While teacher salaries generally dominate employee benefit discussions during budget debates, other state employees stand to receive higher pay. But the House, Senate, and Gov. Roy Cooper all have different notions about how much to increase compensation. Cooper’s budget includes an across-the-board salary increase of 2 percent or $800, whichever is higher. His budget sets aside $203 million each...
The House budget includes more than $3 billion in transportation funding each year of the biennium, in addition to the General Fund appropriations for other state operations. In 2017-18 the House budgets $2.26 billion in transportation-related taxes and fees to the Highway Fund, which pays for maintenance and operations, and $920 million to the Highway...
Once clear message from the 2017 budget discussion: School choice remains a priority for the General Assembly. Both the House and Senate have included funding increases for Opportunity Scholarships in their respective budgets, with a few key differences. • The House and Senate add $10 million each year to the Opportunity Scholarship Grant Reserve Fund, bringing...
Of all the differences among the three budgets submitted for the upcoming two-year spending cycle, none is larger, and less likely to be negotiated, than the $4.4 billion Medicaid expansion Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is pushing. Cooper contends the provision, which would add 624,000 people to the Medicaid rolls — nearly a third of the 1.97...
Politically charged debates over teacher pay are nothing new. This year is no exception, given that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper holds power in the executive branch, while a Republican supermajority governs the General Assembly. Cooper wants to spend more, the legislature wants to spend less. For now, the numbers look like this. The House would...
The tough work on the state budget has just begun. The House early Friday morning passed Senate Bill 257, a $45.7 billion General Fund budget for the next two years. It spends nearly $350 million more than the Senate version of the General Fund budget passed three weeks ago. The differences may not seem so...
Thirty-eight amendments consuming nearly eight hours of debate (including a few extended breaks) wound up changing few minds. The House late Thursday night passed its $22.9-billion General Fund budget for the 2017-18 fiscal year by an 82-34 vote. Twelve Democrats backed the budget’s initial passage. A single Republican, Rep. Jeff Collins, R-Nash, voted no. Earlier that day...
RALEIGH — Now that all budget proposals are on the table, the negotiations between North Carolina’s House and Senate leaders will get serious. Rep. Nelson Dollar, R-Wake, senior chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, sat down with Carolina Journal Thursday morning before the news conference introducing the House budget to discuss successes, priorities, and differences of...
