Policy Report

Multi-million dollar bond referendums and tax increases will not repair the damage done by years of inadequate school facilities planning. With construction and labor costs rising, massive school building programs, such as the one proposed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), will exert a crippling tax burden on local communities.

City and county government cost on average $2,863 per capita in Wilmington during fiscal year 2004. This cost was 42 percent higher than Wilmington's per-capita spending in 1994. As real per-capita personal income increased just 13 percent over the 10-year study period, operations costs climbed 35 percent and capital spending nearly doubled over the decade. No large city in North Carolina had faster spending growth than Wilmington did.

In response to a widely cited study by the American Federation of Teachers, Harvard education professor Caroline Hoxby recently released a study of the academic proficiency of charter school students. Hoxby finds charter schools comparing favorably with regular public schools: "charter students are 5.2 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 3.2 percent more likely to be proficient in math on their state’s exams."

Freedom Budget 2005 continues the tradition of JLF alternative budgets that revise the governor’s Continuation and Expansion budgets. If an item is not included here, the authors accept the governor’s proposal. This includes all pay raises for state employees and some tax changes. The specific recommendations detailed in this report are made as additions or subtractions from Gov. Easley’s budget.

A 2004 study on the academic impact and effectiveness of charter schools in North Carolina authored for the Terry Sanford Institute by Robert Bifulco and Helen Ladd reached some harsh conclusions regarding the performance of the charter schools. Using three different models that compare state end-of-grade (EOG) test scores for regular public school students and charter school students, Bifulco and Ladd conclude that North Carolina charter schools are not only failing to improve their students' academic performance, but are actually hurting it.

TEA-211, the federal US transportation program passed in 1998, resulted in a substantial improvement in overall road performance but at considerable cost, according to the 14th annual review of state highways by Professor David T. Hartgen, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

County and municipal governments provide many key services while taking in billions in revenue. Their roles grow ever greater as state government shifts more taxing power to localities to make up for money kept by the state. Still, finding comparative data is hard. That's why this report provides information of how much local government costs in every city and county in NC.

North Carolina has the second-largest state-owned road system in the US, almost 79,000 miles. A study in 2000 for the John Locke Foundation using data from 1998 showed that the system was in quite poor shape on key indicators. Clearly, North Carolina is losing the battle on road conditions. The purpose of this analysis is to update the earlier study by gathering and reporting on road conditions for each county and determining how conditions in each county have changed since 1998.

N.C. is currently considering important modifications to its tort law, especially its application to medical malpractice. Proponents say it's the only way to ensure quality medical care remains affordable in N.C. Opponents say fluctuations in interest rates and the "insurance cycle" in general account for premium changes, and that tort reform would imperil the health of North Carolinians by "subsidizing" negligent physicians.

Major road projects are freeway and arterial widenings, new freeways and arterials, new exits, climbing lanes and other major actions that are large enough to likely affect growth. Between 1990 and early 2004, North Carolina constructed 349 major road projects costing about $7.34 billion, about 50 percent of the total expenditures for the TIP and Loop roads and about 1/3 of the total NC State highway program over the same period. This study reviews recent trends in North Carolina’s highway funding practices and the cost-effectiveness of these major capital actions.