In this report, we evaluate several opportunities for making the North Carolina General Assembly more transparent, effective, and responsive to the public.

Specifically, areas under consideration include leadership term limits, session length limits, legislative pay, and government transparency.

Leadership Term Limits

Term limits are nothing new. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution considered but did not adopt them, partly because members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms of office and because there was a custom of elected leaders rotating offices at the time. In the 1990s, the push for congressional term limits spread to state legislatures, and states started enacting legislative term limits. Today, 16 states have some form of term limits for legislators.

A growing number of states have implemented term limits specifically for legislative leaders, independent of any term limits for legislators in general. As with how the 22nd Amendment was passed after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to four terms, many states that imposed legislative leadership term limits did so after leaders who had served for decades left office.

Nineteen legislative chambers across 14 states in the United States have leadership term limits. Only Maine imposes leadership term limits by statute. Most of the rest impose limits by tradition or chamber rule, which can easily be changed if a powerful leader wants to keep the position. One chamber, the Oklahoma House, imposes leadership term limits by Republican Party caucus rule, meaning there is no limit if Democrats take the majority.

An added concern in North Carolina about the power of long-serving legislative leaders is that our constitutional order gives those leaders some appointment powers usually associated with governors.

Eight-year lifetime term limits for speakers of the House and presidents pro tempore of the Senate would address an overconcentration of power caused by legislative leaders clinging to their positions for a decade or more. Allowing a freer leadership rotation will enable the General Assembly to consider new ideas better and make old rivalries and conflicts less likely to derail policy considerations. Unlike general term limits, leadership limits do not restrict voters’ choices.

While some legislators resist the idea of leadership term limits, the idea is overwhelmingly popular with the public.

Session Length Limits

Legislative sessions in North Carolina have grown longer over the past decade. The norm had long been for the legislature to meet for fewer than 200 legislative days (the days each chamber meets) spread over fewer than 300 calendar days in the two-year legislative biennium. Session length has steadily crept up over much of the past decade to the point where the 2021–22 biennium was 245 legislative days in the House and 246 legislative days in the Senate over 475 calendar days (the 2023–24 biennium is still ongoing at the time of publication).

Those longer sessions are not free. In 2015, well before the 2021–24 inflationary period, it cost taxpayers an estimated $50,000 per day when the General Assembly was in session.

Thirty-nine states currently have some form of session length limit, 29 of which are imposed in state constitutions. The length limit varies widely, from 60 legislative days per year in Alabama and Wyoming to California’s limit, which is so varied and lengthy that it is practically not a limit at all.

Session length limits would impose more regularity on the General Assembly, allowing legislators to better plan their lives, including work at their regular jobs, by reducing scheduling conflicts. Session limits would restore a power balance between legislative leaders and rank-and-file members by reducing the advantage of “strategic patience” that leadership has.

Restricting session length too much, however, has disadvantages. They include potentially shifting power to the executive branch and lobbyists, more missed floor votes over scheduling conflicts with legislators’ other duties, and more out-of-session committee work and special sessions.

So, the goal is to right size legislative sessions. June 30 (the day before the start of the fiscal year) is a natural date for the General Assembly to conclude its regular business. Setting a June 30 end date would translate to:

  • Long sessions of roughly 90 legislative days spread across 170 calendar days
  • Short sessions of approximately 35 legislative days over about 65 calendar days

The General Assembly sometimes needs to meet in special sessions to address veto overrides, state emergencies, or court decisions requiring an immediate legislative response. Even with those sessions, reform would reduce biennial session lengths to about 150 legislative days spread across 250 calendar days per biennium. That was the norm before the recent upward creep in session length.

Increase Legislator Pay

There are opportunity costs associated with serving as a state legislator. The time legislators spend in the General Assembly is not spent working to support their families. North Carolina has one of the lowest state legislative salaries in the United States at $13,951. It has not changed since 1995 and is much lower than the median salary for all state legislatures in the United States ($38,855.50). It is also lower than the $34,400.50 median salary for hybrid (between part-time and full-time) legislatures, similar to North Carolina’s.

North Carolina’s mileage reimbursement rate and per-diem compensation for legislators are also comparably low.

The low pay for legislators in North Carolina’s General Assembly limits the number of people who can afford to serve, especially considering the increased session lengths requiring members to spend more time on their legislative work. It also makes it harder to recruit candidates, especially those who are not retired or independently wealthy.

Legislators voting to increase their own pay is politically unpopular. They could offset part or all of the increased cost to taxpayers of a salary increase, however, by realizing savings on per diem, mileage, and office expenses through session length limits. Limiting session length as proposed here would allow legislators to raise their salary to $20,533.70 at zero net cost to taxpayers.

Increase Transparency

The General Assembly generally scores well on transparency measures compared with other state legislatures. While bills and proposed committee substitutes (proposals to alter bill language that can go as far as replacing it with something completely unrelated) can be introduced without warning, no legislation can advance without being first posted on the legislature’s website and publicly voted on in both chambers.

Legislators must balance transparency with other considerations, such as protecting constituent privacy and ensuring an opportunity to have honest policymaking discussions. Unfortunately, legislators backslid on transparency when they included a section in the 2023 budget granting themselves the power to determine if their own records are public, demonstrating the need for more robust institutional support of transparency.

So, the goal is not maximum transparency but the proper balance between transparency and other legitimate concerns. To that end, the General Assembly should:

  • Repeal or modify the provision in the 2023 budget that made legislators the sole judges of which documents they produce are public records.
  • Put a transparency constitutional amendment on the ballot. The amendment should cover all three branches of state government. It should also require a supermajority for the legislature to exempt itself from transparency laws and include a “clearly outweighing” standard that would favor public disclosure unless the interest served by nondisclosure outweighs that of disclosing a record. Both elements would foster a presumption of transparency.