During this holiday period, we are pleased to present you with 'the best of 2009' NC Policy Watch commentaries. We hope you enjoy re-reading some of these thoughtful editorials that are still relevant to the 2010 policy debate.

Though far from perfect and marketed poorly, the achievements of the 2009 legislative session deserve praise

Quick take:

Though fraught with frustrations and delays and most of the other downsides that one associates with democratic government in a closely divided state, the 2009 session of the North Carolina was still a real success. In addition to raising nearly a billion dollars in essential revenue, lawmakers passed numerous important bills that will benefit workers, consumers, public health, public education, and the economy as a whole.   

There's a mind game that most of us have played at various points in our lives that goes something like this: "If someone had told me six months ago that I would have accomplished X by now (something that was well short of my dreams but beyond what I might have realistically expected to achieve), would I have taken it?" Usually, the answer to the question is "heck yes!" This is essentially the place that progressive North Carolinians find themselves in as they reflect on the 2009 session of the North Carolina General Assembly.

As the final days wind down on a very long and uneven session in the midst of economic hard times, the initial reaction is to feel a sense of frustration and disappointment. After all, this year's session was fraught with hard and unpleasant decisions. No one enjoys cutting essential services or raising tax rates. And, as usual, big business and the wealthy mostly got their ways.

To make matters worse, few decisions were accompanied by moments of great clarity or shared moral purpose. To the contrary, most big decisions were only arrived at after long spells of awkward and process-laden debate. Many votes were very close and partisan and, despite the issuance of a number of olive branches from the House and Senate majorities, the two minority leaders never took any meaningful steps to help with the governing process. Add Governor Perdue's uneven first half-year on the job into the mix and it's enough to sober even the biggest optimist.

A success nonetheless

And still, despite all of these shortcomings, the 2009 session of the North Carolina General Assembly must be classified as a genuine success. Consider the following (very partial) list of session accomplishments; what would North Carolina progressives have said at the beginning of 2009 if given the opportunity to know that each of these items would be law (or on their way to becoming law) today?

#1 – A billion dollars in new tax revenue - Think back to the beginning of the year. Despite ever-more-dire state revenue figures, most public officials were in no mood to staunch the flow of red ink with tax hikes of any kind. House Speaker Joe Hackney – one of the most progressive and serious lawmakers to ever lead that body – made clear that new taxes were not on his agenda. In the state Senate – home to a longstanding effort to reform the state tax system – the talk was of "revenue neutral" reform. Meanwhile, big business interests and right-wing think tanks were already firing all of their guns in an effort to assure that any budget shortfall would be balanced with draconian cuts alone.

Despite these roadblocks, lawmakers passed a state budget that raises around a billion dollars in new revenue for essential services in the coming year.

The package is far from perfect. Most new taxes are regressive and most of the budget shortfall remains unplugged. To make matters even tougher, the process for arriving at and explaining the tax decision was messy and poorly handled. But in the end, lawmakers did something akin to "the right thing" in a very difficult area.

#2 – Big ticket improvements to state unemployment insurance laws – As the result of a group of mostly technical changes designed to assure full access to benefits for deserving unemployed workers, North Carolina lawmakers helped assure that the state would pull down hundreds of millions of federal dollars that would have otherwise gone to other states.

#3 – Real progress on "hot button" social issues – Despite the bad economic news, state lawmakers made groundbreaking headway on a number of important, "hot button" issues. Here are just a few:

• New regulation of smoking in public places: After years of failure and against all odds in the home of tobacco, lawmakers passed a critical new public health and safety law that will ban smoking in restaurants and bars in the state for the first time.
• Death penalty reform: When Governor Perdue signs the Racial Justice Act today, North Carolina will join a very short list of states to bring an extra measure of fairness and justice to its state death penalty laws by permitting murder defendants to challenge their death sentences based on statistical evidence of racial bias.
• Anti-bullying legislation: Despite the absurd and over-the-top claims of opponents, state lawmakers took a courageous stand against bigotry and intolerance by sending a strong directive to all public schools to combat the destructive practice of bullying, including bullying perpetrated against kids because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
• Sex education: After years of allowing the state's children to wallow in the dangerous mire of ignorance and misinformation (in which the teen pregnancy rate remained among the highest in the nation), lawmakers made real (if imperfect) progress in advancing the cause of comprehensive sex education by passing a bill that mandates the provision of accurate and comprehensive information along with a message of encouraging abstinence.

#4 – Big wins for consumers – Banking interests, home builders, realtors, landlords and consumer advocates came together to pass a number of bills that will significantly improve how average North Carolinians are treated in number of commercial transactions. These include bills to:

• Abolish "deficiency judgments" on certain "nontraditional" mortgages (i.e. the possibility that the borrower will still owe money after his or her home is foreclosed upon);
• Create new statewide standards for rental housing, protect low-income renters from housing discrimination and improve fair housing laws;
• Dramatically increase the amount of equity in their homes that debtors may protect from creditors,
• Protect homeowners from losing their homes due to liens placed by their homeowners' associations without their knowledge,
• Protect consumers from predatory "debt buyers" who purchase old, stale debts and attempt to extract money from unwitting consumers.

Room for improvement

If there was one real shortcoming to the 2009 session (aside from the failure to enact progressive tax reform), it was probably in the failure of lawmakers to do a good job of explaining and selling their accomplishments. Though often obvious to policy wonks and others who understand and seriously monitor state government, many of the legislature's choices and actions were inadequately explained and marketed to the public at-large. This was especially true with the push for new tax revenue, which could and should have been justified and defended from Day One.

As lawmakers begin to contemplate the work that will confront them in 2010, they would do well to begin by explaining and "selling" their formidable achievements from 2009.