Mmmmm....bacon
The state budget is chock full of plenty of home cooking for the Triad. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although budget hawks will tell you that the state could do without spending on some programs, particularly the grants to nonprofits.
The teapot museum I mention getting a $400,000 grant in this morning's story is a real place. Click here for a link to a page that explains what they're trying to do.
You can find my other budget story from Wednesday's paper by clicking here. It talks about all the policy direction that gets thrown into the budget, beyond just the expected tax and spending items.
As for last night's amusements:
Both the House and Senate were scheduled to pass the budget Tuesday. The House's situation is a bit more tenuous because Democrats only hold a three-vote advantage there and are trying to pass the budget without Republican help.
That means a small group of determined Dems can hold up the budget, which is exactly what happened.
Led by Rep. Linda Coleman, a group of about five legislators held out to improve deal lower paid state workers would get in the budget. Basically, they wanted to arrange for more of a pay bonus than the current version of the budget allows.
House leaders agreed to that and asked Senate Leader Marc Basnight to go along.
According to Basnight, he took the proposal back to his caucus (re: the other Senate Dems) who said, in a word, "no." The potential for spending $21 million extra dollars (out of the $17.2 billion budget) also prompted a veto threat from the governor.
The logic for the rejection seems to be this: if you start tinkering with what's supposed to be final budget deal, you're going to have all sorts of requests come out of the woodwork. And who is to say that one group will get to tack something on and another won't?
So the House, which had planned to try to settle its budget early this morning (aiming for right after midnight) is now stuck half-way through the formal approval process. And the Senate isn't going to move until the House gets a deal done.
And so we start the day. Both chambers meet this afternoon.
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