Perdue: seniors promise tough to keep

Gov. Beverly Perdue says the steep drop in revenue made it hard to keep a campaign promise to help seniors.

Perdue was responding to questions posed by readers of The Charlotte Observer. Two readers asked her about a plan Perdue touted during her campaign to expand the homestead exemption and freeze property tax evaluations for seniors who make less than $50,000 and have lived in their homes for 20 years.

Perdue said the recession and a steep deficit made such a promise difficult to keep.

North Carolina faced a shortfall of $4.7 billion — a 20 percent hole in the state budget — for this fiscal year. Even with new revenue and federal recovery funds, we cut $2.1 billion from the state budget. As a result, many tough decisions had to be made to balance the budget and to protect public school classrooms and other core services in health and public safety.

I'm hopeful that as the economy rebounds we'll be able to make progress on many issues this budget could not address.

Republicans have said Democrats overstated the size of the deficit by measuring available revenue against what they would have hoped to spend in the best of times instead of what was actually spent in the previous year.