NC lawmakers ready to vote for $19B spending plan designed to protect classroom jobs

House, Senate prepare to debate final NC budget

RALEIGH, N.C. — More teachers and university faculty would stay on the job this fall but some might face furloughs, and thousands of Medicaid patients may no longer get help at home with cooking and bathing in the North Carolina government budget heading for the first of two final votes Tuesday.

The nearly $19 billion spending plan proposed for the new fiscal year after weeks of debate by House and Senate Democratic negotiators seeks to protect more classroom positions in public schools and University of North Carolina system campuses.

By earmarking more North Carolina Education Lottery profits to keep teachers employed in early grades — the most significant funding changes to the distribution since the lottery was created in 2005 — lawmakers believe they will prevent the elimination of 1,700 teacher and other instructional positions. Local school districts eliminated more than 5,000 positions last year.

“There’s some really … innovative ways in here to keep teachers teaching and faculty members teaching in the universities,” House Speaker Joe Hackney, D-Orange. “There are some new ways to minimize the damages.”

But job preservation could come at a price for families and the teachers themselves. The bill would allow campuses to raise tuition by $750 per student to help close an extra $70 million in spending cuts lawmakers directed them to make. The measure also gives local school boards and university campuses the option to furlough school employees to offset budget cuts.

Furloughs are unlikely given all the hoops a local school board would have to go through to direct up to two days in public school furloughs, said Brian Lewis, a lobbyist for the 65,000-member North Carolina Association of Educators, the state’s top teacher lobbying group.

“We don’t think there should be any (classroom) job losses in the 2010-11 school year,” Lewis said Tuesday.

Community college tuition also would go up by $6.50 to $56.50 per credit hour for in-state students.

The compromise spending plan would go to Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue for her signature if the bill is approved by the House and Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday. Democratic negotiators wrapped up their work on the final budget Monday after agreeing in principle to the plan over the weekend.

The bill contains no broad tax increases but provides a tax credit to small businesses for their unemployment insurance tax.

The budget also would eliminate two Medicaid programs that pay for aides to help about 38,000 people living at home with bathing, cooking and other personal care needs. The programs would be replaced with two new programs that would save $50.7 million by tighter monitoring of patients who need less assistance or actually don’t qualify for the services.

The Democrats said they closed an estimated $800 million budget gap by reducing spending by more than 3 percent compared to what was slated for use in the second year of the two-year budget that was approved last summer. Lawmakers had to narrow a $519 million gap created because Congress hasn’t approved additional Medicaid funds as earlier expected in part by reducing spending an additional 1 percentage point as a last resort.

Republican leaders said early Tuesday they wouldn’t vote for the bill because it doesn’t prepare for an estimated $3 billion shortfall when temporary tax increases expire and stimulus money runs out.

“The Democrats’ answer to getting out of hole is to just dig a deeper hole,” said Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham.