Garrou a local voice at table

It was after 9 o'clock on one recent night, and state Sen. Linda Garrou was still in her plush corner office at the General Assembly.

She had a lot of phone calls to make.

The N.C. Senate was finalizing its state budget plan, and Garrou, the Senate's senior budget writer, knew that some of her constituents would be disappointed.

"I guess that's one of the downsides," said Garrou, a Democrat from Winston-Salem. "Everybody thinks that because I'm appropriations chairman, I can get money anytime I want to. And that's just not the way it works, and that's difficult sometimes.

"I've had some friends with projects that I would have loved to have supported, and they just didn't fit into the mix."

This year it was especially difficult to satisfy everyone. The state's revenues have dwindled in the recession, forcing Garrou and the other budget writers to cut spending.

Those cuts make people angry. Garrou has been getting e-mail accusing her of "balancing the budget on the backs of children." That's because the Senate's budget increases average class size by two students, and it reorganizes and reduces pre-kindergarten programs.

She also encountered some resistance from fellow legislators as the appropriations committee crafted the budget in recent weeks. Committee members -- who are accustomed to expanding the size of the state budget each year, not reducing it -- did not want to make the spending cuts that Garrou insisted were necessary.

"In my position, I felt like I really had to keep people's feet to the fire about being careful, making sure that every dollar is well spent," Garrou said.

Her colleagues describe her as tough, decisive and all business.

Sen. Vernon Malone, D-Wake, leads an appropriations subcommittee on education, and he worked closely with Garrou to develop the budget. He recounted meetings in which Garrou would go silent, obviously troubled by cuts that would have to be made.

"It pained her to have to increase class size. That was extremely difficult for her to buy into. She was pained by doing any tampering with Smart Start and More at Four. She just hated that," Malone said.

"But ultimately, she would have to say, ‘My friends, we've got to make a decision -- here's the amount of money we've got, and here's what it would cost.'"

The $20 billion budget was approved by the full Senate last week in a mostly party-line vote, with Democrats supporting it and all but three Republicans opposing it. In the coming weeks, the N.C. House will pass its own budget plan, and then a small group of leaders from each chamber -- Garrou chief among them -- will get together and hash out a compromise.

Garrou, 66, has represented Winston-Salem in the N.C. Senate for 11 years. For seven of those years, she has been an appropriations chairwoman, one of the most highly-sought jobs in the legislature because it brings great influence over the most important bill the legislature passes each year -- the state budget.

She has contemplated running for other things. She said she has been approached about running for U.S. Senate against Republican Richard Burr in 2010, but Garrou said she is not interested.

She was also asked to run against former U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole in 2008. Garrou didn't run, but Kay Hagan did. Before unseating Dole, Hagan served alongside Garrou as a state senator and lead budget writer.

Garrou said she wants to stay in her current position. Despite the sometimes-absurd hours (budget negotiations have been known to last well past midnight), she shows no sign of fatigue -- and she thinks she plays an important function for her constituents.

"For many, many years, Forsyth County had no one sitting at the table. It is important that we as a Piedmont region, and not just Forsyth County, have someone sitting at the table, and I believe that's a role I've been able to play."

One key example is the proposed tax increase on cigarettes, which Senate leaders are still debating internally. Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, supports it. So does Marc Basnight, the president pro tem of the Senate. But Garrou believes that a large tax increase on cigarettes will devastate the state's tobacco industry.

Basnight has told the president of Reynolds American Inc. -- which has its headquarters in Garrou's district -- that Garrou is the person "standing in the gap," trying to block the tax increase.

Gene Ainsworth, a lobbyist for Reynolds who has known Garrou for 25 years, agreed with that assessment.

"I think she stands first among those in that gap," Ainsworth said.

Ainsworth, who lives in Winston-Salem, said that the city is lucky to have Garrou is such a high-ranking position. In meetings of the senior Democratic leadership, Ainsworth said, Garrou can bring perspective that the other leaders may not have.

"What she has is a chance to bring all the facts to the table," he said. "She can ably articulate what the tobacco industry brings to the treasury."

And that goes for other issues beyond tobacco interests, he said.

Garrou brushes off any suggestion that her position is a "powerful" one. She likens herself to a bus driver with many backseat drivers. But, she adds, she's just the bus driver, not the tour director -- that would be Basnight.

Still, Garrou is powerful all on her own. In a biennial, nonpartisan survey, she consistently ranks as one of the most influential legislators. And she can tinker with the state budget in ways that most of her colleagues can't.

This year, for instance, she inserted a special provision that could lead to North Carolina's public-television network moving under the jurisdiction of the UNC School of the Arts. The provision got no public debate, and few people -- including leaders at both the network and the school -- were even aware of the provision until after the budget passed.

Those sorts of provisions cause Republicans to complain that Garrou and the other Democratic leaders are too insular. Last week, they said that Democrats were rushing a vote on an incomplete budget, with not enough time for debate or Republican amendments.

But Garrou defended the budget-writing process. By necessity, she said, a document as long and complex as the state budget must be crafted by a small group of decision-makers -- of which she is certainly one.

"If we met as a committee of the whole, we could never get this budget done," she said. "If you get 50 people working on it, you could never get it done."

■ James Romoser can be reached at 919-210-6794 or at jromoser@wsjournal.com.