All those nice buildings, and no money to open them

It's not that the state of North Carolina has been "penny wise and pound foolish." It has been penny foolish and pound foolish.

Today's News & Observer reports that the state might not have the money to operate all the new buildings it has built on university campuses. Anyone who has visited a University of North Carolina campus in the past few years has seen the transformation that has taken place throughout the system. Bolstered by a $3 billion bond issue passed a few years ago and additional capital spending, the university's 16 campuses have been transformed. New buildings have been wedged into seemingly every nook and cranny of the campuses. South Campus at UNC-Chapel Hill has gone from an outlying suburb to a megalopolis in the past couple of decades. Construction at Appalachian State has overwhelmed sleepy little Boone. N.C. State has created a whole new university at the Centennial Campus. And these are just three examples.

Now, it seems, the state can't find the money to use the new buildings that are coming on line. Not only is the state saddled with debt, it is saddled with operating costs it either did not anticipate or assumed economic growth would cover. Wake up! The economy isn't growing; it's shrinking, and so is state tax revenue.

More conservative budgeting would have anticipated operational costs and would have been more cautious about capital expenditures. Revenue streams change. When the state commits to debt for the next 10 or 20 years, it is gambling, and while some gambling might be advisable (we all gamble on our home mortgages), caution should be the watchword. Don't borrow more than you can afford to pay back in a worst case (or at least bad-case) scenario.

The state may have little choice but to raise taxes or fees in a bad economy or to mothball these expensive buildings, gaining no return on our investment, until state revenues revive. And we don't know when that might be.