We want a budget - but not a bad one

Editorial by Durham Herald-Sun, August 13, 2015.

We’re tempted to say, enough already. The General Assembly is unconscionably overdue in passing a state budget for a fiscal year that began six weeks ago, and with another two-week extension Wednesday, the House and Senate are still far apart on agreeing on a final budget.

The prospect is real that state agencies and local school districts won’t know what they’ll have to spend this year until it is one-sixth over – if then. Perhaps most in limbo are the school districts.

Should the Senate budget version prevail, thousands of teacher assistants across the state will face elimination of their jobs, or districts will be scrambling to find alternate source of local funds to keep some or all them in the classroom.

The prospect the Senate version might become law holds another late-inning challenge for schools. It calls for cutting class size, an inherently positive idea for improving the educational environment. But the timing would be terrible,

At best, schools will be scrambling to find qualified teachers to fill slots even as the school year is underway.  Even worse, for many districts, that last-minute feeding frenzy is going to see those with higher salaries raiding nearby districts where pay is lower – a move that could double-whammy Durham.  Durham Public Schools could be filling new slots and replacing teachers lured to nearby higher-paying jobs.

So there are critical differences to resolve between the House and Senate budgets, which is why we suggested it would be facile simply to admonish the legislators to forge some kind of compromise and put a budget in place. In fairness, that could mean losing those teacher assistants – bad policy, in our view – or keeping them at the expense of trimming class size – bad policy, to be fair, in the view of the Senate majority.

As much as we would like to see a budget passed, we hope the House will stand fast on teacher assistants, and on a couple of other key issues that Gov. Pat McCrory highlighted in a press appearance Wednesday. The governor and the House members want to revive a version of the historic tax credits that made projects such as American Tobacco in Durham possible and have benefited the economy in scores of towns and cities across the state. And the governor and the House oppose a Senate measure to alter distribution of sales tax that would punitively impact urban counties and several others where tourism is an important part of the economy.

Yes, we want a budget deal – but not a bad one.

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/editorials/x110786016/An-elusive-budget-deal