Senate budget
The folks in charge of the Senate budget say they'll have the full package online tonight sometime around 7 p.m. Some highlights from a 2 p.m. briefing with Sens. Linda Garrou, Charlie Albertson and A.B. Swindell:
- * Total size will be about $20.05 billion, or about $1.4 billion less than last year's budget and just under $1 billion less than what Gov. Bev Perdue proposed.
- * About $320 million of those cuts come by raising the average size of a classroom by 2 students. For K-3 classrooms, average size rises to 20 students. For 4-12 classrooms, average size rises to 22.
- * About 712 government workers could lose their jobs under the Senate proposal, with another 900 vacant jobs eliminated.
- * The process of merging Smart Start and More at Four, the state's two early childhood education programs, begins under the Senate budget, although both keep their names for now.
There was not much talk about what the finance package that pays for all this will look like, although we’re told they need to come up with another $580 million to make the budget work.
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