Key NC lawmaker: Don't expect a new state budget until the fall

Two months past the start of a new fiscal year, General Assembly leaders are still hammering out differences.

Posted 2:07 p.m. Sep 2, 2021 — Updated 6:07 p.m. Sep 2, 2021

Travis Fain

, WRAL statehouse reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — State government will likely go into the fall without a new state budget providing employee raises and laying out major projects the state will undertake over the next two years, a key Senate leader said this week.

And that's if top state leaders come to an agreement at all.

"We’re still having conversations," Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger told reporters Wednesday afternoon. "I think we’ve narrowed down the items we need to agree to in order to start, in earnest, hammering out some final provisions in the budget."

Conversations now are primarily between House and Senate leadership, who plan to negotiate away their own differences before including Gov. Roy Cooper in earnest in negotiations that he'll ultimately have to sign off on unless Republicans can get a number of Democrats to back their budget in opposition to their party leader.

Cooper vetoed the last several budget efforts, so the state is working off 2018 figures, plus a series of "mini budgets" dealing with some of the state's more pressing issues and issues with broad consensus. The new fiscal year, typically a deadline to enact a new budget, started July 1.

Berger, R-Rockingham, said Wednesday that he and House Speaker Tim Moore have had budget conversations with the governor, but it will probably be late September before the Republican majorities controlling both chambers can go to him with a united front on spending plans.

"At that point, we will have what I consider to be conversations in earnest with the governor," he said.

That's a bit different than the process leaders described earlier this year.

There are a number of sticking points, Berger said. The House put more projects into the state's capital budget, spending money without increasing the general fund's bottom line – essentially an end-around to spend more than Senate leaders would like. The House also proposed significantly larger raises in the budget for teachers and state employees.

In the budget bill, page after page without a dollar sign

The House also added a lot of policy provisions to the budget – not spending money, but changing state education policy, reining in the governor's emergency powers and making other moves about which Cooper has already raised concerns. These would be sticking points in negotiations with the governor if they survive House-Senate negotiations.

“I don’t know that those things are going to be there or not be there," Berger said Wednesday.

The Senate leader struggled to predict how, and when, all this ends. The state's ostensibly part-time General Assembly has been in session since January.

"My crystal ball’s a little cracked," he said. "It could go fairly quickly, but given what we’ve seen thus far, I don’t anticipate that. … I don’t see us getting to the finish line before the end of September."

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