ATLANTA – The dust has settled around the no-holds-barred, 40-day backwoods boxing tournament of the 2009 Georgia General Assembly, leaving on the podium a new Georgia Department of Transportation run by an appointee of the governor, a controversial price hike on Georgia Power's small customers, and a budget totaling some $35 billion in combined state and federal funds.
Left bloodied on the ground are: a flat tax on vehicles, a tobacco tax and more dollars for transportation. However, many of these bills, like a video-game boxer, will shortly reappear at full strength -- and in the meantime, the gamers might build up enough skills to steer their champions to a win.
Transportation, and its management and funding, dominated the second half of the legislative session.
In the afternoon of the penultimate workday, the House agreed to create a GDOT state planning director to be appointed by the governor, but only on an amendment that lets the House Transportation Committee vet the appointee. The appointee will create a statewide transportation plan and the list of big-budget transport projects first in line for funding. Opponents fear the governor's legislative allies will muscle their opponents into deals – in exchange for priority on their road projects.
"This bill will be a fertility clinic of power politics," suggested Rep. Brian Thomas (D-Lilburn).
A name-naming power play followed the next day in the Senate. During the last-hour debate, Sen. Preston Smith (R-Rome) alleged a GDOT board member texted him saying a project to widen US 411 near Rome would be derailed unless he, Smith, voted against the bill – thereby protecting the board member's job. Smith was indignant and much of the senate applauded his passionate denunciation of GDOT.
However, Sen. Steve Thompson (D-Marietta) immediately took the well and said the text was part of a fuller email conversation that presented the governor as a threat. Thompson affirmed the GDOT board member alleged the new bill would kill the SR411 widening – but because Gov. Perdue would veto it on behalf of his friends, the Rollins family. Smith presented the GDOT note as a threat; Thompson said the note was a warning of an attack from the governor. Nonetheless, Senate approved the bill on a party-line vote.
Yet nearly everyone agreed that GDOT needs some sort of leadership renovation; legislators on both sides of the aisle and both houses used words like "dysfunctional" and "black hole" and "asphalt kingdom" to describe the agency and the time it takes to plan and complete projects.
But the new GDOT director of planning will set to work with no new funds. There were two plans for a tax hike for transport, but House Transportation Committee Chairman Vance Smith read the obituaries of both at about 11 p.m. on the last day of the session, after unsuccessful conference committee meetings.
"We had a great plan. I'm disappointed for the second year in a row," said the Pine Mountain Republican. "I'm not going to blame anybody," he cavalierly said, then went on to defend the House plan, which sought a 1-percent statewide sales tax on transportation, designed to raise about $25 billion over ten years.
The Senate-approved plan would have let regions chose to band together in groups of their choice and raise the tax for regional projects.
Both plans require approval in a statewide referendum. Because there's no ballot until 2010, there's still time for a compromise next session. But it's a defeat for the business lobby, whose Get Georgia Moving coalition, heavily lobbied the Assembly in its closing days for any plan to raise more money for transport.
The death of transport funding pulled down MARTA with it in the Senate after they were hastily tacked onto another bill as riders on the last day of the session. The bill would have allowed the Atlanta rapid transit authority to draw on its capital reserves to pay for operations. Now that they still can't touch their savings, they may shut down one weekday per week, according to general manager Beverly Scott. MARTA has asked Gov. Perdue to reconvene the Assembly for a special session to handle MARTA's bills. Scott says she gets no state money and isn't asking for any; she just needs to draw on savings. MARTA is funded by a DeKalb and Fulton County sales tax.
All around, the state is working with less money; the FY 2010 budget is about $5 billion smaller than 2009, mostly on lower tax receipts.
Most departments have felt that eight percent cut roughly equally, according to Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans), House Appropriations Committee chair.
But the budget "maintained priorities of education, healthcare and public safety," he explained.
Indeed, the Department of Education's total appropriation is only about one percent smaller than last year – propped up in part by federal stimulus package funds.
And Medicaid providers like doctors and hospitals won't have to take a rate cut. A cut proposed by the governor might drive providers out of the Medicaid business, Harbin said.
Another successful bill will add to the state coffers by 2012 by cutting taxes on long-term capital gains, according to its sponsor, Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock).
