TRAVIS LONG - tlong@newsobserver.com
Thom Tillis, N.C. Speaker of the House, talks with News & Observer reporters and members of the editorial board, Wednesday, July 7, 2011, at the paper.
RALEIGH -- Republicans in the N.C. House will not give up on key bills that the governor vetoed, Speaker Thom Tillis said Wednesday, promising overrides if they can muster enough votes during the four days the General Assembly will be in session later this month.
That was one of several topics Tillis covered in a meeting with reporters and editors at The News & Observer as part of his tour of the state's newspapers to tout the legislature's accomplishments and talk about what's ahead.
The Mecklenburg County Republican previously said the House would attempt to override Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of the voter identification bill. On Wednesday, he said a decision about whether to take on the abortion bill - requiring a 24-hour wait and an ultrasound test - is being discussed with members of both parties now. Perdue vetoed 15 bills, a historic number, that came out of this session. For the first time in 140 years, the session was controlled by a Republican majority in the House and Senate. Most of the vetoes are likely to stand unchallenged.
"We will take up any veto where we have a high degree of certainty that we have the votes for it," Tillis said. "We will not extend the session for the purpose of overriding vetoes. We'll be out of there in four days."
The main reason the General Assembly is reconvening is to debate and vote on new districts for members of Congress and the General Assembly. That will happen fromJuly 25 to 28, after House and Senate redistricting committees hear presentations on the proposed maps in sessions that begin July 21 and run through that weekend.
Tillis said politics will have less to do with redistricting than will the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act, case law and the state Constitution. Once lawmakers have finished with redistricting, they will reconvene again in September to take up a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Tillis also said one of the first tasks of the Government Operations Oversight Committee this fall will be to evaluate how school superintendents across the state handled budget cuts. He said the legislature provided enough money to hire teachers in kindergarten through third grade. But superintendents will have to find other ways to make cuts required by the reduced state budget, and report back to the General Assembly at the end of August.
If local school districts don't hire those early-grade teachers, Tillis said, "they better have a good reason for it and it better be consistent with our emphasis on K through 3 development."
He said some children who haven't received the education they need early in life are being wasted as productive members of society.
"I'm absolutely certain that some number of those people who are being lost were lost before they ever get out of third grade," Tillis said. "They didn't have early childhood development opportunities. They didn't have the core ability to read by third grade. They didn't have the skills they needed to be educated past third grade."
Still, he said, lawmakers didn't want to mandate how to ensure those opportunities are provided. Rather, he said, they wanted to shift that responsibility to the superintendents.
He disagreed that there was a disconnect between that goal and the reality of the General Assembly's education budget cuts, which include reductions in funding for early childhood programs. He said the budget as a whole, including the goal of reducing student-teacher ratios, should accomplish it.
But House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, a Democrat from Orange County, called Tillis' remarks "doublespeak."
"The superintendents are doing the best they can in a terrible situation," Hackney said. "They were given teaching jobs and teaching assistant jobs in the budget, then they were given a huge discretionary cut on top of it with no place to go to get those cuts except teacher jobs and teacher assistant jobs in many cases."
Tillis is using his visits to the state's newspapers to tout the session's accomplishments. He said there was little dissension among the ranks of Republicans, and that helped streamline the process and led to the shortest "long" session in 30 years, with a focus on job creation.
"I'm very proud of what we've accomplished in this session," he said, adding that as a management consultant "I don't know if I've ever seen the amount of change occur and still have a very productive, very functional organization from the beginning."
Hackney called it a "terrible session for North Carolina."
"Instead of creating jobs or trying to create jobs what they did was ending up cutting jobs," Hackney said. "More importantly, cutting many of them in the critical areas that make North Carolina so attractive to business, and to make you want to come to school here and live here. They cut 3,000 or so jobs in the university system, we don't know how many yet in the public schools. The number is going to be north of 20,000 before it's over. It's going to have a negative ripple effect through the economy."
