This is the fifth year in a row that state lawmakers are wrestling with a budget shortfall and no matter how legislative leaders settle the differences between the House and Senate budgets, it will be the fifth year in a row they make choices that partially solve some of the state’s problems by making other ones worse. .
Unless things change dramatically, the final budget will cut some programs that working to fund other well-intentioned programs that are popular, increase waiting lists for vital human services to find money to pay for enrollment increases in schools, reduce funding for some education initiatives to pay for corporate tax cuts championed by the ever present business lobbyists.
It amounts to an annual political shell game, imposing arbitrary spending limits and then moving money around under them to keep advocates troubled, but not hostile, cutting a program less this year than last, finding a little more funding for a specific crisis identified by an investigative series in one of the state’s major newspapers.
In the short-term, all the maneuvering diffuses public outrage over any one crisis in particular. In the long term, it obscures the growing number of fundamental problems in the state, many of which have risen to levels that can only be described as emergencies.
Tuesday the North Carolina Psychiatric Association released its Report Card on the Clinical Impact of North Carolina’s Mental Health Reform. The report finds that despite the state’s efforts to reform the mental health system by transferring patients from institutions to community programs, admissions at state mental hospitals are up.Admission of adult patients has increased 23 percent since 1999 and the admission of children and adolescents has also increased. Philosophically, state leaders are committed to reform the system that relies on outdated institutions instead of community and family care. But the level of planning and funding has yet met the philosophical commitment, and NCPA believes that has created a state of emergency in the state’s mental health system that threatens the well-being of people struggling with mental illness.
Every year, the state releases high school dropout rates that appear to show that schools are making progress in keeping kids in class and off the streets. But the figures are misleading. The real numbers show that more a third of ninth-graders don’t graduate from high school and among African-American males, less than one in two makes it across the stage four years later to get a diploma. Hard to imagine a more devastating problem that affects people’s lives and sends its ripples through most of the fundamental institutions of the states, the courts, the prisons, the unemployment offices, and the hospitals. State leaders occasionally mention the state of emergency in the schools and provide a little money here and there for dropout prevention programs, but most of the speeches and most of the funding are aimed at the more popular early childhood programs, not the less-publicized efforts to help troubled teenagers.
People in more than 700,000 households in North Carolina face a housing crisis, paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing, at risk of losing a house or apartment with the next unexpected expense. Almost 9,000 homes have no heat in the winter, more than 13,000 have no indoor plumbing. Workers in many urban areas cannot afford the rent to live in the cities where they work. The evidence is clear that there is a state of emergency in affordable housing in North Carolina.
No one has the perfect response to these emergencies and the others that threaten our quality of life, but we know how to help. Provide more funding for community mental health programs, expand programs that have proven to help kids stay in school, invest $50 million in the Housing Trust Fund to build homes and create jobs.
It is hard to believe that each one of these emergencies has not moved a governor or legislative leader to begin a crusade to address them, but there are no crusades underway in Raleigh. One dictionary defines an emergency as "a condition of urgent need for action or assistance."
North Carolina has urgent needs. What’s missing is the leadership to address them.
Raleigh, NC
