State lawmakers return with plenty left to do

By Jim Tharpe and Nancy Badertscher

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

State lawmakers come back to town Monday with only seven legislative days left to finish work on next year’s $17.7 billion budget and a plate full of other proposals.

The Senate convenes at 10 a.m. and the House of Representatives at 2 p.m. as the Legislature returns from spring break with most of its work still ahead.

The unfinished work includes items as big as legislation to toughen ethics provisions and as personal as requiring pickup truck drivers to buckle up.

A frenzied pace at the 40-day session’s finale is routine. But the final few laps could be even more intense this year because of the state’s financial woes and controversial plans to balance the budget -- partially by placing a new fee on hospital revenue that would raise more than $170 million.

Another proposal would raise an additional $96 million by increasing state fees paid by hundreds of thousands of Georgians on everything from specialty tags to airport runway inspections.

“The pace of this session has not been a lot different than it has been in the past,” said first-term Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge). “If it is slower, I would attribute that to the fact that we’ve got the worst budget challenge ... since the Great Depression.

“I think that’s kind of taken the focus off the more traditional desire to see a lot of bills passed.”

Veteran state Rep. Alan Powell (D-Hartwell) agreed the budget has defined the session so far, a theme that will likely be magnified in the final days.

“It’s really going to be driving the last seven days,” Powell said.

Lawmakers have a constitutional mandate to balance the budget, and that has proved to be especially thorny this year as the recession cut into state revenue. Some estimates place the budget gap at $1 billion, even though state revenue increased slightly last month after a 15-month string of declines.

Politically unpopular cuts to state programs and services will be needed to balance the books, and teachers are among the interest groups closely watching the budget process.

Their big fears, said Jeff Hubbard, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, are “more furlough days, more job cuts, salary reductions, program ‘wipeouts’ and higher class sizes.”

He said the education community is expecting that “when student achievement nose-dives, the teachers will be the ones left to shoulder all of the blame from the politicians and the public.”

Among the measures still to be considered:

• A transportation bill that would divide the state into 12 regions and allow each to hold a vote to decide whether to tax its residents for transportation projects within the region. The bill has been heavily amended, and a House-Senate conference committee will try to work out the kinks.

• Ralston's ethics reform package, which would establish new reporting and fee requirements for lobbyists. The bill would stiffen penalties for bribery in Georgia and put in place a new abuse-of-power provision to target officials who engage in harassment and coercion. Missing from the bill: caps on lobbyists' gifts.

• A bill that would prohibit drivers from texting on cellphones.

• A Senate-passed bill that would require pickup drivers to buckle their seat belts.

• A bill that would make it a crime to coerce a woman to have an abortion.

• A bill requiring that lawmakers receive a report every year on the potential three-year impact of any tax break they pass. A provision stripped from the bill would have required the report to include an analysis of whether the tax breaks were achieving their objectives and how they were affecting distribution of the tax burden.

Lawmakers hope to finish work by April 22. They want to adjourn by that date because the next week they have to qualify for office.

All 236 seats in the General Assembly are up for election this year, and lawmakers are prevented from raising campaign money while the Legislature is in session.

The speaker speaks

House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) on the end of the session:

• On the proposed hospital tax: “I was disappointed at the Senate amendment to House Bill 307 [hospital tax]. We worked very hard to come up with an agreement the hospital community wanted.”

• On the 2011 budget: “I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to reach an agreement [on the budget] in fairly short order. Its [passage] is probably going to be on the last day or two. That’s kind of a common thing.”

• On a major transportation bill: “What I’ve told my members in the House is: This is not being in search of the perfect bill, but in search of the best bill we can get. Georgia is a big state, a diverse state, and every region in Georgia — rural, urban, suburban — has its own take. Bringing those views together and melding them into a bill that lets us meet the challenges — which we’re not meeting right now — is a pretty tall order. But I’m optimistic we’re going to reach some good workable solution.”

• On his ethics reform bill: “Does it please everybody? No. But my intention was to make sure that we responded in a very forceful way to some things that happened last fall that were causing some perception problems in the House. I think we’ve done that. I think there are very significant improvements.”

• On a resolution to impeach state Attorney General Thurbert Baker:

“I have said publicly and say again I wish the attorney general would realize who his client is. His client is not the Obama administration. His decision not to join in [lawsuits over the federal health care overhaul] is harmful I think because it takes us out of the discussion. I think that’s where we should be. What I wish he would do is do his job. But impeachment? I don’t think that addresses what we really need to be addressing, and that’s how do we become a part of the discussion, the court case.”