Negotiators from North Carolina House are now looking over a new budget offer from their counterparts in the Senate.
This is the seventh time Senate negotiators have asked the house “how about this?”
The other six have led to some progress but the state’s $21 billion budget remained stalled as each body kept to certain tenants the other saw as unpalatable.
So at a Joint Conference Committee Meeting yesterday Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown said lets spilt the difference.
And that’s what this latest proposal does. It calls for a roughly 8% raise for teachers; midway between what the house and senate have each called for.
Prior senate offers had also drastically cut funding for teaching assistants, something the house is against. This new offer calls for a 50% reduction in funding for the positions statewide.
And the Senate is proposing about half as much in cuts for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Medicaid which provides healthcare to the poor and disabled.
The House is now considering this new proposal.
