After nearly two months of late nights and lots of wrangling, the North Carolina General Assembly approved its 2008-2009 budget Monday night (July 7).

It was a give and take year for Western North Carolina. Many had hoped this year’s session would produce a more balanced formula for lottery distribution funds coming to WNC. Under the current funding formula, counties with a higher property tax rate get more money for school construction because it is assumed those counties are poorer. But the existing formula shortchanged WNC counties because they all had lower-than-average property tax rates. The formula meant that counties with higher property taxes — like Mecklenburg or Cumberland counties — received more money than poorer counties in WNC.

The compromise reached by the General Assembly is to use the same funding formula, but give any profits back to shorted school systems. However, a flaw in the compromise is that those districts only get more money if lottery ticket sales meet projected sales increases — something that’s rarely happened since the lottery began.

Rep. Phil Haire, D-Sylva, said he’s optimistic there will be some profit. He said lottery officials are tweaking the system and increasing prizes, so that the current projections will likely match up and give schools more money.

But “whether it’s enough to make schools’ funding whole, we’ll have to find out next year,” Haire said.

More for education

On a more positive note, teachers throughout the state are bound to be pleased with the 3 percent salary increase included for them in this year’s budget, though it does fall short of the 7 percent increase recommended by Gov. Mike Easley.

There was also $1.5 million set aside to establish a University of North Carolina medical school branch in Asheville. The school will hopefully help compensate for a lack of medical professionals in WNC, particularly in the rural counties.

Western Carolina University in Cullowhee got a windfall of cash this year. The school received $500,000 to fund additional faculty and equipment for its forensic science program – one of two in the nation.

“That’s going to become a real center in the whole South in forensics training,” said Haire. “It’s like CSI Cullowhee.”

The university also received more than $4 million to help plan its proposed allied education professions building.

The re-establishment of the statewide Committee on Dropout Prevention comes as welcome news to Swain County, which boasts the second highest dropout rate — 8.25 percent in the 2006-2007 school year — in the state.

WNC legislators successful

Several items undertaken as personal causes by WNC legislators were included in the budget. A total of $341,000 was appropriated to continue the landslide hazard mapping program — a vital asset in preventing landslide disasters in the mountains. A couple of weeks ago, the program’s future appeared to be in jeopardy when no money for it was included in the Senate budget.

Sen. Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville, worked to address the subprime mortgage crisis that has contributed to an economic slump nationwide. Partly as a result of his efforts, the budget included $3 million for a home protection program to help residents at risk of foreclosure. Also included was $200,000 recurring yearly to fund a legal assistance program to protect homebuyers from predatory mortgage practices.

Sen. John Snow, D-Murphy, was instrumental in the establishment of an Energy Star tax holiday that came out of this session. Under the legislation, energy-friendly appliances will be tax-free beginning the first Friday in November and running through the weekend.

Additionally important to WNC are two agriculture-related bills. One will ensure that the Mountain Research Station test farm in Haywood County stays open through an agreement between the state’s research universities and Department of Agriculture. The two groups will collaborate to draw up a strategic management plan for the state’s test farms.

The other bill establishes a North Carolina Conservation Easement Trust Fund. Monies will be taken from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and diverted for the purpose of setting aside land in protected conservation easements.

Mental health

The biggest mandate of this General Assembly session was to work toward fixing the state’s broken mental health care system. The General Assembly appropriated $25 million for mental health care and established an array of ways to monitor financial practices and ensure accountability in the system.

The state drastically cut funding to community support services, or groups that contracted with regional state-run organizations in charge of providing mental health care. A Raleigh News and Observer investigation was instrumental in exposing fraud and misuse of state dollars by community support groups. Legislators also improved and strengthened the financial oversight of community support services and added months of accreditation requirements.

WNC will likely benefit from some of the measures taken to improve mental health care. The Department of Health and Human Services, in charge of overseeing the mental health care system, will perform a service gap analysis to determine what’s missing for patients. Of the money set aside for mental health, $8 million will be used to help local management organizations — such as the Smoky Mountain Center for Mental Health — set up local substance abuse services. A lack of substance abuse treatment providers is a critical problem in this region.

Additionally, $10.6 million was set aside to establish more local inpatient psychiatric beds in order to ease a total reliance on state mental hospitals. And to aid in recruitment of mental health care professionals — also a struggle in WNC — the state has pledged up to $8,000 in sign on bonuses for new, full-time psychiatric nurses.