Sen. Renee Unterman
Age: 60
Position: Represents Senate District 45, which includes Buford, Sugar Hill and Hog Mountain
Took office: 1999, House of Representatives; 2003, Senate
Occupation: Insurance executive
Education: Georgia State University, University of Georgia
Coming Sunday
The final days of this legislative session are seeing a number of strange “Frankenbills,” where lawmakers have taken pieces and parts of bills and sewn them together with the hope that lightning strikes.
One of the state Senate’s top Republican leaders said Friday that she still plans to pursue a controversial privatization of Georgia’s child welfare system, despite efforts by Gov. Nathan Deal to scuttle it.
This latest battle by Senate Health and Human Services Chairwoman Renee Unterman, R-Buford, cements a role that has made her a key player at the state Capitol this year. The lone woman in the chamber’s Republican majority — and a 23-year veteran of state and local politics — she sits at the center of a tumultuous 2014 legislative session that wraps up next week.
Long known for working late hours and weathering upheavals since her days as mayor of Loganville, Unterman now finds herself in conflict with the state’s highest official. Deal announced Thursday a comprehensive review of the state’s child welfare system, a move aimed at delaying an effort he once backed to turn the bulk of the system over to private operators.
He repeated Friday that he now wants a slower approach. His creation of the Child Welfare Reform Council is tasked with studying the state’s Division of Family and Children Services and reporting back on needed changes. The council is similar to one Deal formed to study the state’s criminal justice system, and it won the Republican governor praise from the child advocacy community for its careful approach.
“This is an area that does need the same kind of scrutiny,” Deal said. “Bringing together people who are knowledgeable, people who are interested in the issue, to try to get their ideas and suggestions in the event there needs to be further legislation on the subject.”
Unterman said she was not fazed. She has been at the center of a frenzied effort this year that has seen an unusual number of different bills chopped up and sewn together in hopes they survive. With the original privatization bill stuck in the House, Unterman in the past week said she has added the privatization bill’s language to three separate bills — House Bills 913, 914 and, notably, 990, which House leaders proposed to effectively block Medicaid expansion in Georgia — and she plans to flood the House with them.
“It’s still a viable option,” Unterman said of the privatization effort, which has been strongly backed by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle. “I’m hopeful with one of these it could go through.”
Senate and House lawmakers had very different ideas about what a pathway into privatization should look like. Senate leaders, led by Unterman, wanted the state to start bidding out all child welfare services by 2017, while House heavyweights wanted a scaled-back pilot program to test privatization in select areas over a two-year period.
Her persistence should not surprise anyone, said those who know her. Unterman, 60, has spent much of her career advocating on issues involving children, the elderly and the vulnerable. A nurse and social worker by training, she has endured the suicide of her son — this year, she took a day off to observe the fifth anniversary of his death — and a messy divorce that involved an alleged suicide attempt, domestic abuse allegations and treatment for depression. Unterman has even been trampled by a cow.
Yet, “she is always ready to lend her passion and commitment to those who so often don’t have a voice,” said Cagle, who meets regularly with Unterman as part of the Senate’s inner power circle. “The Senate is a stronger and better institution thanks to her efforts, and I am proud to serve alongside her every day.”
From the beginning, she’s never been afraid to roil the waters.
In the late 1980s, Unterman became the first female mayor of Loganville, a town about 45 minutes east of Atlanta on the Gwinnett and Walton county line. Just months into her first term, the then-33-year-old moved to fire the police chief, then watched as the city’s Police Department resigned in protest.
A group of angry residents confronted her after the vote on the police chief, chanting for her recall, kicking at her briefcase and grabbing at her clothes as she left the room. They labeled her dictatorial, stubborn and closed-minded. Years later, she said the experience made her realize it was a badge of honor to be called difficult when it involved an issue she believed in.
Melvin Everson is the executive director of the Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity and has known Unterman since the late ’90s. When he made a bid for the state House in 2004 and 2005, Unterman — by then an established local name who had also been a Gwinnett County commissioner — walked door-to-door with him offering her endorsement.
Everson said Unterman is a strategic lawmaker.
“I know she is very methodical in what she does and she gives it the utmost consideration,” he said. “She’s very conscious of the decisions she makes. When she puts her support behind a bill, she supports it wholeheartedly.”
This year, in addition to the privatization push, Unterman is working to get an “adult and aging services” agency within state government and has also backed mandated insurance coverage for treatment of autism in young children.
Polly McKinney, the advocacy director for Voices for Georgia’s Children, a nonprofit child policy and advocacy organization, said Unterman is one of the state’s most fearless and hard-fighting advocates for vulnerable people — even when she has not agreed with the legislator.
“When she first started talking about the sexual exploitation of children, you couldn’t say the word ‘sex’ on the floor of Senate. It just was not done,” McKinney said. “She’s the one who’s forced everyone to pay attention to that. She challenged the leadership and the male-dominated paradigm and shifted it.”
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