The 2010 session is over and lawmakers did pretty much what they said they'd do

Members of the General Assembly headed home this past Saturday morning. In all likelihood, they will not return to Raleigh, except to attend various meetings and study commissions, until next January.

As is usually the case, the session provided a mixture of encouraging and discouraging developments. For the most part, lawmakers stuck to the cautious, middle-of-the-road approach that House and Senate leaders had forecast they would pursue earlier in the year.

In some ways, of course, this made a lot of sense. This was, after all, a "short session" that was generally supposed to be devoted to "adjusting" the budget rather than to lots of grand new policy initiatives. Add to this the fact that lawmakers had very little money with which to work and the strong desire of Democratic leaders not to do anything too controversial at such a critical political juncture (the party that wins this fall's election will be drawing the new post-Census political map) and it's no wonder that leaders wanted to get into Raleigh, get some stuff done and get the heck out of town.

To the extent legislative leaders were actually able to pull this off and keep state government more or less up and running, they deserve a good deal of credit. In effect, leaders offered North Carolinians a fairly modest set of promises and, in the end, delivered on them.

Still, there's no denying that 2010 now also marks another year in which North Carolina will have once again failed to address several festering and critical policy challenges. From the state's eroded and out-of-date revenue system to its fast re-segregating and under-resourced public schools to its crumbling mental health system, our troubles and challenges continue to mount.

Here are some of the highlights and lowlights of the 2010 session:

The lights are still on – Despite the absurd, conveniently unspecific and cynically political complaints of the far right, legislative leaders patched together an FY 2011 budget that mostly avoids disastrous service cuts. At this point, North Carolina will not be forced shorten the school year or kick children off of the Health Choice program or start to furlough prisoners.

Nonetheless, essential services will be reduced and badly underfunded. To see this reality, one need only visit one of the state's thousands of increasingly overcrowded K-12 classrooms, spend five minutes kicking around one of our absurdly inadequate mental hospitals, examine a rising college tuition bill or speak to a state employee whose real wages have fallen for two years in a row. In general, things are getting tighter and tighter and are stretched past their limits.

Additional confirmation of this hard reality was made available in a new report issued by the N.C. Budget and Tax Center entitled "How Low is too Low?" According to the report, state spending per capita is now at the lowest level since fiscal year 1996-97. Indeed, it has dropped $311 over the past three years, from $2,257 in 2007-08 to $1,946 in the new budget that began July 1.

Moreover, when measured as a percentage of the state's total personal income, the fall in spending is even more striking – from a high of 8.19% in 1998-99 to just 5.8% in the new budget. This is truly a precipitous drop and indicates that the recession is far from the only culprit for the tough fiscal times.

Passage of important consumer protection legislation – In one of the session's true bright spots, lawmakers passed the long-sought Homeowner and Homebuyer Protection Act during the session's waning days. This new law will prohibit mortgage foreclosure rescue scams and other dangerous real estate practices, like abusive "lease option" agreements and "contract for deed" transactions. It will keep a lot of people in their homes while at the same time putting a real dent in a bottom-feeding "industry" that had been capitalizing on the suffering of others. In addition, legislators also gave final approval to a bill that will extend the Commissioner of Banks' successful emergency foreclosure program to all home mortgage foreclosures, rather than just so-called "subprime" mortgages. This bill also establishes funding for housing counseling and foreclosure mitigation efforts. 

Passage of a modest ethics reform – Few issues received more media attention during the session than the debate over ethics in government. Again, to their credit, lawmakers stood "up to the plate" and got something meaningful passed. The new legislation adopted in the waning days of the session will make a host of useful changes – by, among other things, clamping down somewhat on the so-called "revolving door" for those who would leave state employment to become lobbyists, requiring more disclosures of more public servants about their receipt of contributions and gifts, and making more information public.

Unfortunately, reform efforts fell short in at least two important areas that would have been true "difference makers." First and foremost, lawmakers failed to expand the public financing of elections – either for Council of State candidates (current law already provides it for Insurance Commissioner, Auditor and Superintendent of Public Instruction) or local government races. As a result, big interest group campaign contributions will continue to remain the elephant in the room when it comes to ethical temptations. Second and in a related vein, lawmakers failed to enact the kinds of "pay to play" rules that would truly rein in campaign contributions from potential state contractors to those with authority over their contracts.

Other noteworthy items – When it comes to the agenda favored by progressives, there were a handful of other important accomplishments that deserve mention.

Encouraging developments included:

• A new law that allows parents of special needs kids to opt out of corporal punishment for their children in the public schools,

• A new legislative study of public school re-segregation,

• The end of the booster club-driven, in-state tuition break for out-of-state athletes,

• Passage of legislation that bans the latest version of the predatory video poker and "sweepstakes" machines.

• The failure of a variety of anti-immigrant proposals and other extreme far right agenda items.

Negative developments included:

• An array of deep cuts to a number of essential education, environmental, justice and public safety and social safety net programs,

• Passage of yet another round of expensive gifts to large and profitable corporations – including expanded business subsidies and a lessening of environmental standards for certain businesses,

• Passage of a new and troubling law that will permit DNA testing of people arrested for certain crimes and the retention of this private information even when individuals are not charged or are found to be innocent.

Going forward

While pragmatic and realistic progressives can understand the mostly cautious avoidance of boat-rocking that was the hallmark of the 2010 session, their patience is not (and ought not to be) inexhaustible. Given the enormous challenges that confront the state, at some point, progressive leaders who want to do more (and who know in their hearts that North Carolina can and must do more) will have to muster the courage to take on the far right and other backward-looking obstructionists of both parties who stand in the way of progress.

In other words, running in place forever is no long-term policy solution. At some point in the near future, thoughtful and caring leaders will have to put their cards on the table and push aggressively for the kinds of structural, long-term progressive changes that are necessary to move North Carolina forward. Let's hope 2011 is the year.