ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate passed a state budget Friday slashing spending by $2.6 billion over the objections of Democrats who argued majority Republicans could have avoided some of the cuts by raising revenues.
The scaled-back fiscal 2021 budget, which passed 34-15 along party lines, is the product of Georgia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which drove up costs across many state agencies while sending tax revenue plummeting.
“We could not foresee the overnight impact of COVID-19,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, said at the beginning of Friday’s floor debate on the budget.
Initially, Gov. Brian Kemp and legislative leaders instructed the agencies to reduce their spending by 14% but later amended that to 11% after receiving a slightly better tax revenue report for May than the 36% drop-off that occurred in April.
“You don’t reduce funds by 11% without affecting every budget in every corner of our state,” Tillery said.
Tillery highlighted some steps Senate budget writers were able to take to mitigate the impact of the budget cuts, including restoring funding to Georgia’s pre-kindergarten program, reducing employee furloughs from up to 24 days to 12 and redirecting leftover federal funds into state programs.
“I know this is not the budget many of you expected to or hoped to have this year,” Tillery told his Senate colleagues. “[But it] prioritizes the items we care about most.”
But Democrats complained the spending cuts still would inflict severe damage to Georgians, particularly health-care needs the pandemic has made even more acute, and to the state’s workforce. Among other things, initiatives to provide targeted pay raises to employees in agencies with the highest turnover have been zeroed out of the budget.
Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson, D-Stone Mountain, said coronavirus is only partly to blame for the fiscal hole the state finds itself in. Legislative Republicans helped create a revenue shortfall by cutting the state income tax rate two years ago and doling out tax breaks to special interests.
“We have made tax and policy decisions that undermine the future of this state,” Henson said. “We can and should do better.”
Other Democratic senators criticized Republicans for refusing to consider proposals to raise revenues, including increasing Georgia’s tobacco tax – third-lowest in the nation – and drawing down federal health-care dollars by expanding Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
“There are a number of ways we can expand our revenues and not have to be make these draconian cuts,” said Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Hufstetler said his committee is working on one potential revenue raiser. The panel has targeted for elimination a list of tax breaks the state currently offers as inducements to attract new businesses and create jobs, folding them into a bill headed for the Senate floor.
“There’s potentially millions of dollars there,” said Hufstetler, R-Rome.
While getting rid of tax breaks might appeal to Democrats looking for more revenue, Georgia businesses are gearing up to defend them. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce and Georgia Economic Developers Association released a statement Friday opposing House Bill 1035.
“We must remember that businesses in Georgia have just started to reopen after a government mandated lockdown, and we are now suffering in a recession with record unemployment,” the statement read. “Our economic development community needs every tool possible to lead this recovery.”
Meanwhile, the fiscal 2021 budget likely won’t be finalized until the last day or two of this year’s legislative session. The House passed a much larger pre-coronavirus spending plan in March before lawmakers took a three-month hiatus to discourage the spread of COVID-19.
A joint House-Senate conference committee will work during the next week to settle the two chambers’ differences over the budget.
Legislation to permit sports betting in Georgia made a comeback Friday in the state Senate as lawmakers scramble to drum up new revenues to plug the state’s coronavirus-ravaged budget.
A measure by Sen. Burt Jones, R-Jackson, that would legalize sports betting and hand management responsibilities to the Georgia Lottery Corporation was tacked onto a separate bill dealing with traffic tickets.
It would allow online betting platforms like FanDuel and Draft Kings to operate legally, so long as they secure licenses from the lottery. People who are 21-years and older in Georgia could place bets.
Revenues from sports betting, which Jones pegged at a “conservative estimate” of $60 million annually, would go to fund Georgia’s HOPE scholarships for state university students and preschool programs.
Supporters say those revenues would also be a boon for the state budget, which is set for spending cuts of roughly $2.6 billion for the 2021 fiscal year.
On Friday, Jones said a bump in revenues plus the existing management know-how by the lottery should make the bill palatable for those wary of freeing up more forms of gambling in Georgia.
“This right here, the online betting program, is I think an answer to adding significant revenue dollars to a system [that] moving down the road will continue to need more dollars,” Jones said Friday. “And you’re taking an activity that is currently going on right now.”
Jones’s sports betting package was added to House Bill 903, a short bill tweaking motor vehicle citation rules that flew out of the state House of Representatives by a near-unanimous vote in March.
It passed out of the Senate Special Judiciary Committee in a vote early Friday morning and now heads to the full Senate. The committee, chaired by Sen. Jen Jordan, D-Atlanta, is composed entirely of Democratic lawmakers.
Gambling legislation has had a rocky road in the General Assembly in recent years, including during the current 2020 legislative session. A measure to let voters decide whether to legalize sports betting, casinos and horse racing died in the House in March.
