North Carolina’s share of the state’s fiscal adjustment funds – flexible dollars allocated to North Carolina from the US bailout – provides an opportunity to meet new and long-standing needs across the board. government by injecting dollars at a single scale into communities. .
Our analysis to date shows that the plans proposed by the State House and Senate lack transparency and public input, rely on one-time and arbitrary allocations for specific communities only, and demonstrate over-reliance on federal funds. rather than government funds to meet long-term needs. .
Further analysis of the three plans – those released by the Governor, Senate, and House, respectively – shows substantial variations between the proposals. The positions have been classified in one of the five categories linked to the objective or the result sought by the investment. They were:
- Assistance to individuals, examples include salary bonuses and food bank funding
- Building capital and infrastructure, including broadband networks and subsidies to water and sewer services
- Support the workforce, examples include grants and funding from Longleaf Commitment to expand a learning program for high demand areas
- Stabilize private companies across North Carolina, including through a grant program to help them recover from the pandemic
- Financing public establishments, such as stabilizing community college budgets, funding communicable disease control and prevention through public health departments, and supporting local governments to administer federal recovery funds.
All three proposals place a high priority on improving state infrastructure, although they vary in how they intend to do so. In addition to infrastructure investments, the governor’s plan prioritizes aid to individuals, while the Senate places the next largest investments to stabilize businesses, and the House proposes similar funding levels for the assistance to individuals, mainly in the form of one-off bonuses. and business stabilization. Notably, legislative plans would invest very few dollars in supporting the workforce, and all three plans would invest relatively few dollars in financing public institutions.
Suzy Khachaturyan is a policy analyst at the Budget & Tax Center, a project of the NC Justice Center.
