Republicans send state budget plan to Cooper, with a transparency poison pill
The $30 billion spending plan also includes Medicaid expansion, teacher pay raises, a substantial transfer of state funds from public schools to private ones and greater GOP power in the judiciary.
Reader’s Note: As this post highlights the importance of public records and transparency, I am making this particular newsletter item publicly available at no cost. If you want to support this continued journalism, please do so by subscribing or upgrading your membership plan here.
North Carolina’s $30 billion spending plan received final legislative approval on Friday. It now goes to Gov. Roy Cooper, who will have 10 days to act on the measure once it reaches his desk.
Cooper on Friday said he’d allow the budget to become law without his signature so the state could move forward with Medicaid expansion, the Democratic governor’s top policy ambition.
“I will not allow people who are crying for help to wait any longer, so I am directing our Department of Health and Human Services to begin today the process for expanding Medicaid while allowing this budget to become law without my signature,” Cooper said in a statement.
But the 625-page budget also includes a number of items Cooper finds objectionable, including greater GOP control over community colleges and state courts, raises to teachers and state workers outpaced by inflation and an opportunity for all North Carolina kids, regardless of income, to attend private school using taxpayer dollars that would’ve otherwise gone to public schools.
On Friday, the Senate held a final procedural vote on the budget, with a 26-17 vote split along party lines. None of the seven Democratic senators who supported an earlier version of the budget backed the compromise reached between House and Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats. Early Friday morning, five House Democrats backed the bill, including four architects of the proposal.
The Senate’s final thumbs up marks an apparent conclusion of a highly contentious process.
🗑️🔥An incredibly messy week
Because Republicans have a supermajority in both the House and Senate, they don’t need Democratic votes to achieve key policy objectives. But that changed when Senate leader Phil Berger insisted last week that a final budget include legalizing casinos and video lottery terminals.
Thirty House Republicans told House Speaker Tim Moore they wouldn’t vote for a budget that included Berger’s demand. Berger’s efforts to persuade some of the House’s most right-wing members proved unsuccessful, prompting Moore to declare that he’d advance with two separate bills: A state budget with every other agreed upon provision besides gambling and a standalone bill linking Medicaid expansion to casinos.
The linkage was aimed at forcing Democratic support to get all GOP policies over the finish line. But Democrats refused to blink after Cooper condemned what he declared “the most brutally dishonest legislative scheme I’ve seen in my 3+ decades.”
On Monday, all Senate Democrats and 40 of 48 House Republicans signed onto open letters opposing a joint Medicaid/casinos bill, making it impossible for Republicans to achieve all their ambitions.
Later that night, a copy of a 611-page draft budget was leaked to reporters. The document represented an apparent compromise reached between the House and Senate on top spending priorities other than casinos.
On Tuesday, Cooper called Berger to voice his concern with the proposed gambling expansion being tied to Medicaid. Moore also insisted his chamber lacked the votes for the passage of a standalone bill.
Hours later, Berger folded.
In a Tuesday night news conference alongside Moore, Berger announced the plan to add casinos and video lottery terminals was dead and that his chamber would get behind a budget, which included the original commitment the House made this year to link Medicaid expansion to the budget.
“The emotion that was permeating every bit of discussion about that had sort of already overtaken,” Berger told reporters. “I've learned that in an environment like that, you're unlikely to make any progress. It was my belief that it was time for us to just move forward."
🤫🚪A blow to transparency
The final language of the budget was to be released sometime on Wednesday. But with a leaked draft of a budget already circulating since Monday, the public and members of the media raised attention to a number of concerning items.
One particularly eyebrow-raising provision buried deep within the budget: Giving lawmakers sole control over the public’s access to their records.
The proposal read, “Notwithstanding any other provision of this section or order, rules, or regulations promulgated or adopted thereunder, the custodian of any General Assembly record shall determine, in the custodian's discretion, whether a record is a public record and whether to turn over to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, or retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of, such records. When requested by the Legislative Services Officer, the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources shall assist in the preparation of an inventory of the records to which the request applies."
The North Carolina Open Government Coalition posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, “Interpreted broadly, this language gives total discretion over the entire public records process to individual legislators. Interpreted narrowly, it gives legislators more power to determine when their records go to the State Archives for permanent storage. This greatly risks depriving the public of historical information when each individual elected member decides for themselves what should be public.”
Despite the pushback, lawmakers kept the language in the final budget they released at 4 p.m. Wednesday — just 18 hours before the House was set to hold an initial floor vote.
But it wasn’t just one vague, opaque provision left in the budget. Lawmakers further weakened public records law.
The final budget language repeals a statute granting the public access to redistricting documents and declares that current and former state lawmakers are “the custodian of all documents, supporting documents, drafting requests, and information requests” and aren’t required to disclose any records.
Effectively, the budget grants lawmakers immunity from sharing public records and allows them to sell and destroy their documents at will.
“When enacted, North Carolina will be one of the least transparent of any state in the country,” Sen. Graig Meyer, an Orange County Democrat, said during a three-hour floor debate Thursday. “Public access to legislative documents will be limited to only the documents that any legislator or the legislative majority decides to release, which is to say that there will be no public access at all because voluntary access is not public access. We legislators would have the ability to destroy every single email we write.”
During an exchange with Democratic Sen. Jay Chaudhuri of Wake County, Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican, said the final version of the budget “is just codifying what is common practice and that the legislators or lawmakers aren’t hiding anything more than they have in the past.”
On Friday, Meyer pushed back.
“We have never been able to shield our external communications,” Meyer said. “We have never been able to destroy our records while in office. … If public records belong to the public, then why would we have the ability to sell them?”
In response to the final budget language, I submitted 170 records requests on Thursday (one to every state lawmaker) before the budget could take effect. I requested all their communications dating as far back as state retention policy presently requires. I also requested records of all past lawmakers and a list of contact information of all former legislators.
On Wednesday, I requested Paul Coble, the General Assembly’s legislative services officer, retain all lawmaker records from this session and immediately disclose them. In response, Coble wrote back, “I like this one. ‘Since you are going to cut off public records requests when the budget is signed into law, give me everything including the kitchen sink now and everything you can anticipate to be written in the future.’”
No lawmaker has taken ownership for the language in the budget. The records I’ve requested could shed light on how the controversial provision came to be, but the disclosure of that may very well depend on the level of transparency of legislators who could soon have the ability to disclose only what they want in the public domain.
✍️Other provisions
The budget includes a number of other important issues related to elections, education, the judiciary, infrastructure, pay raises and so much more. Rather than recap them all here, I’ll redirect you to my overview of the 14 things in the budget that you need to know. While it doesn’t cover everything, it does shed light on some of the most important policy objectives and the political repercussions of them.