Legislative Update from Rep. Frank Iler – March 6, 2017
Last week in the North Carolina House of Representatives we passed bills affecting our community colleges, we received the Governor’s budget, and we continued our planning for the House and Senate budgets.
Two bills that change the way community college boards of trustees are selected passed the House last week. On Tuesday, I was in the Education Committee on Community Colleges to help present the bills, as I was one of the primary sponsors. House Bill 12 and House Bill 14 cleared the committee and came to the House floor. These bills are local and include approximately 17 of the 58 colleges. They replace the four appointees by the Governor on each board with appointees by the House and Senate. The county commissioners and boards of education appointees are not affected at most of the colleges. On the House floor on Wednesday and Thursday they passed on a party line vote of 74–43 and 71–45, respectively. Brunswick Community College was included as one of the colleges on these local bills. We feel that the locally elected representatives are closer to the needs of the community than a staffer in the Governor’s office.
On Thursday we had a very large joint meeting with the House and Senate Appropriations Committees receiving the Governor’s budget and hearing a presentation by the Governor’s Budget Director. He did an excellent job. While we agree on many of the Governor’s priorities, we have some concerns on the level of spending, which appears to increase over a billion and a half dollars in the two year budget. My first question to the Director was, “I appreciate that there are no tax increases in this budget, but are there any tax reductions?” The answer was basically no, beyond the built-in reductions we put into the last budget cycle. We are committed to raising spending by only the combination of population and inflation. This appears to be almost double that amount. We will have until June 30th to come up with a final two-year budget for North Carolina. We have once again proved that tax rate reductions produce more economic activity and jobs, and more revenue dollars. So, we will be looking to continue to take the tax burden off of our citizens.
We continued to meet with our Senate counterparts in the Appropriations Committee on Transportation. Last week I made a mistake by stating we had a presentation on education funding. It was on transportation funding. Last week we continued to learn about the details of the various aspects of transportation, such as the Strategic Transportation Investment Plan (STIP), DMV, as well as the Metropolitan Planning Organizations and Rural Planning Organizations (MPOs and RPOs). The MPOs and RPOs are the local officials that give input on transportation projects in their areas and have a direct impact on what projects are done in the future.
We also had many groups visit us last week from the healthcare industry. Groups of nurses, home health workers, social workers, and Alzheimer’s/Dementia operatives came by to remind us of the importance of this work to our citizens.