Representative Susan Fisher's Reports from Raleigh

2.      Create jobs that create strong, healthy and more prosperous families;

3.      Insure our future by insuring the health and safety of our citizens;

4.      Take action when the President and Congress won’t; and

5.       Give people confidence in a government that works for them.

I believe that investing in education is the most important thing we can do for our people and our economy, and that remains my #1 priority.  I will work to substantially increase teacher pay, provide more money for education than ever before, and make sure lottery proceeds are ONLY spent on education. 

I believe that our workers must make good wages and have health care benefits, and I will work to increase our state’s minimum wage and give state employees a long deserved pay raise.  And, I believe that we should cap our state’s gas tax to give consumers some relief at the pump.  We must also demand the President and Congress take action to rein in the billions and billions of dollars in profits that the big oil and gas companies continue to rake in at our expense.

THE LEGISLATIVE WORK AHEAD

Although we’ve only been in Raleigh for a few days, legislators already have a long “to-do” list – and it keeps growing by the day.  As always during the short session, our biggest task will be passing the budget for the coming year.  There are several stages in the budget process that will play out between now and the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.  The Governor announced his budget plan on Tuesday, the Senate is expected to pass its spending plan prior to Memorial Day, and then the House will pass its version.  After that, members of the House and Senate will work out the differences between the two spending plans and we will pass a final budget that sets funding levels for our schools, law enforcement, local and state governments, salaries for teachers and state employees, etc.

Legislators received some good news recently – we won’t have to deal with a budget shortfall for the first time since the late 1990s; however, we still have enormous demands to meet and we will be faced with some difficult choices.  We will have to find the resources to deal with the approximately 30,000 new students at our schools and desperate need for thousands of new teachers, more cars on our roads, and soaring health care costs.  Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks as we make progress on the budget.

We will also introduce legislation based on the work of the many study committees that have been meeting since last fall.As you know, I served on the House Select Committee on Health Care, which has produced numerous pieces of legislation that will help us reduce the number of uninsured people in our state, offer a tax credit to small businesses that offer health insurance to their employees, and reform our mental health system.

Just today two bills from this study were introduced: 

HB 1894 would institute a Health Care System Study Commission to look at ways to get coverage to all our citizens, and

HB 1895 would establish a High Risk Health Insurance Pool.  I am a co-sponsor of these bills as well as others from the Committee that you will hear about later.

I also served on the House Select Committee on Ethics and Government Reform and there are a number of bills introduced that will look at the following issues:

• Use of campaign funds.
• Treasurer Training
• Public Financing Pilots
• Legislative and Executive Ethics