Georgia’s legislative session is well underway, and Gwinnett County legislators are shooting to pass bills on everything from legalizing medical marijuana to authorizing schools to dispense asthma medications to students.
District 5 Sen. Curtis Thompson, (D-Tucker) is hoping to pass his sponsored Controlled Substances Therapeutic Relief Act, which would allow for medical prescriptions for marijuana. Read more on SB 7 here.
In Thompson's case, his largest supporter – making up more than 44 percent of all contributions – is himself, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Legislative Navigator, a digital database that allows taxpayers to peruse the bill sponsorships and votes of their local legislators. The legislator has donated $30,000 to his campaign six times, according to the website.
Information about Thompson's bill sponsorship, campaign funding and even the likelihood of his sponsored bills passing is available through the site. The navigator pulls statistical and bill data from the state's General Assembly and campaign finance data from the National Institute of Money in State Politics. The institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that collects state-level campaign finance and lobbying data from all 50 states, standardizes and categorizes it, and then makes it available to the public.
The digital database feature that measures the propensity of a bill passing, which is based on Georgia Assembly bills on similar topics pass or fail results between 2005 and 2014, estimates that Thompson's marijuana bill has less than 1 percent chance of passing.
In addition to finding local legislators and their bills, the navigator campaign finance search tool helps voters determine the donor names, instances of giving and the dollar amount of donations for Thompson and Gwinnett’s other six senate and 22 house members can be uncovered through the website.
Similar to Thompson, support for neighboring Rep. Valerie Clark (R-Lawrenceville) is pretty close to home. Her husband, Robert, is her greatest financial supporter, donating $20,000 to her campaign, making up more than 27 percent of her campaign funding.
Legislators' have passed an amended version of Clark's sponsored bill on administering asthma medication at schools. Read more about HB 362 here.
The data is a work in progress, but provides tools for voters to assess and review day-to-day lawmaking at the Gold Dome.
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