"The focus is to create jobs," says Rogers, which the bill will do by drawing more money into the economy. Under the bill, half of individuals' and corporations' long-term capital gains become state tax exempt after 2011.
Rogers suggested the removal of the "threat" of long-term capital gains tax will drive people to invest in real estate, for example. And that it's a benefit for the vast majority of Georgians because they are part of an "investor class society" through 401(k)s or other stockholdings.
But Atlanta Senator Nan Orrock says the cut will actually dig a $1 billion hole in Georgia's 2012 budget, the first year its fiscal effect will be felt.
"This threatens our ability as a state to deliver services," said the Democrat.
She calculates the act might create 22,000 jobs – at a cost of $265,000 per job.
She called it the "same old trickle-down theory."
The wealthiest 5 percent in Georgia will get 92 percent of the tax relief, she added.
Another tax cut failed – the so-called "Lexus loophole" would have replaced annual ad valorem car taxes with a one-time, 7-percent levy at the time of purchase. That fee would be capped at $2,000 – meaning the fee rises with the price of the vehicle until about $30,000. After that, the fee would have stayed at $2,000, whether the car costs $30,000 or $130,000. It passed the House but never made it to the Senate floor.
A pair of sin taxes failed: on adult entertainment and tobacco. The so-called "pole tax" failed to make it to House or Senate vote. It would have required a $3 to $5 surcharge for entry to strip clubs and the like.
A new family law now allows the adoption of human embryos. But the bill's major innovation is the legal definition of "embryo" – "an individual fertilized ovum of the human species from the single-cell stage to eight-week development".
That definition is a step back from a separate bill still in the House that would have criminalized the destruction of human embryos. Supporters said destroying embryos amounts to murdering a person.
Critics said such a law would remove the option of in vitro fertilization in the state of Georgia, as the process generates extra embryos that are never implanted and couldn't be legally destroyed under the failed bill.
The successful bill stops short of calling an embryo a person. "It leaves it open ended," says sponsor Rep. James Mills (R-Gainesville), adding that he personally would like to see an embryo defined as a person.
A threat to county road funding passed both houses after it was softened a bit by amendment. House Bill 2 would have required counties to verify its prisoners are legal United States residents and if not, help deport them, or risk losing state road funds. Now state appropriations committees "may" consider such noncompliance, rather than "shall" consider it.
But residents who don't speak very good English can still try the driver's license written test in any one of the 14 languages offered by the Georgia Department of Driver Services, after an English-only provision stalled in the Senate.
Would-be Georgia voters, however, must prove citizenship when they register, under a bill that one lawyer and representative calls "a voting rights act nightmare" simply because of sloppy language.
"I understand that this is a bill with a political purpose," said Rep. Doug McKillip (D-Athens).
But the language in the bill is internally inconsistent and that it leaves it up to counties to decide which documents constitute proof of citizenship, he says.
McKillip predicts a constitutional challenge if the bill becomes law, which "will be an embarrassment to Georgia."
But perhaps the most controversial winner this year was Senate Bill 31, considered by some a fixed match. The bill allows Georgia Power in 2011 to start charging its small customers – homes and small businesses – to finance the construction of two nuclear reactors that won't come online until 2016 at the earliest.
It was controversial because usually Georgia Power has to go to its regulator for small customers – the elected Public Service Commission – to request rate increases. And the PSC has only allowed Georgia Power to collect capital construction finance charges after a plant comes online, so only customers who use a plant have to pay for it. The bill also carves out some large business and industrial customers.
Yet both the House and Senate voted for the bill, in roughly 3-2 margins on Georgia Power's argument that the pre-collection will save on construction costs in the long run. It was arguably the most heavily lobbied bill in the session; Georgia Power CEO Michael D. Garrett registered as a lobbyist in time for the vote.
Gov. Perdue has yet to sign any of this successful legislation. He has until May 13 to review and sign or veto. The governor's office policy is to decline comment about any legislation on his desk.
Maggie Lee specializes in quality of life topics, Atlanta's international communities and general reporting. She covers Georgia economic development and the Chinese community as a stringer for China Daily and chronicles life in Georgia's most diverse county for the DeKalb Champion.
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