Macon Telegraph:
The path to Atlanta may be kind of a trudging one for state legislators this year, because the 2010 Georgia General Assembly doesn’t offer much in the way of light-hearted fun.
The budget is a mess, and another billion or so dollars probably will be cut in a climate that’s already yielded heavy cuts and furloughs for most state departments. Legislators won’t quite forget about trying to pull pet projects into their district, but protecting the ones they’ve got probably will be a higher priority.
“There are definitely recommendations from the task force that would need legislation to implement,” Brantley said this past week. “And so the governor will be looking at those.”
The governor is likely to get involved, but he won’t be rolling his legislation out until the session begins.
The clock is ticking on Atlanta’s water supply, with a federal judge threatening to cut access to the area’s biggest supply of drinking water.
Just about everyone seems to want more funding for roads, but legislators have wanted that for a couple of years now and will have to try again to find a compromise on how to raise the money.
Meanwhile, the outgoing speaker of the House has left that post because his ex-wife confirmed he had a long-rumored affair with a lobbyist, so ethics reform is likely to be near the top of the Legislature’s agenda. Traditional free evening dinners with young lobbyists are likely to drop down a few notches.
All in all, it’s not the best time to be a state legislator when the 2010 session opens at the Capitol in another week.
“I’m not looking forward to it,” said state Sen. Cecil Staton, R-Macon. “This will be my sixth session, and I absolutely am dreading it, to be frank.”
The budget
State leaders sliced billions from the budget over the past year and a half, and new cuts could be as high as another couple of billion dollars.
Gov. Sonny Perdue will get that ball rolling the first week of the session when he rolls out his budget proposals. The state’s revenue picture is bleak enough that Perdue is waiting on final revenue figures for December before making any final decisions, Perdue communications director Bert Brantley said.
Asked what programs will be targeted for cuts, Brantley said they will be “all across the board.”
“We have gone through program by program with these agency heads ... (but) those final decisions literally wont’ be made until we hit print on the budget,” he said.
“The only blanket statement I can make is layoffs are, obviously, a last resort,” Brantley said.
State Rep. Larry O’Neal, a Houston County Republican and chairman of the tax-code-writing Ways and Means Committee, said the budget crisis calls for better tax collections. He said hiring more auditors to focus on sales and payroll taxes and tracking down businesses that defraud the state “absolutely is my No. 1 priority” this session.
“I just think there’s a lot of money out there that could fill a lot of these budget holes if we could do a more efficient job of collecting them,” O’Neal said. Those changes, though, wouldn’t provide immediate relief. More furloughs are almost guaranteed, and some state programs may not simply take cuts, but they may be eliminated.
State Rep. David Lucas, D-Macon, said he’d like the state to increase fees on amusement gambling machines found in convenience stores across the state. Increasing them $25 could raise $250 million to $300 million, he said. The bottom line for Lucas, one of the longest serving legislators in state government, is that the state needs to raise more money.
“We can’t afford to keep cutting,” he said. “We’re talking about furloughing teachers again. That’s ludicrous.”
No new taxes, mostly
Lucas and some other Democrats would like to see a tax increase to stop the bleeding on the state budget, but leadership in the Republican majority at the Capitol has shown no appetite for an increase.
That includes Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, who heads the state Senate, and incoming Speaker of the House David Ralston, who will lead the House of Representatives.
A new transportation tax might be OK’d, but that’s likely to take the form of regional sales taxes commonly called “T-SPLOSTs,” and those taxes would require voter approval before counties could bind together and charge an extra penny for roads and other transportation projects.
Several tweaks to the tax system will be discussed, though. Many legislators still want to get rid of the so-called “birthday tax,” paid on vehicle tags each year near the owner’s birthday. This was discussed last year and that plan, which would add a new sales tax to vehicle sales to make up for the revenue, likely will be resurrected.
Local property taxes in general are still a target, and state Sen. Chip Rogers, a Woodstock Republican and the Senate’s majority leader, said he’ll be calling for “maybe as many as a dozen incremental changes.”
Many of those changes would be aimed at keeping a home’s taxable value from increasing too much, he said.
Rogers also said the state’s sales tax collection system also might be overhauled, with a new association put together so local governments can partner to handle collections from retailers. The Georgia Department of Revenue handles that now.
The creation of an association is a bit different from an idea state Rep. DuBose Porter, a 2010 candidate for governor and the House’s top-ranking Democrat, has been pushing.
Porter, D-Dublin, has said he wants each local government to get more individual control over collections, thus improving the collection rate. But Rogers said that would be too much for businesses with locations in many counties to deal with, which prompted the partnership proposal.
Water
Metro Atlanta needs water. After years of using Lake Lanier as a primary drinking water supplier, the state’s population center is in danger of losing it as a federal judge threatens to stem the flow in coming years.
Negotiations with other states are ongoing, and the state is pursuing legal channels to overturn the judge’s decision.
But finding new sources of water and conserving the existing supplies suddenly are big priorities.
Concerns that water could be piped into Atlanta from, say, the massive aquifer beneath Houston County and other parts of the midstate, have been alleviated for now. A task force put together by Perdue said these “inter-basin transfers” would be too expensive.
But the task force also identified Ocmulgee River tributaries, which feed Macon’s water supply, as possible locations for reservoir expansions.
