Is there a deal on the NC budget? The House is ready, but Senate says not so fast.
Update: GOP legislative leaders announced Tuesday night they would drop a contentious proposal to expand casinos and other gambling and vote on a state budget that will trigger Medicaid expansion, as lawmakers originally planned, on Thursday and Friday.
Senate and House Republicans continue to negotiate an agreement on the state budget, Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
A deal between both chambers of the GOP-led General Assembly wasn’t expected to materialize on Tuesday, and is expected at the earliest on Wednesday, Berger said, explaining that discussions about how to move forward with the budget and a new House bill to combine a contentious gaming proposal with Medicaid expansion were still ongoing.
Once an agreement has been reached, and a majority of Senate and House conferees have signed the conference report for the budget bill, Berger said, then the Senate and House can proceed with holding the two-day votes it would take to pass the roughly $30 billion spending plan and send it to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk.
If an agreement is reached tomorrow, Berger said, both chambers could hold votes on Thursday and Friday. Berger also suggested that lawmakers could be in Raleigh until Saturday for budget votes, although he said GOP leaders would try to avoid that.
The latest Tuesday afternoon update further delays the timeline for approval of the budget and the gaming bill that Berger was insisting up until last week must be included in the spending plan itself.
Negotiations appeared to break down last week when House Speaker Tim Moore said that 30 members of the House GOP Caucus had said they wouldn’t vote for a budget that included the proposal to authorize four new casinos and tens of thousands of video lottery terminals in the state.
On Tuesday, Berger weighed in on a new idea put forth by the House over the weekend: to make the enactment of Medicaid expansion contingent on the new standalone gaming bill, House Bill 149, and not the budget, as was previously the case.
Most legislative Democrats, with a couple of notable exceptions, expressed outrage over the proposal to put the trigger for Medicaid expansion in the gambling bill.
Cooper has also criticized the GOP proposal since it was first reported on by media outlets over the weekend. In another statement on Tuesday, Cooper accused Republicans of “breaking their promise to expand Medicaid” and “using it to extort a shady, sole source casino deal that many of their own members find suspicious.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Moore said that the House was ready to vote on the budget and the gaming and Medicaid bill as soon as Wednesday. House conferees were signing the budget conference report on Tuesday morning, he said.
Talking to reporters Tuesday morning, Moore said that a budget document that was obtained by The News & Observer on Monday evening, which had been revised as recently as Monday afternoon, was a draft, and that there could be some changes in a final budget that he expected to be released Tuesday afternoon.
Many of the provisions in the draft, including raises for teachers and state employees and personal income tax cuts, would stay the same, Moore said.
Moore said on Tuesday morning, before Berger spoke to reporters about the status of budget talks, that he believed Senate leadership supported the decision to advance the gaming proposal in a separate bill that would trigger Medicaid expansion, but that he didn’t know if Senate leaders had the votes to pass it.
Moore said he was confident the budget had enough votes to pass, but said he was still counting votes on the gaming and Medicaid legislation — a copy of which The N&O obtained Monday — to determine if it could also pass the House.
As of Tuesday morning, Moore said he expected that unless something significant disrupted negotiations, the House would move forward with voting on both bills.
“The negotiations are still continuing, right? It’s a matter of also trying to ensure there are votes for a plan, so there’s some flexibility to see what we need to do,” Moore said. “But absent something, absent there being a change in the circumstances, the plan right now is to vote on both bills Wednesday, and to vote on both bills on Thursday.”
If the casino and Medicaid bill doesn’t have enough votes to pass, the House’s next steps would still need to be determined, Moore said. But he indicated the House would likely still go ahead and vote on the budget.
“It doesn’t worry me or bother me,” Moore said. “If that bill comes to the floor, and if it doesn’t have the votes, then it simply doesn’t have the votes.”
Before the final budget is released, House Republicans planned to hold another caucus meeting Tuesday. The official budget documents — the main budget legislation and an accompanying breakdown of how the roughly $30 billion in taxpayer money would be allocated and spent — could be released as soon as 2 or 3 p.m., Moore said.
A press conference featuring both House and Senate leaders and budget writers, a custom that typically follows the release of the final state budget, could follow later on Tuesday, Moore said, ahead of the initial votes expected on Wednesday.
But, he said, there were still several steps that needed to happen before that.
“I’m kind of at step three right now, and that’s like step eight, so I’m trying to just get there,” Moore said.
This story was originally published September 19, 2023 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Is there a deal on the NC budget? The House is ready, but Senate says not so fast.."
