News-Record.com

There's an interesting document floating about Cap City today courtesy of the folks at Americans for Prosperity, a conservative foundation with funding in common to the John Locke, Civitas, etc...

It's a two page spreadsheet that appears to list the expansion items House budget writers are considering including in next year's budget. Part of it is scribbled on, like things might have been stricken from the list or reduced in their funding amount.

Click here for the first page, which has been scribbled upon. And then click here for the second page, which lacks scribbles.

I've spent a little bit of time today trying to establish the provenance of the document and can say that it appears genuine and jibes with what folks in the know have been saying about the budget. Still, not having it from the original source requires the caveat that it could be out of date or otherwise misleading. (I don't think so, otherwise it wouldn't be here.)

So this thing comes along after the House budget process hit the gas and then promptly hit the brakes at the end of last week. None of this stuff strikes me as deal breaker material, although one can well imagine the budget writers were hoping for more availability (read: better than expected tax revenue) so they could do these things AND something else.

A few notes about what the document shows mixed with what others have said about the budget process:

• It would appear that special projects, what some folks would derisively call pork, have returned to the budget, at least on the House side. (Remember, the Senate will get to compile its own budget after the House passes its version.) I don't think this is hugely surprising. The Associated Press wrote about this phenomena for the weekend papers.

• Special projects always get a good deal of attention but may get more this year. They were excluded from last year's budget and after the teapot museum the public is keenly aware of this spending.

• Not everything on that list is a special project or pork. Funds for the Rural Center or Smart Start or the Clean Water Management Trust fund, for example, don't really fit that definition.

• Everything on that list adds up to about $250 million for next year between recurring and nonrecurring spending. That sounds to me like a nice round target number.

• Some lines on this document are left blank. I don't know what that means.

• Rep. Alma Adams will tell you "every project is special to somebody. I think all projects are special projects." She favors these smaller grants to local nonprofits, but she did not sound completely confident that they'd make it into the final House version.

• What Speaker Joe Hackney has said is that special projects could be included but in a priority order. Ones with state-wide importance would get first crack, then regional projects, then local ones. The assumption here, I think, would be that by the time you'd get down to local projects, the budget writers would be out of money.

• The folks at AFP questioned whether the appropriators were really living up to their promise of more open government. They also likened all these projects to earmarks in the federal budget. "Add up all that money and there's your high risk pool," said Dallas Woodhouse, AFP's spokesman. He was referring to a program meant to get health insurance to those without.

• The AFP folks also complained to me that a lot of the items didn't have bill numbers attached to them. (At least if a bill's filed, you know where an item has come from, whose asking for it, etc...) That's weird, because several of the items without bill numbers attached have been filed as bills.

House budget writers say they hope to release the thing tomorrow (Tuesday) and run the bill through by the end of the week. But I wouldn't fall out of my chair if they move things a day or two.

Of local (Guilford County) note: The International Civil Rights Museum is on the list, as is the United Arts Council and money for the nanotechnology school.