Fitzsimon File

The General Assembly session steams on with debates about relaxing the restrictions on when school can start, elections to the UNC Board of Governors, and a fierce behind the scenes battle over a ban on smoking in restaurants and public places that passed a House Committee but has yet to come to the House floor for a vote.

All those issues have garnered their share of headlines and news accounts, but the biggest story of the week might have come early Tuesday morning in a meeting of the budget subcommittee responsible for health and human services programs.

For the past several weeks, House and Senate members of the Appropriations Committee have been divided into subcommittees that listen every morning and every afternoon to presentations from state agencies about their budgets and programs.

That part of the budget process ended Tuesday with an ominous thud as Senator Doug Berger announced the targets for the Health and Human Services Subcommittee that he co-chairs. The budget targets are set by the House and Senate leadership and limit how much money the subcommittee can recommend that the state spend in its issue area in the biennial budget.

The Health and Human Services budget target for next year is $34 million above the current year’s funding level. That is just slightly more than half of the $59 million that Governor Easley recommended in new spending on human services in his budget.

Easley’s proposal was widely attacked by human service advocates for not investing enough money in programs that provide services, especially in the areas of mental health and substance abuse.

Now it looks like lawmakers are setting the bar even lower, disturbing enough in most years, but scandalous when the state’s mental health system is in such bad shape that a consultant hired by the Administration said it would take $2.5 billion over the next five years to fix it.

Legislative leaders on mental health have introduced bills calling for an investment next year of close to $200 million. And that’s just mental health. Then there’s Smart Start, children’s health care, child care subsidies, HIV/AIDS, and on and on.

Maybe folks misheard Berger. Maybe he meant the target was $34 million to pay for an increase in what’s called the continuation budget, which would pay for higher expenses to keep programs at current levels.

But reportedly, the Senate leadership is balking at Easley’s proposal to continue half of the two temporary tax increases passed in 2001. The state sales tax and the income tax rate on the state’s wealthiest taxpayers are both scheduled to fall by a quarter of a percent next year, which would return both to their pre-2001 levels. That would cost the state roughly $300 million a year.

Easley wisely wants to keep the tax increases on the books to pay for education and other important programs. You can argue with Easley’s spending priorities, but he is right that the massive needs of the state make cutting any taxes this year unwise.

The reports that the Senate leaders may want to let the tax increases expire lends credence to the thought that the overall budget target for human services is only $34 million more than the current year.  Not having $300 million to spend makes expanding mental health services and providing health for more children almost impossible.

The targets are vitally important because of the way the legislature puts the budget together. Once the Health and Human Services budget is done, that’s it. No one is allowed to offer amendments during the budget debate to take money from other departments to spend more money on mental health or child care.

The budget targets define the debate. Tuesday morning’s announcement seems to indicate that lawmakers may be more concerned about cutting taxes this year than taking care of people in the state who need help.

We’ll know more Wednesday about the targets as the budget committees begin evaluating Governor Easley’s specific requests. Let’s hope that Tuesday’s budget targets were simply misinterpreted or misstated. If not, lawmakers better come to their senses pretty quickly or a lot of people in North Carolina will suffer as a result.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.