NC could see a budget stalemate again this year, this time between Republican chambers

The North Carolina state budget being a drawn-out battle between branches or chambers is becoming more of a tradition than an exception.

Less than a month before the new fiscal year begins, there’s still no new state budget. And the state could see another summer-long budget stalemate, or one that extends into the fall.

There’s a chance there might not be a budget in the end, at least not in the traditional sense.

Instead, Senate leader Phil Berger is ready to move ahead with smaller, “mini” budget bills by mid-June, he told reporters Thursday on the Senate floor. That means the week of June 14, less than two weeks away.

“We will send bills over to the House that deal with spending measures, although I do not at this point anticipate it will be a traditional budget,” said Berger, an Eden Republican. Both chambers of the legislature are Republican-controlled.

That’s the same week that the House will move ahead with its own full comprehensive budget, with or without a Senate deal.

“Regardless of if we have received something or not, the House will move forward with a budget,” House Speaker Tim Moore told his fellow House members on Thursday.

Rep. Jason Saine, who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee, told House members that the full Appropriations committee will meet Wednesday.

“The speaker was very clear. I want to reiterate that the chairs of Appropriations agree. We will have a House budget. We will have something for you to vote up or down, either way,” Saine said Thursday.

Usually each chamber must pass its own budget, then a third version called the conference budget that they agree on. That’s the version that goes to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk. He vetoed the 2019 budget, and while the House overrode his veto, the Senate did not. So instead a series of smaller “mini” budgets were passed and signed by the governor.

The state doesn’t have to have a new budget in place by July 1. Instead, it will continue to operate at the previous budget spending level until new legislation.

Budget process

The last budget battle, in 2019, was between the Republican-led General Assembly and Cooper, a Democrat.

But before it even gets to the point for Cooper to take action on, the chambers are having their own trench warfare of numbers. And the relationship between the governor and the legislature is getting frosty after a year that began more friendly.

It’s the Senate’s turn to put forth its budget first. But before that, Senate Republican leadership want to get to an agreement on a total spending number with House Republican leadership. They are still not there yet.

The House and Senate have gone back and forth several rounds — at least five as of last week, Saine told The News & Observer previously — on getting to a total spending number between $25 billion and $26 billion. Saine said the House has moved more than the Senate has in negotiations.

Berger said Thursday that the Senate is no longer going to move on its latest negotiation.

The House, impatient with the Senate, held Appropriations committees this week, which oversee the budget. It no longer is waiting on the Senate to go first before working on its budget proposal, though the Senate is tying up fiscal research staff still.

Some House Appropriations meetings were more organized than others.

On Thursday, Rep. Jimmy Dixon, a Warsaw Republican, led the House Appropriations Agriculture, Natural and Economic Resources Committee meeting that had agency heads share their budget priorities.

“This is the first round. I will say for the agencies that are here, it is the intention of the House to pass a comprehensive budget this year. And so we all know the process that we are currently in, but it is in the intention of the House to pass a comprehensive budget rather than consider the mini budget type thing,” Dixon said.

On Wednesday, in Education Appropriations, there were presentations going over budget goals of the North Carolina Community College system, Department of Public Instruction and the Office of Charter Schools. The same morning, Health and Human Services Appropriations was more of a looser discussion for each lawmaker to express what they think should be budget priorities.

Health Chair Rep. Larry Potts explained why: “This meeting kind of happened on the spur of the moment.”

Still, more House Appropriations meetings are scheduled for next week, too.

On Tuesday, Cooper ended the Council of State meeting with a message to the General Assembly.

“I know a lot of you are working on the budget over in the General Assembly,” he said. “I know that the House started out at $26.4 billion and Senate at $25.5 billion and now the House [came] down to $26 billion. I want to remind both chambers that [his budget proposal] was $26.6 billion and that this is a three-way street, in order to be able to get a budget.

“We don’t want to be where we were last time,” Cooper said. “So I just want to remind people of that.”

He added that he looks forward to the next state revenue forecast due in a few weeks.

The 2019 mini budget tactic was a way to get around Cooper’s veto of the comprehensive budget. But this time, North Carolina could have the same scenario to get around the chambers.

Also on Thursday, the Senate rejected Cooper’s nomination for the Department of Environmental Quality secretary, Dionne Delli-Gatti, a first after the legislature put in place the requirement of confirming the governor’s Cabinet picks after Cooper first took office in 2017.

Berger doesn’t think the vote will impact this year’s budget negotiations with Cooper. Shortly after the vote, Cooper named Delli-Gatti as the new North Carolina Clean Energy Director.

“One of the challenges that you have in what we do is whether or not you can in some respects separate out issues, so that you don’t allow highly contested issue to bleed over and create a problem with something that is truly unrelated,” he said.

“So that would be my expectation, that this would not have any significant impact on any discussions as far as the budget is concerned, but we’ll have to see.”

He also doesn’t want to present a comprehensive budget to the House without that agreed-upon spending number.

“The last time we tried that was in 2015, at a time when we had a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican governor. And it was October before we got the budget done. So we resolved at that point in time that the first time in doing the budget is for us to agree on a spend number,” Berger said.

He said the legislature is “probably past that milepost already” of it becoming a long summer budget process.

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