Even Jones’s bid for sports betting looked dead in the water. A measure he brought to legalize the activity, Senate Bill 403, died quietly in the Republican-controlled Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee without a vote in March.
Gambling aficionados have long urged the state legislature to give voters the final say in whether they want to partake in gaming forms besides just the lottery, which sends millions of dollars each year to the popular HOPE program. Detractors call the activity a moral vice that squanders people’s money and family time.
But the money crunch brought on by the state’s economic slowdown amid the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a new variable into the gambling equation. Faced with deep spending cuts, lawmakers are seeking ways to drum up revenues for the budget.
Sen. Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said Friday she was concerned about a lack of provisions guaranteeing funds for preschool programs in Jones’s measure but said its passage would help ease the pain for state agencies facing budget cuts.
“I have consistently said that we can’t cut ourselves out of this deficit that we’re facing right now,” said Williams, D-Atlanta. “And we have to look at additional revenue streams.”
Local sports organizations also turned out Friday to praise passage of the measure out of committee. Steve Koonin, the CEO of the Atlanta Hawks basketball organization, said the sports-betting measure would boost fan interest in the sport while bolstering state revenues.
“During this difficult time for our professional sports teams, maintaining and building our engagement and relationship with fans is absolutely critical,” Koonin said.
Hate-crimes legislation got its first hearing in the General Assembly in more than a year Thursday amid growing tension over how strongly to punish bias-motivated offenses and whether to include “gender” as a protected classification.
House Bill 426, sponsored by Georgia Rep. Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, has been the source of contentious debate in recent days as lawmakers hurtle toward the end of the 2020 legislative session, with little time left to haggle over details.
Questions over the bill have centered on whether to designate hate-crimes offenses as standalone charges or as enhancements to separate crimes like assault or property destruction, which could affect the level of punishment for those convicted.
It also remains to be seen whether Senate lawmakers will keep language in the House bill that specifies the term “gender” as a category protected from hate-influenced acts.
The bill has languished in the Georgia Senate after passing out of the state House of Representatives on March 7, 2019. Its first airing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Jesse Stone, R-Waynesboro, was held Thursday night. Another hearing is set for Friday afternoon.
Lawmakers want to avoid passing a hate-crimes bill this session only to have it tossed out in court for being too broad, as happened in 2004.
That year, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down a law enacted in 2000 after ruling it did not clearly specify what a hate crime is, such as whether it depended on a person’s race, gender or other identifiers.
Efstration’s bill would designate a hate crime as an addition to a separate charge that prosecutors would have the discretion to bring. It specifies hate crimes as those targeting a victim based on “race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability or physical disability.”
Asked Thursday if his bill is too broad, Efstration said it would only apply to offenses that have a clear message of hate – not for more minor actions like generic graffiti.
“It applies to all Georgians if the elements fit,” Efstration said. “If the nature of the crime is the bias against the class of the victim.”
Efstration and supporters from both sides of the aisle – including Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, the General Assembly’s longest serving member – have urged swift passage of the bill after such a long delay in the Senate and with the clock ticking on the current session.
But the bill could see several changes as it winds through Stone’s committee in the Senate. Portions of a separate hate-crimes bill that was drawn up just this week by Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan could find their way into the House bill.
Duncan, who presides over the Senate, has pressed for a “comprehensive approach” to the legislation that would make hate crimes standalone offenses and increase potential prison time from two years to five.
He frames his version as tougher on hate-crime offenders and capable of putting teeth into state law, rather than just sending a message.
“There is a no way to ignore the sense of urgency, the desire and the immediate need for the strongest hate crimes law in the country to show up on our books here in Georgia,” Duncan said earlier this week.
But Duncan’s bill has drawn the ire of many lawmakers, particularly Democratic leaders, who worry the bill could gum up the legislative works so late in the session – and risk sinking Efstration’s bill.
Critics have also lambasted Duncan’s bill since it does not include the term “gender” in a list of 18 different personal, social and physical attributes that would be protected from hate or bias-motivated crimes.
Leaving the term “gender” out of Duncan’s bill could leave Georgians exposed to hate crimes motivated by a person’s gender identity, said Rep. Matthew Wilson, one of five openly gay members of the General Assembly.
“As we know, transgender men and women are one of the largest groups of victims of hate crimes and bias-motivated crimes every year,” said Wilson, D-Brookhaven. “So to say that that is a serious bill is incredibly offensive because the group that needs this law the most is not even included in this bill.”
Duncan’s office did not respond Thursday to a request for comment on why the term “gender” was not included in his bill.
Critics also highlighted other categories that were specified in Duncan’s bill including people who are exercising their free-speech rights, which they argue waters down the protections by making them too broad.
