No new state budget is a loss for more than teachers
If a state budget is a state’s road map, North Carolina has officially lost its way.
The standoff between the General Assembly’s Republican majority and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has blocked the adoption of a new state budget and has the state retracing last year’s spending plan.
It’s the nature of a standoff that each side points at the other, but the blame here is far from equally shared. The Republican leaders have brought this on by continuing to push through legislation — or deny Medicaid expansion — as if the 2018 election had not eliminated their veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate. Cooper has vetoed 14 bills, including the budget. The Republican majority has failed to override any.
Republican lawmakers anticipated this situation by passing legislation in July 2016 that allows the previous year’s budget to continue if a new budget does not become law. That change eliminated the possibility of a government shutdown and deprived the governor of what would be powerful negotiating leverage. Now the government can muddle on with less spending than inflation and population growth merit, a constriction many Republicans actually welcome.
Republican lawmakers have tried to avoid some hazards of not adjusting state spending by passing “mini budgets” to allocate vital new funds to state departments, but big consequences remain. The most obvious is that pay raises for public school teachers — and educators at the community college and university level — remain in limbo. And capital projects for the repair and construction of buildings in the UNC system are also on hold.
Meanwhile the inability of North Carolina’s leaders to agree on a budget has raised doubts about the state’s financial management, which could undermine its coveted AAA rating. The credit rating agency Moody’s Investor Service said as the impasse deepened last November that, “The lack of a budget for more than four months reflects governance weakness and is credit negative.”
The lack of a budget isn’t just about the big items — raises for educators and UNC construction projects. It’s also about the small losses that loom large in the lives of individuals who depend on state support.
Scott Farmer, the executive director of the N.C. Housing Finance Agency, described two changes in housing for low-income people and disabled people that will result from the lack of new funding. His agency will lose $20 million that it had planned to combine with federal housing funds to subsidize the construction of affordable rental developments in low-income rural counties. Without the state subsidy, developers may have to build the units in more affluent counties to make their investments sound. “We will see less applications in low- and moderate-income counties,” Farmer said. “The damage has been done at this point.”
Meanwhile, the agency is also losing $7.2 million it had planned to provide to developers and property owners who create housing for people with disabilities. The Department of Health and Human Services uses the new housing to move disabled people from group homes and institutions to their own apartments. Now the number of units will remain fixed and some disabled people won’t get an opportunity for better and more independent living for another year.
No doubt there are many more such stories.
A budget impasse might be worth enduring if the divide involved strong points on both sides. But in this case Republicans are holding out against what is good, just and prudent: Medicaid expansion, meaningful raises for teachers and an end to further tax cuts.
Both sides should renew their efforts to resolve this unnecessary and harmful standoff and get North Carolina back on the road forward again.
Correction: An earlier version of this editorial gave the wrong year for passage of legislation that allows the previous year’s budget to continue if a new budget is not adopted. The legislation was passed in 2016, not 2017.
This story was originally published January 21, 2020 at 5:45 PM.