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Budget déjà vu

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Staff

Chris Fitzsimon

In case you missed the news about the state budget negotiations between the House and Senate late last week, here is a quick summary.

The House budget spends more on public schools and less on the university system than the Senate plan, and that prompted UNC President Erskine Bowles to warn at Friday’s board of governors’ meeting of impending doom for UNC if the House budget was adopted.

Then came news that budget writers had somehow found $83 million to lessen the need to slash the university budget and Bowles said he was encouraged by the development.

If all that sounds familiar, it should. It’s almost exactly the same thing that happened last June and the June before that. The House passes a budget that makes deeper cuts to UNC and fewer reductions to public schools and human services than the Senate proposes and university officials go ballistic and the final budget makes fewer cuts to UNC.

That doesn’t always mean less funding for K-12 education or mental health, but it might this year. The reports about the $83 million quoted a spokesman for House Speaker Joe Hackney saying the new money came from shifting funds from other budget areas, including health and human services.

There are plenty of reasons that the UNC budget dance always seems to end the same way. Erskine Bowles is a powerful voice in the legislative building and he has a receptive audience, especially in the Senate.

New investments in UNC have long been a priority of Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight and other Senate leaders. Then there is Citizens for Higher Education, a political action committee of wealthy donors to UNC-CH that has become one of the biggest contributors to legislators’ campaigns and employs two lobbyists to patrol the legislative halls.

The PAC was instrumental in getting a secret provision in the state budget a few years ago to give university booster clubs a windfall by allowing out-of-state athletes to pay in-state tuition, a move that cost the taxpayers $10 million a year.

The House budget calls for an end to the booster club windfall, a proposal that that no doubt has Citizens for Higher Education on high alert and planning more campaign contributions.

At some point during the discussion about why the UNC budget always seems to prevail, somebody will call the UNC system the state’s crown jewel. And UNC is clearly among the best public university systems in the country and provides North Carolina incalculable benefits in a wide variety of areas, including research, economic development and a world-class education for North Carolina students.

The question every year is not should the state continue to strongly support the public university system – it is why does it seem that UNC is always the top priority in years when lawmakers cannot muster the political courage to find revenue to make equally important investments or stave off devastating reductions in other areas like the criminal justice system, the human-services safety net and even public education and community colleges.

None of that is the university system’s fault and none of it means that the university should get less funding, though the booster club subsidy is indefensible.

But there ought to be a way to at least have a fairer debate about budget priorities and it’s not likely parents of children with a disability are forming a powerful PAC anytime soon.

That means it’s up to lawmakers to make sure they listen just as carefully to the state’s most vulnerable people and educators at all levels as they do the folks with access to the tickets at mid-court of the basketball games.

Chris Fitzsimon is executive director of N.C. Policy Watch.

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