Claim: "This is the facts. You all know the facts. There are fewer dollars in the public school system today than there's ever been."

Speaker: Gov. Bev Perdue at a press conference Monday at the state Capitol

Television ad: "The new legislature balanced the budget, they cut waste, lowered taxes - they even added state funding for 2,000 more teachers."

Sponsor: Americans for Prosperity Foundation

The state budget is rolling out this week with a lot of interesting details related to higher education.

Our first big story on the budget landed today. Have a look here. It talks at length about the now-former provision that for five years allowed public universities to count non-resident athletes as North Carolinians, a huge gift for booster clubs funding scholarships.

But that provision has now been scrapped, though academic scholarship funds like the Morehead-Cain at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Park program at N.C. State retained the benefit.

Another quick detail - a proposed enrollment cap for UNC system schools was also scrapped in the final budget. House budget writers had recommended a 1 percent cap on enrollment next year as a way of getting a handle on some unpredictable enrollment budget planning.

Check back at www.newsobserver.com for more details of the budget.

The UNC Board of Governors has decided not to make any changes  in its leadership for the next two years as it grapples with massive budget cuts and a national search for a new president to replace Erskine Bowles.

Re-elected Friday by the other members were chairwoman Hannah D. Gage, vice-chairman Peter D. Hans and board secretary Estelle "Bunny" Sanders. 

Gage, who lives in Wilmington, joined the board in 2001 and in 2008 became the first woman to lead it when she was elected to her first two-year term as chairwoman.

The board oversees the state's 16-campus public university system. The state legislature, which faces a revenue shortfall this year of $800 million, is pondering whether to trim the system's budget by as much as $175 million. That, says university officials, would cause serious damage to the system, which has already suffered  $575 million in cuts in recent years.

After she was elected, Gage quipped that she had been told by several people that no one else would want the job, given the challenges the system faces.

Gage is a retired broadcast executive, and a 1975 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. She is a former chairwoman of of the UNC-Wilmington Board of Trustees and members of her family have ties to a host of system universities, served as trustees of three different campuses and on the board of the UNC system when it had six campuses.

Hans is a 1991 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a senior policy advisor with the law firm Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough in Raleigh.

Sanders is mayor of the Town of Roper and a graduate of Howard University.

North Carolina's recently enacted tax hikes won't cause job losses, according to a new report released this morning.

The report from the N.C. Budget & Tax Center in Raleigh suggests that "tax increases will not hurt the private-sector job market" as some critics have claimed.

Here's a good (but long) letter recapping what went horribly wrong with North Carolina's mental health reform and imploring lawmakers not to cut community support. An excerpt: "I have to say that I have never come across an individual with schizophrenia recently released from John Umstead who feels like an empowered "consumer" with choices of where to get services.  Legislators looking down from 30,000 feet could not realize that someone with florid psychotic symptoms does not ponder his service options as if he were picking Target v. K-Mart." 

The state budget deficit is causing lawmakers and the governor to look
at some pretty painful possibilities in terms of cuts. Here's a letter
from some supporters of the Wright School, a residential mental health treatment facility for North Carolina children ages six to 12, which was mentioned in a Feb. 3 article detailing programs that might have to go.

With more news about furloughs today (Under the Dome, Page 3B), I went back and pulled what Gov. Beverly Perdue had to say about them during her discussion with the editorial board last week. State Treasurer Janet Cowell has cautioned lawmakers that forced furloughs for state workers might affect the state's bond rating. House Speaker Joe Hackney wants furloughs on the budget-hole-filling table, but Perdue says other states have found that furloughs cause more trouble than they're worth.