The case of the vanishing budget: How N.C.'s secretive budget "process" is bad for the public good

If, in this precise moment, you’re wondering where North Carolina’s multi-billion dollar budget is, the same one that sets crucial policy and spending parameters for state agencies, that dictates classroom funding levels for 1.5 million schoolchildren, that sets pay levels for thousands of state employees, retirees and teachers, it’s in the same place it’s always been.

Not, I fear, in a public space – a mic’d up committee room or in a clerk’s trusty hands – it exists, without hyperbole, mostly in Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger’s brain.

And, to a lesser extent, in the care of the most powerful lawmakers atop a GOP-dominated House and Senate conference committee, a committee that, as of this moment, has yet to schedule a single public meeting, or a single hearing to listen to the public, in all its wild, untamed glory.

It’s a committee composed, as it were, of Republicans one and all, if you exclude the pair of Democrats selected, perhaps, because at points along the way, they voted for the GOP’s budget in the first place.

Read more: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2019/06/13/the-case-of-the-vanishing-budget-how-n-c-s-secretive-budget-process-is-bad-for-the-public-good/