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Mon. late: Show us the money
posted at 2008-06-03 00:39 | Last modified 2008-06-03 07:36
Here's the House budget money report, put online late tonight. Speaker Hackney decided this evening to make the budget docs publicly available before Tuesday morning's Finance committee. Thanks, Mr. Speaker.
(General provisions are here, BTW.)
Bottom line: $21.35 B, a little leaner than Easley's $21.5 B, mostly
because the House didn't include Easley's proposed "sin tax" hikes.
Gainers v. Decliners
(Just some highlights -- this list is nowhere near comprehensive.)
Education picks up 109M – about 1% - much of it in one-time money. (More on that below.)
K-12 gets a 1% boost - a net gain of 99M, though 49M less in recurring money
The UNC system loses 24M - not quite 1%
Community Colleges pick up 33M, about 3.7%
Health and Human Services loses 167M – about 3.3% of its previous appropriation for this year.
(Relative) winners:
10M expansion of NC Health Choice
8M each for local psych inpatient beds and foster care payments.
6.1M for walk-in psych crisis and aftercare beds
5.6 M for mobile mental health crisis intervention teams
-
5.2M for an 60-bed overflow unit at Dix
5M for 5% increase in dental reimbursement rates
(Relative) losers:
Work First cash assistance - down 9.4M
Medicaid inflationary freeze = 28M cut
84M less for the troubled Community Support Services program
Justice and Public Safety picks up almost 22M, 1%-ish, almost all of it recurring.
Natural and Economic Resources gains a healthy 20% - 95M. Two-thirds of it is infrastructure money for rural economic development.
Gen Gov adds 13M, which amounts to a 3.2% gain. The lion’s share of the new money is for various Housing Finance programs – 7M for disabled housing, 3M for the Home Protection Program, 2M for the Housing Trust Fund.
Statewide Reserves gets a whopping 431M - a 62% boost. (The adjustment here is disproportionately large because the original 08-09 budget included no raises at all.) Most of the money - 366M - goes to salary raises for teachers (3%) and state employees (2.75% or $1100, whichever is higher). Another sizeable chunk, 22.7M, is for JDIG, and another 10M is headed for gang prevention.
Three things to remember
(Well, okay, there's a lot more than three, but you have to start somewhere.)
1. Not all money is equal.
Recurring money is the kind you can count on next year (more or less), which means you can use it to hire people or start programs.
Non-recurring money means there's no guarantee you'll get all of it - or any of it - again next year. It's great for capital outlays and one-time needs, but overall, it's not what you need to plan and run a stable organization.
Depending on need, some departments would rather get 50M recurring than 100M non-recurring.
2. Not all cuts are equal.
Some cuts involve moving services into other agencies.
Some cuts involve swapping out General Fund money for either receipts (money collected for services) or federal funding. Neither of latter is necessarily as stable as the former.
And some cuts are just, well, cuts.
3. None of this is for sure yet.
Even if a given raise/cut/provision makes it past House Finance, Pensions, Approps, and floor, there's still no guarantee the Senate will agree to it. Or the Governor's office, for that matter.
Senior House Budget Chair Mickey Michaux said today he expects the Senate will have different priorities that could lead to substantial changes. Senate Budget Chair Linda Garrou agrees: "You got it."
Comments? Drop me a line.
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