NC Legislative Updates as of February 12, 2021

North Carolina

Activity Updates – NC

We met with Senator Tom McInnis to let him know I was representing CRMCA and re-acquaint him with the Association. It was a brief meeting but he recalled previous conversations and looks forward to meeting with members again to discuss 2021-22 legislative priorities.

Attended the Carolinas AGC virtual meeting with Representative Dean Arp. He spoke about the budget. The state revenues do not look as grim as originally projected. COVID issues and Education will require big expenditures. Transportation will receive a large amount of funds as is typical. Rep. Arp is a Senior Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He stated that everyone (read legislators) understands there is a need for transportation funding. COVID caused DOT a revenue loss of $210 million. There is funding coming from the federal government to the state and directly to some localities for transportation. He also discussed job retraining and that they will continue to look at funding for workforce development.

Bills and Legislation – NC

S38 Small Business Owners/S Corp Fairness Act – allows sole owners of S Corporations to represent their company in court without being an attorney.  This bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and will next be heard in Senate Rules.

COVID Related Transportation Funding – The Governor has laid out his priorities for COVID relief spending in the document linked here. He requested $258,995,900 of the federal funds be used for Highway Infrastructure. We expect to see the transportation funding appropriated in the COVID bill set to be introduced next week.

This is not Governor Cooper’s full budget proposal for the biennium.

COVID – NC

Numbers as of February 10

  • 805,898 cases

  • 10,181 deaths

  • 2,291 currently hospitalized

Vaccine Update – Most of Group 3 can begin receiving vaccinations on March 10th. This includes Workers supporting highway infrastructure and transportation maintenance and repair technicians.

Educators and those working in K-12 schools can get vaccinated starting February 24.

Other Important Items – NC

NCDOT Audit – we are hearing there is another audit coming out soon that will not show the Department in a positive light. We will be watching for more information on this.

The NC Office of State Budget and Management and the NC General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division have released a revenue forecast for our state. It is expected tax revenue will exceed the previous estimate by $4.1 billion. This is great news for NC’s economic outlook. More details of the report can be found here.