rivalries and conflicts less likely to derail policy considerations. Unlike general term limits, leadership limits do not restrict voters’ choices. While some legislators resist the idea of leadership term limits, the idea is overwhelmingly popular with the public.”
Report: Reforming North Carolina’s General Assembly
An additional limit proposed by the report is a limit on session lengths. Currently, 39 states have session limits, 29 of which are imposed within the state constitution.
In each two-year cycle, the legislature is expected to meet for less than 200 days spread over 300 calendar days. However, these numbers have steadily climbed higher over the past decade. The 2021-22 cycle was 245 days in the House and 246 days in the Senate, spread over 475 calendar days.
Imposing session limits has both pros and cons. One of the pros is the decreased cost to the taxpayer; longer sessions come with a hefty price tag. In 2015, the daily estimated cost to taxpayers when the NCGA was in session was $50,000. Keep in mind this was before the inflation in 2021-24.
An additional upside of imposing session limits is to bring more regularity, allowing legislators to plan their lives better and reducing scheduling conflicts, creating more space for legislators to work their regular jobs.
“Session limits would restore a power balance between legislative leaders and rank-and-file members by reducing the advantage of ‘strategic patience’ that leadership has,” according to the report.
“Session lengths have been growing over the past decade,” remarked Jackson. “Long, irregular sessions are contrary to North Carolina’s citizen-legislator tradition. They keep legislators away from their constituents, families, and work. Longer sessions also cost taxpayers money; each day the legislature is in session costs taxpayers an estimated $50,000 per day.”
“Session limits would restore a power balance between legislative leaders and rank-and-file members by reducing the advantage of ‘strategic patience’ that leadership has,” reads the report.
However, term limits also have downsides. One is the risk of shifting the balance of power into the hands of the executive branch and lobbyists. It could also result in more missed floor votes due to schedule conflicts with legislators’ regular jobs, etc., and more committee work out of session and special sessions.
“So, the goal is to have the right size of legislative sessions,” according to the report. “June 30 (the day before the start of the fiscal year) is a natural date for the General Assembly to conclude its regular business.”
A June 30th end date would mean long sessions of 90 days spread across 170 calendar days and short sessions of 35 days spread over 65 calendar days. According to the report, this reform would reduce the two-year cycle to about 150 days spread across 250 calendar days, which was the norm prior to the past decade’s creep.
North Carolina legislators have one of the lowest salaries in the nation, at $13,951. It is also much lower than the median salary among the states, which is $38,855. It is also lower than the $34,400.50 median salary for hybrid (between part-time and full-time) legislatures, similar to North Carolina’s.
According to the report, North Carolina’s mileage reimbursement rate and per-diem compensation for legislators are also “comparably low.” Researcher say the low salary limits those who can serve and makes the state legislature inaccessible to many.
“They could offset part or all of the increased cost to taxpayers of a salary increase, however, by realizing savings on per diem, mileage, and office expenses through session length limits,” write Stirling and Jackson. “Limiting session lengths would allow legislators to raise their salary to $20,533 at a net-zero cost to the taxpayer.”
Compared to other states, the NCGA generally scores well on transparency, but the report finds that there is room for improvement.
“Unfortunately, legislators backslid on transparency when they included a section in the 2023 budget granting themselves the power to determine if their own records are public, demonstrating the need for more robust institutional support of transparency,” write Stirling and Jackson.
The report asserts that the goal is not maximum transparency but a balance between transparency and other legitimate concerns. It then outlines specific ways in which transparency can be improved. This includes modifying the 2023 provision, which made legislators the “sole judges” of which documents are made public record, and adding a transparency constitutional amendment that covers all three branches of state government to the ballot.