Lawmakers say budget, ethics will be top issues

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January 9, 2013

Lawmakers say budget, ethics will be top issues

Charles Oliver charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com The Dalton Daily Citizen Wed Jan 09, 2013, 06:00 AM EST

Four years after economists declared an end to the recession, Georgia lawmakers say they will still struggle to put together a budget this year.

“Revenues just aren’t growing as fast as our needs are,” said state Sen. Charlie Bethel, R-Dalton.

The General Assembly’s 2013 session starts Monday. Bethel and state Rep.-elect Bruce Broadrick, R-Dalton, spoke Tuesday at the trade center for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce’s legislative preview breakfast. Rep. Tom Dickson, R-Dalton, and Rep. Jay Neal, R-LaFayette, could not attend the meeting, organizers said, because they were in Atlanta on legislative business.

Net state tax revenues declined 0.7 percent in November, the latest month for which data are available, to $1.35 billion, according to the governor’s office. For the first five months of fiscal 2013, which started July 1, revenues were up 3.5 percent compared to the same period the previous year, to $6.96 billion.

Broadrick, a pharmacist, said lawmakers are going to face particularly difficult choices regarding Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides health coverage to low-income people.

“Medicaid faces a $300 million shortfall this fiscal year. That’s something we will have to deal with in the supplemental budget. The projections I’ve seen indicate that we are looking at a $400 million gap in fiscal 2014,” he said.

Lawmakers increased spending overall slightly in the fiscal 2013 budget, but the $19.3 billion is still well below the $21.2 billion fiscal 2009 budget, the last one lawmakers approved before the recession forced spending cuts on them.

Both men agreed ethics reform will also be a top issue when the Legislature convenes. They said they did not yet know what the specifics of any reform package will be, but they said it will likely contain some sort of limit on gifts by lobbyists to legislators.

“Eighty percent of the people support that. I don’t see how we can’t take that up,” Broadrick said, referring to non-binding questions on the July 2012 general primary ballots asking voters whether such gifts should be limited.

Both men said they support stronger ethics laws, but Bethel questioned just how effective those laws can be.

“People who are ethical are going to behave ethically,” he said. “People who are not ethical are going to behave unethically. No matter what you pass they are going to find a way to be unethical.”

Bethel pointed to Florida, which has banned lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers.

“It’s my understanding that lobbyists now just give to the Democratic and Republican parties, and those parties give debit cards to legislators,” he said.

Bethel said if voters aren’t convinced their representatives will behave ethically the best thing to do is to vote them out.

Bethel said he expects lawmakers to follow up on the criminal justice reform law they passed in 2012 by addressing the juvenile justice system. He said Georgia has pretty stiff penalties for status offenses, actions that would be legal if the person committing them were not a minor. He said the state needs to find ways to keep juveniles convicted of such offenses in their communities and out of corrections facilities, where they often become more hardened.

“We would not only see some real budget savings, we will see some lives saved,” he said.

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Lawmakers say budget, ethics will be top issues

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