Blogging the State Budget – What does it mean to cut the budget?
North Carolina, to the great chagrin of some budget hawks, budgets on a recurring basis for fiscal years running July 1st to June 30th. Basically, the state’s budget gurus make their predictions about revenue for the coming year, and legislators cut or expand the budget based on that revenue forecast. Doesn’t that sound simple? You just need about 400 pages of legislation and money reports laying out the cuts and expansions to individual items.
In even-numbered years like 2010, legislators simply “tweak” the second year of a previously passed two-year budget. The whole process starts, basically, when the appropriations committee co-chairs in the House and Senate assign each area of the budget a spending target. The subcommittees in charge of those areas either cut or expand items to make the target.
Subcommittees matter. If you’re trying to talk to a legislator on the education subcommittee about something in the mental health budget, you might as well be talking to me about how to perform open heart surgery.
The Legislature’s “money report,” lays out all the cuts and expansions. Scroll to page 15 of the money report, and you’ll see exactly how it works. The education budget for the previous fiscal year was $7.36 billion. Scroll through a few pages of cuts and expansions, and you get an overall budget of $7.085 billion for this year. That’s $270 million year over year overall budget cuts for education. Of course, some argue that budget cuts aren’t the same as spending cuts. But we’ll save that for another post.
Remember, the money report shows only those programs with a change in appropriation. There are thousands of pages of additional budget codes and programs.
In January, the Legislature will be back in Raleigh and working on a whole new two-year budget. There will be more extensive hearings on individual programs, and those hearings will carry great weight as legislators consider more cuts. Supporters of various state programs will need to have their facts in order just to protect what they have.
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