North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein plans to take action Tuesday on state lawmakers’ newly approved $34 billion state budget plan, he told reporters Monday.
Stein didn’t say what action that would be. Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled General Assembly approved the plan Thursday with support from all but a handful of Republicans and nearly half of all Democrats.
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Stein has 10 days from then to approve it, veto it or let it become law without his signature. The Democratic governor has raised objections to some pieces of the spending plan but agrees with other parts of the budget.
“We've had a few days to continue to scrutinize it,” Stein told reporters after signing unrelated bills into law Monday. “We're still in that process and the absolute, final, finalization of our review. Tomorrow I will act on it.”
Raises for teachers and state employees — plus separate bonuses for them, for retired state employees and for local law enforcement officers — are among the main areas of focus in the new budget. All will get at least 3% raise. Teachers will receive on average an 8% raise and some state law enforcement and prison workers would get even bigger raises, up to 17%.
The budget also:
- Continues Republicans’ years-long efforts to further reduce personal income taxes.
- Spends an extra $151 million on Hurricane Helene recovery and $10.7 million on Tropical Storm Chantal recovery.
- Boosts funding for a new state children’s hospital.
- Cuts funding for Legal Aid and similar groups.
- Makes Wake County the most understaffed prosecutor’s office in the state.
- Raises taxes on sports betting companies — and allows UNC and N.C. State athletics to get a slice of the pie for the first time — while also authorizing prediction market betting companies to operate at a much lower tax rate.
- Includes dozens of policy changes and budget adjustments affecting K-12 education.
If Stein were to veto the budget it would delay, and potentially stop, what would be the first raise in over a year for most state employees. In debates over the budget in the state House and Senate this past week, some Democrats who voted for the budget said they were doing so largely for those raises, or for the Hurricane Helene funding, in spite of other objections they had against the plan.
One of the complaints Stein has with the budget is that it contains little to no additional funding for the state’s mental health services.
“We don't have enough mental health beds,” Stein told reporters Monday after signing a bill into law intended to make it easier to commit criminal suspects to mental hospitals.
He added: “I have requested the legislature to put more resources toward that, and they didn't in this budget. So there is definitely more work that we can do together.”
Some Republicans also said that they didn’t love everything in the plan — which was the result of more than a year of negotiations between Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall and their top lieutenants — but that they believed that each side made necessary compromises in order to get to a final deal.
“There’s things in here — there's things [that have] been in every budget — that I didn't like,” said House budget writer Rep. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth on Thursday before its final passage. “But I look at the totality of the budget, and it is good.”