By Steve Huffman
shuffman@salisburypost.com
Rowan County’s representatives in the state legislature said they’re as unsure as anyone when a state budget might be passed.
“You think an agreement is about to be reached and then it all falls apart,” said Rep. Lorene Coates, D-Rowan. “It’s very frustrating.”
North Carolina is operating under a budget resolution extension since the deadline for passing a budget was June 30. Legislators will soon have to approve another extension because the resolution under which the state is operating expires at midnight Friday.
Coates said such extensions aren’t unusual. She noted that in 2001, her first year in the General Assembly, a budget wasn’t passed until December.
House Democrats are returning to the bargaining table on taxes with Senate Democrats as soon as possible by modifying a $982 million tax package hammered out with the Senate last week.
Gov. Bev Perdue surprised fellow Democrats when she announced last Thursday she wouldn’t accept the plan because it contained a 2 percent income tax surcharge paid on all wage earners with tax bills, not just the wealthiest.
Coates said her understanding of the bill was that it wasn’t supposed to have affected families with adjusted gross incomes of $50,000 or less. She said she would support the surcharge if it was rewritten to reflect that those in lower income brackets wouldn’t be affected.
Excluding lower-income workers, Coates said, would result in a budget shortfall of $30 million, an amount that would have to be made up in other areas.
Rep. Fred Steen, R-Rowan, said Tuesday he’s grown all but used to the budget impasse.
“Nothing’s really happened or transpired this week,” he said.
Steen admitted much work remains in getting a budget passed.
“It’s a little tricky working for a compromise and trying to make the governor happy, too,” he said.
Steen said he didn’t feel he could support an income tax surcharge that affected lower wage earners.
“That’s a showstopper with our economy in the shape it’s in,” he said.
Steen said that typically, he gets little feedback from his constituents concerning anything taking place in Raleigh. That’s not the case this year, he said, as he’s received numerous e-mails from constituents urging him not to support a budget proposal that includes any form of tax increase.
Steen said constituents have also addressed the issue with him in public. When he participated in Fourth of July festivities in Faith, Steen said, numerous taxpayers spoke to him about keeping taxes as low as possible.
“I’ve never seen so many average constituents engaged with this thing,” he said.
Steen said he supports a zero-based budget that involves scrutinizing virtually every program and salary funded by the state. “We need to take a really hard look at everything,” he said.
Steen said approving this year’s budget is far different from those of the past.
“In the past, the arguments centered around how we were going to spend the money, not where the money was coming from,” he said.
Sen. Andrew Brock, R-Davie, said a close look at the tax codes is needed, since they were developed in 1927 when manufacturing operations made up a far larger portion of the revenue than is the case today. But he said he was opposed to any income tax surcharges.
“It’s crazy to tax people on top of taxes,” Brock said of those surcharges.
Instead, he said, the state needs to find fat in the budget and make appropriate cuts.