North Carolina’s road to long-term success

This year, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory made it clear that the state’s reliance on quick fixes is over and that his goal is to begin focusing on long-term reparations to ensure the state’s ability to provide for its citizens.

The below graph provides a visual representation of North Carolina’s budget from FY 2010 through FY 2015.

Governor McCrory’s major focus areas include increasing the State Repair and Renovation Fund to launch a 25-year plan to replace and upgrade aging infrastructure. He is also looking to increase the Information Technology Systems Reserve in an effort to fund high-priority IT projects taking place throughout government agencies. These are quite ambitious projects given the state is only increasing the overall budget by 3.6 percent in the first year, and while the governor has indeed asked for a significant increase in the IT Systems Reserve, it comes at the cost of the Office of Information Technology. While the IT Initiative Reserve is set to increase by nearly $35 million between FY 2013 and FY 2014, the Office of Information Technology is losing more than $39 million. Therefore, technology dollars are more so reshuffling existing resources, and there will actually be less money available in the next few years for IT projects.

Overall, the structure of the state’s departments has remained unchanged over the past few years. The one significant exception is the dissolution of the states’ Departments of Correction and Crime Control and Public Safety, and the advent of the new Department of Public Safety. Funding for the new department remained consistent with the funding levels of its predecessors, and no major initiatives, IT or otherwise, are planned for the next two years.

Unfortunately, not all budget changes involved a simple reshuffling; some departments lost significant amounts of money. The biggest loser was the state’s Department of Commerce, which lost more than $3 billion, followed by the Department of Transportation’s $1.5 billion loss, though it is likely that at least some of that loss was transferred to the Repair and Renovation Fund. 

Analyst’s Take

The small increase in the state’s overall budget means that most departments will maintain the status quo for the next two years. Few costly initiatives are planned, and as the governor stated, the next few years will be used to set the stage for long-term growth.

While the overall budget remains fairly steady over the next two years, the IT budget has dropped significantly, which will likely have an impact on spending for the next few years at least, especially for those interested in the community development, general government and natural resources verticals. As expected, health care continues to be a growth area as well as economic development and regulation, which will likely be heavily focused on regulation and compliance.

Vendors interested in finding out more about North Carolina should check out Deltek’s state profile application.