Fitzsimon File

There are plenty of things to complain about in any review of a legislative session and the one that adjourned last week is no exception.  Progressive and conservative groups generally agree that the decision to borrow $857 million without a vote of the people is a bad idea and expanding questionable corporate welfare programs was a mistake.

Organizations on both sides of the philosophical spectrum are part of the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform that is upset about some of the changes in state lobbying and ethics laws, as well as the increasingly closed budget process, especially in the Senate.

But that's about where the agreement ends. Progressives wanted more investments in affordable housing, child care, and mental health services, and supported legislation to protect children from bullying at school, including gay and lesbian children, and wanted lawmakers to address racial bias in capital punishment.

The folks on the Right opposed those proposals of course and are angry that legislators didn't take away the local option transfer tax from counties and overturn the state's annexation law that has generally served the state well.

There are plenty of other differences on a wide variety of issues, but the latest release from the Pope Civitas Institute about the state budget deserves special attention for what it reveals.

The Civitasers report says that "pork and earmark spending in new budget totals $1.1 billion. Pork is defined as "generally wasteful government spending falling well outside the proper scope of government services," though there is no definition included of proper scope.

Earmarks are defined as "state funds being directed to locally-focused projects and reflect the influence of certain lawmakers…"

The message of the report is clear, that lawmakers wasted more than a billion dollars this session on pork barrel projects and earmarks.

Among the items listed as pork, things that government shouldn't be concerned with, are the Tobacco Quitline in the Division of Public Health, obesity prevention programs, UNC-TV, preserving farmland, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, the Museum of Art, and helping make sure that working poor families are aware of the new State Earned Income Tax Credit.

The list of earmarks is even more puzzling. The Civitasers are upset about funding for Communities in Schools—one of the state's most successful dropout prevention programs, a new phone system for the Governor Morehead School for the Blind, new crime lab equipment for the State Bureau of Investigation, alternative sentencing programs to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison, and virtually every construction project approved for state government or the UNC system.

The UNC projects that made the list include planning money for new classrooms, buildings for engineering, nursing, and law schools, firefighting training, and a statewide program for infection control and epidemiology at the UNC-CH School of Medicine.

The report complains that the UNC projects were the result of bills introduced by individual legislators and ignores "proper consultation" with the Board of Governors. But most of the projects funded this session are part of the Board's priority list for budget requests.

And the Civitasers aren't arguing that the money spent on projects on their pork and earmark lists should be redirected to other priorities like affordable housing or child care or expanded health coverage for kids.  They oppose those programs too.

They want to use the money to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, not invest in higher education or help people quite smoking or save their house from foreclosure. No need to replace the phones at the School for the Blind or buy new equipment to fight crime and certainly not improve any museums.

All that is apparently outside the "proper" scope of government. Thank goodness the majority of state lawmakers disagreed, including a significant number of Republicans. Maybe this wasn't such a bad session after all.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.