“We have mitigating factors that should make any recession a mild one, and we may still avoid one,” Robert Buschman, a longtime Georgia State University economist, told members of the state House and Senate appropriations committees.

Buschman said inflation on goods has slowed dramatically. That’s not true for services, however, which are largely untaxed in Georgia. Employers are still facing high labor costs, he said, and the office market remains down. The Federal Reserve may lower interest rates this year, he said, which could help the housing market. Unemployment could rise modestly, but he said Georgia could weather that better than much of the country.

The state also has those reserves to fall back on after a run of huge surpluses.

Several factors contributed to higher tax collections and the surpluses that followed, including record federal spending, low unemployment, a sometimes hot stock market, huge personal savings, and consumption as consumers paid off debt and bought new products.

Some Democrats, however, say the giant surpluses are a product of underfunding by Gov. Brian Kemp in key areas such as public health care while building up reserves that he can later help dole out on politically popular spending in an election year.

Credit: Georgia House of Representatives

Credit: Georgia House of Representatives

Agency faces staffing shortage tied to Medicaid vetting

The state Department of Human Services reports its staffing has been overwhelmed as it tries to determine whether 2.8 million Georgians are still eligible to receive Medicaid.

DHS Commissioner Candice Broce, speaking at a legislative budget hearing, said that even after hiring more than 1,000 workers last year, she would still like to see perhaps an additional 200 if the matching federal funding is there.

Hundreds of thousands of Georgians have been disenrolled from Medicaid in the federally mandated “redetermination” process, as protections offered during the COVID-19 pandemic end nationwide.

That’s required beneficiaries of the program — which provides health care coverage to the state’s poor and disabled — to submit paperwork to show they still qualify.

In Georgia, for the vast majority of those who were disenrolled, it was because of a lack of paperwork, not necessarily that they were ineligible for benefits. Activists fear that’s because many Medicaid recipients don’t know they have to submit new paperwork or they can’t navigate the system. A DHS spokeswoman said in November that the state was trying to notify Medicaid recipients “in as many ways as possible,“ including setting up a website at staycovered.ga.gov to offer guidance about the changes.

Much of the added hiring is being funded with federal pandemic emergency funds that Washington put under the control of Gov. Brian Kemp, who directed $54 million to help bolster the Medicaid efforts.

Broce said that while her agency’s offices in bigger counties remain open five days a week, some in less populous counties are operating on fewer days.

“We have some offices that are open only three days because we just don’t have someone to man the front desk,” Broce said.

Pre-K has high-powered support for more money

The two top members of the state House, Speaker Jon Burns and Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, are seeking a big boost in funding for the state’s prekindergarten program.

They want to inject about $100 million in the program, with that money coming from the Georgia Lottery.

The pre-K program serves two purposes: First, it’s seen as foundational for education. But it also frees parents to go to work.

The program has faced years of flat funding, and that has made it difficult to hire and keep teachers.

“An assistant teacher today earns $20,000. She or he could make more working full time at Target,” said Jones, who led a study committee that examined the program’s needs.

She and Burns want to raise assistant teachers’ pay to $25,700, the same base amount that a K-12 paraprofessional earns.

Rising costs, including for staff, are also limiting how many children can participate in the program.

The state pays for 84,000 pre-K slots, at $5,284 per child, but just over 73,000 are taken.

Gov. Brian Kemp is also seeking more money for the program.

He included an additional $11 million in his budget proposal to start reducing class sizes to 20 kids per teacher, back to the ratio in place over a decade ago.

The current 22 students per teacher is larger than the average kindergarten class and was set during cutbacks in 2011-12 following the Great Recession.

Kemp’s budget proposal, which also includes some pay raises, would boost the current pre-K budget from $460 million to $490 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Credit: Markus Schreiber/AP

Credit: Markus Schreiber/AP

Kemp goes fishing for businesses at Swiss forum

Gov. Brian Kemp was back in Switzerland this week for a second straight year to attend the World Economic Forum, a gathering of major honchos in the business world and big-shot politicos.

Some Republicans frown on the forum in Davos, viewing it as a symbol of out-of-touch elitism. But Kemp sees it more as a fishing expedition — a rather easy one — where he sets bait to lure economic development to Georgia.

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” Kemp said. “It’s a great use of our time to sell our state, and it saved us some overseas travel last year.”

Kemp used this year’s alpine journey to meet with business executives. That included a talk with representatives from Hyundai to discuss the company’s plans for the $7.6 billion Metaplant it’s building in southeast Georgia to manufacture electric vehicles.

The governor also was a panelist in a discussion on the state’s electric-vehicle boom, which has benefited from federal clean energy tax incentives that he and other Republicans have opposed.

Now that the incentives are in place, though, he thinks Georgia needs to make the most of it.

“Now people have to decide if they’re going to come to a state, which state are they going to go to?” Kemp said. “We’re trying to make the argument that we’re the best state to go to because of our conservative principles.”

Credit: Natrice Miller/AJC

Credit: Natrice Miller/AJC

Lt. gov opposes ranked-choice voting

Legislators are discussing ways to replace Georgia’s election runoffs, but you won’t find ranked-choice voting among Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ top choices.

Jones and state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, are backing Senate Bill 335, which would ban ranked-choice voting in Georgia.

The lieutenant governor said it only causes “confusion and fatigue” among voters and could lead to more disqualified ballots.

Here’s how it would work:

When filling out a ballot, a voter would choose a second-choice candidate along with his or her top pick. Then, if the first choice doesn’t finish among the top-two candidates, the vote would go to the second-choice candidate.

That means one candidate would receive a majority of the votes, negating the need for a runoff as happens now in Georgia when no contender gains more than 50% of the vote.

Almost every other state settles races on Election Day, with the top vote-getter winning even if he or she falls short of a majority, or 50% plus one vote.

Credit: Katelyn Myrick/AJC

Credit: Katelyn Myrick/AJC

Bill would give State Election Board power to investigate Raffensperger

The State Election Board would gain the authority to investigate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger under a Republican-sponsored bill.

Senate Bill 358 would also remove Raffensperger, a Republican, as a nonvoting member of the board he once chaired. That power was taken away from Raffensperger in 2021 as part of a wide-ranging election law the GOP-led General Assembly passed following Donald Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

The legislation comes after the board deadlocked on whether to pursue complaints by conservative activists who blame Raffensperger for human errors in Fulton County’s manual audit of the 2020 election. The problems, including over 3,000 double-counted and misallocated votes, didn’t change the overall outcome of the statewide audit, which confirmed Biden’s win over Trump.

“It is time for the secretary of state to be held reasonably accountable, like all other elected officials,” said Senate Ethics Chairman Max Burns, a Republican from Sylvania whose committee handles election bills.

Though the State Election Board declined to investigate Raffensperger, it voted unanimously to ask the General Assembly to clarify whether it had the authority to do so.

A spokesman for Raffensperger’s office called the proposal a “complete and total lapse of judgment” but declined to further comment.

House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington, also endorsed giving the State Election Board independent oversight of elections. But he said he didn’t intend to investigate Raffensperger, the state’s chief elections officer.

Political expedience

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