The Georgia House is set to approve a state budget for the upcoming fiscal year Friday that includes pay raises for 200,000 teachers and state employees and more than $1 billion worth of new construction projects.
The spending plan for fiscal 2018, which begins July 1, was backed by the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday and follows much of what Gov. Nathan Deal proposed during the first week of the session.
It would provide 2 percent pay raises for teachers and most state employees, and a 19 percent raise for child protection workers. The midyear budget Deal signed Wednesday — which runs through June 30 — included 20 percent salary hikes for state law enforcement officers.
Overall state spending would hit a record $25 billion, or $49 billion when federal and other funds are included. Officials say, however, that when inflation and population growth are added to the equation, the state is spending about what it was at the end of the 1990s.
The state budget helps fund the education of more than 2 million students and provides health and nursing care for about 2 million Georgians. The state funds road improvements and prisons, economic development initiatives and cancer research, business and environmental regulation, parks and water projects. It creates thousands of private-sector jobs through construction projects.
The spending proposal includes more than $1.15 billion in new borrowing. High on the list is $105 million to build a new state courts building on the site of the former archives building in Atlanta, which is expected to be brought down next month.
Deal has put money in the budget previously to prepare the archives building for implosion and design the courts building.
The bond package also includes $73 million more to complete a new technical college campus in Deal’s home county of Hall.
Deal had added $10 million to the budget in 2015 to buy the land and $48.3 million last year to get the construction started. Combined, if given final approval as expected, the state will have borrowed more than $130 million to move Lanier Technical College from one end of the county to the other and create a new campus.
The state would borrow $100 million for bridge repair, replacement and renovation projects, and $55 million for improvements at the World Congress Center in Atlanta.
Under the budget, doctors would receive an increase in payments for treating Medicaid patients, and millions more would go to increasing autism services for children in the program, which provides health care to the poor and disabled. The House added $37 million to increase payments to nursing homes. Nursing home company executives are major donors to state campaigns.
The House also added money for dentists who treat low-income Medicaid patients and school counselors, and $600,000 to hire four scientists and two technicians to address the backlog in processing DNA rape evidence packages.
The budget for the upcoming year includes $223 million to help keep the state's Teachers Retirement System on strong financial footing. State officials said the payment is one of the largest subsidies — if not the largest — in the program's history.
While the state’s 100,000 teachers would receive raises, the budget does not eliminate the $166 million in “austerity cutbacks” to schools districts that have been built into state budgets since the early 2000s.
Such reductions in what districts would get from the state school funding formula — which reached more than $1 billion some years — have been whittled down by Deal. The teacher pay raise would cost the state about $160 million, which is about the same amount that is still being withheld from districts.
Last year lawmakers approved 3 percent more for school districts, but The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in October that only about 40 percent of the systems passed the money along as raises.
The full House will vote on the budget Friday, and then the measure will be taken up by the Senate. Lawmakers must give final approval before they close the 2017 session.
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