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For the record: Slash and Burn

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Staff

There has been an increasing drumbeat of late that this state cannot simply cut its way out of this fiscal crisis.
And, as noted elsewhere on this page, there is some solid reasoning that cutting state services and jobs is the surest way to increase the intensity of the economic downturn.

Still, there is an almost institutional reluctance in Raleigh to raising the revenue necessary to avoid damaging cuts to key services and shortchanging the state in federal stimulus money by using it to plug holes rather than rev the economy.

The reason behind this reluctance is crassly political — to ensure that Democrats now in control remain so through the 2010 redistricting. The problem is that, in order to deprive the GOP of a tax-hike talking point, what once was progress is now jetsam.

We got a look this week at what blowing a more than $1 billion dollar hole in the Health and Human Services budget will mean at street level. A preliminary report of the cuts is stunning to the point of numbing:

• A $59.8 million cut in community support services, and then completely phasing out those services next year.
• Eliminating some 465 positions within the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services.
• A $31.7 million cut in group home services.

With a mental health system already in tatters – and in several areas of the state on the brink of collapse – and a growing number of our neighbors no longer able to afford basic services, cuts like these will ignite wildfires of misery in communities all over North Carolina.

Here in Orange County, we’ve watched the decline of mental health services while the need rises. We’ve heard that more and more people are signing up for food and utility assistance.

And with unemployment expected to linger at high levels even after the economy rounds the corner, the need for services is not expected to slacken.

Without the courage to raise revenue, the strategy to combat this crisis is to fire teachers, teaching assistants and mental health care workers; close clinics; and deny uninsured children access to coverage.

There are conscientious members of the General Assembly who have started to balk as the array of cuts becomes clearer. On her Facebook page, Rep. Pricey Harrison of Greensboro recently mused that she “wonders what the point is in being the majority party if we are not going to do the right thing . . .”

A few million North Carolinians are wondering that as well.

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