RALEIGH With little public debate, North Carolina's Republican lawmakers are poised to enact sweeping changes to state government.

Among them:

Reshaping the way the state oversees elections, ethics and lobbying.

Blocking new labor, environmental and farm rules stricter than federal standards.

Moving the State Bureau of Investigation out of the Justice Department, a move the Attorney General says would harm ongoing investigations.

Senate budget writers also would change public school calendars, put limits on the expansion of Charlotte transit and no longer give laid-off state employees "priority consideration" for state jobs.

The measures are among the so-called special provisions in the 376-page Senate budget expected to be approved this week. Critics say the budget should focus on dollars and cents. They say it should not make major policy changes without more public scrutiny.

"Special provisions fly in the face of the need for the people to have debate on significant issues," says former House Speaker Joe Mavretic, a Democrat.

GOP leaders defend the provisions as a legitimate part of the budget.

"A budget is more than just dollars," says Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger of Rockingham County. "A budget is a policy statement by the General Assembly ... We would say we have limited the provisions to (those) that relate to spending."

He says all the policy changes affect spending. He says critics are "masking their disagreement about policy with a disagreement about procedure."

But Ran Coble, executive director of the nonpartisan N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, says this year's provisions are "just as bad as when the Democrats were in control."

"Some of these may be good ideas," Coble says. "They may be bad ideas. But they don't belong in the budget. They belong in separate bills."

Long partisan history

Special provisions have long been controversial.

In 1986, Coble called them "a Pandora's box" that "contain a variety of plagues that undermine the legislative process, work against the public interest and erode the authority of ... government."

Democratic leaders inserted special provisions into budgets that rank-and-file members had little time to scrutinize. Mavretic was elected speaker in 1989 partly in reaction to such practices. He sought to minimize them in subsequent House budgets, as did later Democratic speakers Dan Blue and Joe Hackney. Democrats who controlled the Senate continued to favor them.

John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, says "the most egregious example" of a special provision came in 1997, when a Republican-controlled House inserted into its budget a complete overhaul of the state's welfare laws.

"It was clearly wrong to enact that through the budget process," he says. "You don't want to roll everything up in the budget bill so that you can't have separate votes on major policy changes."

Bills are generally explained and debated in at least one committee where the public can have a say and advocates of both sides can make their case. After the committee votes, the bills go to the floor of each chamber for more debate.

Senate Republicans unveiled their budget Tuesday, passed it out of committee on Wednesday and expect to take their first floor vote on Tuesday. They say they've given lawmakers and the public more time to review it than Democrats did.

"Our complaint in the past was that special provisions come in and we had 30 minutes to read them," says GOP Sen. Bob Rucho of Matthews. "Now there's five days. The paper's not hot and the ink isn't wet."

But critics say that's still little time to digest, let alone debate, often significant changes.

"You do budget issues in the budget and policy issues in bills and don't mix the two," says Jane Pinsky, director of the N.C. Coalition on Lobbying and Government Reform.

"If the policy issue is important enough to be addressed, it should be addressed in a committee and evaluated by staff."

Special provisions

Some changes would be far-reaching. Take the proposed new Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement.

The new board would combine oversight of campaign finance and ethics as well as lobbyists, now handled through the Secretary of State. The description of the new agency takes up 17 pages of the budget bill.

Sen. Andrew Brock, a Davie County Republican and co-chair of the panel that oversees elections board funding, has said consolidating the three functions would take out the politics and save money.

The change would take effect Jan. 1, the start of a busy election year. Larry Leake, who has chaired the elections board for 14 years, calls that "a recipe for absolute disaster."

Secretary of State Elaine Marshall says budget cuts already threaten her agency's oversight of lobbyists. She says moving that responsibility to a new agency should be studied by a legislative task force, not made in a budget bill.

"We really don't understand why a change is needed, (or) what they're trying to improve," Marshall says.

The budget also would reshape the Department of Environment and Natural Resources by transferring the divisions of Forestry and Soil and Water Conservation to the Department of Agriculture.

"They're major policy changes that ought to be debated in the light of day, with public comment, not an up or down vote," says state Sierra Club director Molly Diggins.

GOP's take on it

Berger says Senate Republican leaders have allowed time for debate.

"There are opportunities for folks to say, 'We have a better idea,' draw an amendment up and offer it," he says.

But, he adds, "We need to have an appreciation of the fact that the General Assembly is designed to work the will of the majority of members."

Mavretic, the former Democratic speaker, says leaders should mind the experience of earlier legislatures.

"I just would not like to see Republicans start doing things that got Democrats in real trouble 25 years ago," he says.