Effort advances to ensure Georgia does not divert fees for other uses

Georgians have seen millions of dollars in fees meant to clean up tire dumps and landfills, train police and educate drivers diverted by lawmakers for years, but now voters may get a chance to at least slow the practice.

A key House committee has approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow legislators to dedicate funds to specific purposes, such as environmental cleanups.

Legislators already make promises about how fee and fine money will be spent. But under current law, the only way to ensure fee and fine money goes where it’s suppose to go is for voters to dedicate the revenue in constitutional amendments.

That has allowed governors and lawmakers to divert almost $200 million in money collected from new-tire fees and landfill assessments away from their intended purposes — cleaning up tire dumps and hazardous waste sites. Tens of millions of dollars more have been diverted from traffic fine add-ons that were supposed to go for high school driver education programs.

In all, state lawmakers have diverted hundreds of millions of dollars of fee money — such as landfill fees and court surcharges — in an effort to balance the budget, allowing them to avoid raising taxes or having to further cut spending. In doing so, they've collected money from Georgians telling them their fees were going for one thing while spending them on another.

The proposed amendment, House Resolution 502, sponsored by state Rep. Andrew Welch, R-McDonough, is aimed at making the promises lawmakers make when they institute a new fine or fee stick.

“This is, to me, good government, and reassures that when we are asking taxpayers for that particular add-on or that tax, it goes to the purpose we say it will,” Welch told the House Ways & Means Committee.

Welch said under his proposal, fees could be dedicated for up to 10 years, and then lawmakers would decide whether to renew them.

Some like flexibility that diversion offers

The measure is co-sponsored by House Ways and Means Chairman Jay Powell, R-Camilla, a longtime supporter of stopping the diversions, and the powerful Association County Commissioners of Georgia, which has been critical of not being able to get the fee money sent back to local governments to fix problems such as leaking landfills.

Many lawmakers are fed up with the diversions.

"Unless we pass a constitutional amendment, I don't think I will ever vote for another fee because of the way they have been spent," said state Rep. Penny Houston, R-Nashville, a member of the committee.

But Powell noted in a meeting last week that House Appropriations Chairman Terry England, R-Auburn, a House leader, isn't happy about the measure.

Governors and top lawmakers typically don’t like the idea of dedicating fee or fine money because they want the flexibility to use the revenue where they think it’s most needed.

When lawmakers extended the landfill fees for the Hazardous Waste Trust Fund in 2013, they included language saying the fees had to be reduced if the money was diverted. Gov. Nathan Deal signed the fee extension bill, but he added a so-called “signing statement” declaring that the fee reduction language was nonbinding.

“I understand the premise of it, and I agree with the premise of it,” England said of the proposed constitutional amendment. “However, when we go back into another recessionary period, it takes away the flexibility to use any and all state money to keep us from having to cut off essential services.”

Welch’s proposed amendment would allow state officials to divert dedicated fee money in a fiscal emergency, but England said some recessions last years, and there is a limit on how long the state could divert fee money.

Questions raised about need for fees

Auditors added fuel to Welch's push last fall when they questioned whether the state should continue charging the $1 fee drivers pay when they get rid of tires and buy new ones. The Department of Audits and Accounts report said state officials should do a more thorough review of the program before asking lawmakers to renew the fee in the future.

The analysis said while the so-called “scrap tire fee” that consumers pay has been unchanged, the number of cleanups and other activities funded by the Solid Waste Trust Fund has dropped over the past 10 years.

Another high-profile example of the diversions has been “Joshua’s Law,” which was passed in 2005 and added a surcharge to traffic fines to establish driver education programs in Georgia schools. The law raised $10 million or more annually some years. But a 2011 state audit found that of $57 million collected at that point, only $8 million had actually been used for driver training.

In 2013, lawmakers cut the surcharge from 5 percent to 1.5 percent of the original fine for traffic offenses, and shortly afterward, Deal began allocating more money for driver education programs. Still, Alan Brown, whose son’s death inspired “Joshua’s Law,” said it will take decades to fund driver education programs in every high school at the rate the state has allocated the money.

The Solid Waste and Hazardous Waste funds were created in the early 1990s, and they were designed to help the state’s Environmental Protection Division clean up tire dumps, create a hazardous site inventory, force cleanups of polluted sites by those responsible, or clean up “orphaned” sites.

For the Hazardous Waste Fund, money comes from a per-ton fee charged to dump waste into landfills, and hazardous waste fees.

Combined, fees designated for the two funds have collected about $450 million, of which about $264 million has actually been appropriated for use by the funds for their intended purposes, according to the EPD.

Some county officials have complained that money for environmental cleanups wasn’t always available when they needed it. Others say Georgians shouldn’t be charged the fee if the state isn’t going to spend the money on cleanups.

EPD officials said there are currently more than 150 abandoned hazardous waste sites, landfills and tire dumps in need of a cleanup, at an estimated cost of about $84 million.