While most everyone at the Capitol, from Democrats to Republicans, lawmakers to lobbyists, are praising the “new tone” Gov. Nathan Deal has brought to the Gold Dome, many also are taking advantage of his predecessor’s exit.
A half dozen or more pieces of legislation are tracking through the General Assembly that former Gov. Sonny Perdue either routinely vetoed or managed to kill before they reached his desk, or that simply raised his ire over eight years in office. They include a zero-based budgeting process, a constitutional cap on government spending, and a lowering of the investment necessary to qualify for a tourism tax refund.
For lawmakers who champion those previously doomed bills, Deal’s presence on the second floor of the Capitol is cause for relief. They praise his willingness to work with lawmakers while lamenting what they say was Perdue’s hard-line attitude. Some even claim that Perdue’s opposition to their ideas was based less on policy than on personality.
“I think I got a veto a year,” said Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs. “There is a lot of pent-up Republican angst about things former Governor Perdue vetoed for his Republican colleagues.”
Now, Ehrhart said, “we have an outstanding relationship with this governor. He leads, but he’s communicative. It’s a different world.”
But Ehrhart’s “different world” might more accurately be called a difference of style.
Bert Brantley, who served as Perdue’s communications director in the governor’s office, said his former boss’s relationship with lawmakers “was a dynamic one.”
“While we generally worked very closely with legislative leadership on the budget, the governor respected the legislative process and allowed it to work without a lot of direct influence and interference on non-budget bills,” Brantley said.
The result, he said, was that “a good number of bills got to the governor’s desk that were certain to be vetoed. He viewed this as a normal part of balancing power between the executive and legislative branch, but the vetoes caused serious angst among legislators and resulted in several attempts at veto overrides.”
Perdue vetoed one of Ehrhart’s bills in 2009, a measure that made what Ehrhart deemed minor changes to the state’s student scholarship tax credit program, one of Ehrhart’s pet projects. But Perdue believed it went too far.
Deal, meanwhile, appears to operate differently. The new governor is open to working with lawmakers on the front end on all kinds of bills, his spokesman Brian Robinson said.
“He’s going to work with individual legislators to see if we can help them by going through a negotiated process so we can produce a bill in the Legislature that is going to benefit Georgia or that’s going to meet the governor’s conservative principles,” Robinson said.
But, he said, Deal is not rolling over for lawmakers.
“The fact of the matter is the governor makes an effort of letting legislators know when they have an idea he won’t support to avoid embarrassing them or avoid going through the process to create a bill he’s going to veto,” Robinson said.
That approach has been noticed.
Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, the chairman of the House Economic Development and Tourism Committee, has tried for years to get approval for a bill that would refund a percentage of sales taxes spent at new, major tourism attractions. Perdue vetoed it last year because he said a sales tax refund of this kind has never been tried in Georgia. It would set a precedent, Perdue said at the time, “that I cannot support.”
This year Stephens is back with a new version that lowers the value of the investment necessary to qualify for the refunds from $100 million to $1 million, meaning more projects would qualify. Under Perdue, that would be a guaranteed veto. This year?
“Governor Deal is on board and has made recommendations and added his thoughts,” Stephens said. He doesn’t discount Perdue’s concerns, either, calling them “legitimate.” But, he smiled when asked if he was more confident his bill would become law this year.
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