RALEIGH (July 2, 2025) – State legislators went home last week for a couple of months without adopting a budget for 2025-27 – their basic duty as legislators.
The 2025-26 fiscal year started yesterday. And schools will open next month regardless of whether legislators have approved a budget – or raises for teachers.
In the accompanying video, state Rep. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth and Senior Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, explains why the conference committee process takes time.
“It sets everybody down, and you go line item by line item,” Lambeth says. “It takes a lot of time.”
One “huge” difference between the House and Senate, he says, this year is taxes – the Senate wants to continue on a tax-cut plan agreed to previously, while the House wants to take a more cautious approach, given inflation, $2 billion the state has spent on recovery from Hurricane Helene, and other economic uncertainties.
Lambeth notes that the Senate’s budget proposal would double the tax on sports betting, while the House’s proposal doesn’t. The Senate budget also includes an additional $638 million for a 500-bed UNC-Duke children’s hospital in the Triangle;1 the House’s budget doesn’t.
“We’ve got to reconcile that, and we’ve got to understand the economic benefits to North Carolina, and how do we come to some kind of agreement on how much we’re going to fund for that expansion project,” says Lambeth, a retired hospital administrator.
“The conference process – it can be tough, it can be rigorous. But it works – it just takes time.”
“You’ve got to maintain your cool,” he says, chuckling. “And you’ve got to be able to have a working relationship with each other, and you’ve got to be able to trust each other.”
When will the state have a budget?
Lambeth says legislators will take a break for July 4 and the months of July and August. Discussions will continue, though, he said.
They’ll return in September or October. Or the legislature could fund certain items in June and “there may not be as urgent need to come back in September – we could probably push it off a little bit later than that and give people a little bit longer break,” hen says in an interview recorded June 11.
“It’ll be a while, though.”
1 https://businessnc.com/n-c-senate-budget-pitches-638n-for-triangle-kids-hospital/.
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