Senate Bill 915 is North Carolina’s proposed Current Operations Appropriations Act of 2026, a comprehensive budget bill that sets base appropriations for state government for the 2025-2027 biennium. It allocates funding across major areas including education, health and human services, transportation, public safety, general government, commerce, environmental quality, and the university system. The bill also establishes or revises numerous reserve transfers, special appropriations, and fund balances, including IT reserve transfers, disaster relief funding, Medicaid-related reserves, and various settlement-funded or federal pass-through accounts.
A major portion of the bill is devoted to education. It funds public schools, community colleges, and UNC institutions; revises school finance formulas; and creates or expands several programs, including a new instructional materials allotment, an exceptional children weighted funding model, a school resource officer allotment, literacy and diagnostic assessment expansions, a school performance grade redesign pilot, CEP meal incentives, and multiple teacher, principal, assistant principal, and central office salary increases. It also expands scholarship and completion assistance programs in higher education, broadens Cheatham-White Scholarships, and makes changes to Opportunity Scholarships and other aid programs.
The bill also makes significant policy changes outside of pure appropriations. It restructures textbook law by repealing the State Textbook Commission and replacing it with broader instructional materials authority for local boards, changes community college funding to a labor-market-driven Propel NC model, modifies child care subsidy rates and NC Pre-K standards, revises Medicaid and hospital assessment financing mechanisms, and creates or adjusts several special funds and reporting requirements. It further includes provisions affecting unemployment insurance, environmental permitting fees, dam inundation maps, solid waste beneficial reuse, state parks fee exemptions for disabled veterans, criminal justice information systems, and the State Bureau of Investigation’s status and authorities.
The bill’s impact on state law is broad and structural: it amends numerous chapters of the General Statutes, creates new allotments and reserves, repeals or consolidates existing programs, and changes how funds are distributed and monitored across agencies. It would affect state agencies, local school units, community colleges, universities, hospitals, child care providers, counties, nonprofit grant recipients, employers, and public employees. Because it is a budget bill, many of its provisions are tied directly to appropriations and would govern how state money is spent, transferred, retained, or reported during the biennium.
No committee transcript or vote history was provided, so there is no recorded discussion to gauge sentiment or identify specific objections from members. Based on the bill text alone, the measure appears to reflect a broad, administration-wide budget proposal with strong emphasis on education funding, public safety, health care financing, and targeted reserve building. The bill’s many policy riders and major statutory revisions suggest it would likely draw both support for funding priorities and scrutiny over its regulatory changes, but no direct evidence of support or opposition is available in the provided materials.
This bill would enact the State’s biennial operating budget and make extensive statutory changes tied to appropriations. It sets agency spending levels, creates and revises special funds and reserves, transfers cash balances, and changes formulas for school funding, Medicaid-related assessments, child care subsidies, unemployment insurance, and other programs. It also repeals or amends numerous statutes affecting education governance, community colleges, public employee compensation, environmental permitting, criminal justice administration, and nonprofit grant oversight, thereby altering both fiscal administration and substantive law across state government.
No committee debate or voting record was provided, so there is no direct evidence of legislative sentiment from the available materials. From the bill text, the proposal appears to be a large-scale budget package with substantial investments in education, health, and public safety, alongside significant policy changes and oversight provisions. That combination typically produces mixed reactions: support from those favoring the funding increases and targeted programs, and concern from those wary of the bill’s many statutory changes, reserve transfers, and program restructurings.
The most likely points of contention are the bill’s major policy riders embedded in the budget, especially the repeal of the Textbook Commission and the shift to local control over instructional materials; the new exceptional children funding model; the changes to Opportunity Scholarships and private-school accountability; the Medicaid and hospital assessment restructuring; and the creation of new employer assessments for workforce training. Other potentially controversial provisions include the NCInnovation clawback and repeal, the expanded role of school resource officers, the changes to unemployment benefits, and the broad authority given to agencies and the budget office to reallocate or reserve funds. Because no transcripts or votes were provided, the specific members or stakeholder groups holding these concerns cannot be identified from the record.