The
contours of the current legislative short session took shape this week, though without
many of the ways legislators normally conduct business. The Senate held
numerous in-person meetings of its committees all week, taking up routine
legislation in rooms pre-arranged for social distancing, but lacking in much public
attendance. In contrast, the House held only a few committee meetings and
conducted them remotely, only scheduling one full voting session the whole
week. However, House Speaker Tim Moore announced that his chamber’s remote
meetings would cease next week and that the chamber would return to in-person
discussions and voting procedures then.
Rep. Chuck McGrady, a senior House budget-writer, commented on the difficulties
that legislators and advocates alike faced in trying to facilitate a routine
lawmaking process with
practical
limitations on the public’s involvement. “Several lobbyists mentioned to me
how hard it was to know what was happening,” he wrote in
a
constituent update yesterday. “While notices still went out via the internet,
often they didn’t get a verbal understanding of scheduling until a formal
notice was sent out, making it difficult to research the impact of the proposed
legislation and try to garner access to policymakers. This makes lobbyists’
jobs much harder and makes it more difficult for some legislators to
familiarize themselves with the details of the bills.”
Along
those lines, this week, legislative leadership signaled a path forward on the
one task that typically drives the timelines of all legislative sessions: the
budget. Following an extension of the budget bill filing deadline to next
Tuesday, the Senate’s leading budget-writers introduced 18 separate budget
bills Wednesday. Each bill addressed a specific funding priority for that
chamber, and one of them supported a key priority of city officials. If funded,
SB 810 Water/Wastewater
Public Enterprise Reform would dedicate state funds to public water and
wastewater systems at risk of financial collapse. The Senate bill filings this
week confirmed the predictions of legislative observers, who for weeks have
speculated that legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper would not be able to
agree on an overall budget for the next fiscal year, and so instead the legislature would make
individualized budget adjustments via separate spending bills.
Senate
leader Phil Berger had previously announced an intention to wrap up short
session work by the end of this fiscal year (June 30), and McGrady wrote in his
message that the House would work toward the same goal.
