North Carolina budget gets final OK, awaits Cooper signature
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The North Carolina General Assembly gave its final approval to a two-year state budget Thursday, completing a series of bipartisan votes for the plan that won wide favor after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper recently announced he'd sign the measure into law.
The House voted 101-10 in favor of the measure, the day after the Senate gave the chamber's final OK to the bill by a vote of 41-7. Each chamber also held similar, preliminary votes backing the plan earlier in the week.
While only Democrats voted no, budget support by a solid majority of the party's members combined with all Republicans present represented a significant achievement. Two years ago, a comprehensive spending plan never got enacted due to Cooper's veto and a negotiating impasse with the GOP legislative majorities.
North Carolina has been the only state in the country without an enacted budget in place for this year.
“This will be a huge day for all of North Carolina,” House Speaker Tim Moore, a Cleveland County Republican, said while holding the over 600-page ratified bill now at Cooper's desk. The governor has 10 days to act.
The measure, which spends $25.9 billion this year, $27 billion next year and several billion dollars more in federal COVID-19 relief aid, was the result of several weeks of negotiations between Moore, Senate leader Phil Berger and Cooper.
It wasn't a consensus result, but the plan does reflect a lot of Cooper's input. Cooper announced Tuesday that while he opposed many items in the final bill, including the elimination of the corporate income tax by the end of the decade and the absence of Medicaid expansion, the good in the bill outweighed the bad.
Rep. Gale Adcock of Wake County, the No. 2 House Democrat, asked colleagues Thursday to vote their conscience, but...