By Catherine Clabby and Rose Hoban
Usually, in the second year of the legislative biennium, lawmakers return to Raleigh to revise spending for the second year of the biennial budget bill written and ratified the prior year. Usually, the House presents a budget, the Senate revises that budget and conferees from each chamber hammer out the differences in a process that’s open to amendment. In the past, we have presented the House and Senate appropriations side by side for comparison.
This year deviated from the norm, however, in that the budget was negotiated between the two chambers, then the language was dropped into an existing bill which had been approved by both chambers. This meant that the public amendment process was absent and that lawmakers from each chamber only could vote up or down.
The budget bill and it’s accompanying committee have content beyond simply numbers, they also often contain policy proscriptions, the bill sometimes contains language from such policy bills which dropped wholesale into the document.
Here North Carolina Health News compares language from 2017 and 2018 for environmental topics with health implications, including revised standards for lead poisoning interventions, guidance on how North Carolina should spend $92 million intended to reduce harmful diesel emissions, how the state will address the topic of GenX contamination of the lower Cape Fear River and more. Read more.
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