Fitzsimon File

Conventional wisdom in the legislative world on Jones Street is that lawmakers will wrap the summer session this week and head home to the campaign trial. The House and Senate approved a final version of the state budget last week, increasing pressure for adjournment after a week or two for what is generally described as time to wrap up loose ends.

This year the phrase loose ends doesn't apply. Lawmakers may have already passed the budget, but Governor Mike Easley hasn't signed it yet. Easley has until Friday to use his veto stamp and force legislators to try again to come up with a spending plan.

That seems very unlikely, especially considering that House and Senate budget leaders are now preparing legislation to slightly increase funding for Easley's Learn and Earn Initiative that allows students to finish high school and earn a community college associate degree in five years.

Easley also wanted more money for More at Four, his program for at-risk kids, but late Tuesday it appeared that legislators were not inclined to increase that program's funding.

The new money for Learn and Earn will come in a bill called the "2008 Budget Technical Corrections Act that makes "technical, clarifying, and other modifications" to the budget passed last week. 

Lawmakers consider a technical corrections bill at the end of every session to fix typos and grammatical errors discovered in bills passed earlier in the session. It is also a chance for powerful legislators to sneak in changes to the law without any debate, though that practice has lessened in recent years.

A Senate committee passed a technical corrections bill Tuesday morning, but that is separate from the budget corrections legislation that has been considered in the last week by legislative leaders in a corner room of the Legislative Office Building.

Changes in how lottery funds are allocated for school construction are also in the budget fix-it, as well as provisions about the state's high risk insurance pool. That's quite a bit of clarifying and it is likely there will be more.

Reportedly, legislative budget writers have been told that funding to meet the rising costs of the state health plan may be as much $125 million short. That has prompted talk of raising insurance premiums for state employees as much as 40 percent, a terrible idea that could wipe out the small raise in the budget for state workers.

An alternative proposal would give the administration the authority to adjust the premiums of the plan, an idea that understandably also doesn't thrill state employees.

Lawmakers are also working out the details of the appeal procedure for people denied Medicaid coverage and the latest version of the plan could cost almost $4 million. 

There are other budget items in the more than technical corrections budget bill and there are still important policy decisions left on the table too, including efforts to protect kids from bullying at school and reducing the role of race in the application of the death penalty.

The latest news on those proposals isn't encouraging with political courage in short supply, particularly in the Senate. A mixed bag of changes to the state ethics law passed the House Tuesday and is now in the Senate and the House has yet to take up a bill to make it more difficult for people with a serious mental illness to buy a gun.

And that's just the short list. Don't stop paying attention to lawmakers yet. This may be the last week of the legislative session, but there's a lot more at stake for families in North Carolina than cleaning up some loose ends.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.