Representatives from several nonprofit and advocacy groups urged lawmakers to keep “gender” in the bill during Thursday’s hearing. Sam Olens, a former state attorney general, said excluding the term could put transgender persons in danger.
“If you don’t put gender in this bill, folks that are transgender will have no protection,” said Olens, who served as Georgia’s attorney general from 2011 to 2016. “It is essential that sexual orientation remain in the bill, that gender be added to the bill.”
Opposition came from Cole Muzio, president of the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia, who wondered if Efstration’s bill would be too broad on the one hand and would not deter hate crimes on the other.
“What it does do is it does create thought crimes,” Muzio said. “And it does encourage us not to look at how we’re the same, not to look at how we’re all made in the image of God, but to look at how we’re the ‘other’.”
Rep. Carl Gilliard (D-Savannah) talks about his bill to repeal Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law at the State Capitol on June 18, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A Savannah lawmaker called for passage Thursday of legislation aimed at eliminating the Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law as part of a push for a new round of criminal justice reform amid nationwide protesting against police brutality and racial injustice.
House Bill 1203 would remove language from state law that allows private citizens to arrest someone who commits a crime in their presence or within their “immediate knowledge.”
It would also do away with language allowing a private citizen to make an arrest “upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion” that someone committed a felony crime and is trying to escape.
The bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Carl Gilliard, is among more than a dozen bills filed since Monday when the legislative session resumed that focus on court and policing reforms.
They include measures to repeal the state’s stand-your-ground law, prohibit police officers from racial profiling and ban no-knock search warrants.
At a news conference Thursday, Gilliard said and other House lawmakers supporting the bill called the citizen’s arrest law outdated and an incentive for untrained civilians to perpetrate violence on others.
“To move Georgia forward, our focus is prevention in reference to repealing this law so that we will have an opportunity for the law to do the law,” Gilliard said.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, said arrests should be left to law enforcement professionals and not “amateurs … [who] sometimes flow into the role of vigilante.”
“We need to understand that citizen’s arrest is dangerous more often than not,” Oliver said.
Sen. Michael “Doc” Rhett, D-Marietta, said he plans to file a “companion bill” in the Senate on repealing the citizen’s arrest law.
In the House, a separate bill has been filed by Rep. Jeff Jones, R-Brunswick, to legalize “citizen’s detainment” provisions that would allow citizens to hold someone suspected of committing a crime under certain circumstances until law enforcement officers arrive to make an official arrest.
The recently filed bills on citizen’s arrest come amid protests that have rocked the U.S. in recent weeks following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in Minneapolis during an arrest in which an officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes.
The citizen’s arrest proposal also comes after arrests were made in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was gunned down during a pursuit by two white men near Brunswick in late February.
The two men, Travis and Gregory McMichael, have claimed they suspected him of committing burglaries in the Satilla Shores neighborhood where they lived. Friends and Family who knew Arbery say he was out for a jog.
The McMichael men were arrested on felony murder charges in early May, months after the shooting. Since then, many Georgia leaders and lawmakers have pressed for repealing the citizen’s arrest law and passing a hate-crimes bill, which has stalled in the Senate.
Georgia House Speaker David Ralston has cast doubt in recent days on whether any criminal justice-minded legislation would muster enough support to pass this session except for the hate-crimes measure, House Bill 426.
In the Senate, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan unveiled a different hate-crimes measure Wednesday that would impose tougher penalties than the House-passed bill but which has stirred fears the move could crater chances for any hate-crimes legislation to pass this year.
The Georgia Senate Thursday jump-started a measure aimed at exempting ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft from the state’s sales tax by charging them a flat fee for ride-hailing services that would be dedicated to public transit.
The move came after lawmakers pushed through legislation in January to start collecting online sales taxes from third-party companies like Google and Amazon that officials say could reel in around $100 million annually for the state, plus tens of millions of dollars more for local governments.
But part of that deal involved passing a separate arrangement for ride-hailing companies to exempt them from those online sales taxes. Those companies instead favor paying a fee of 50 cents per ride.
That 50-cent fee arrangement was tacked onto a bill to ease income-tax requirements for Georgia farmers hard-hit by Hurricane Michael in 2018, which cleared the Georgia House in March but sat in limbo as the General Assembly went on hiatus amid the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, Senate lawmakers picked up the ride-share fee measure, House Bill 105, and sent it by a 41-3 vote back to the House for final approval.
Senate Majority Whip Steve Gooch, who led the push for the ride-share fee, said Thursday the bill’s passage would be a “reduction to the bottom line” for state sales taxes but would help boost funding for transit operations in Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia.
“We believe this is a good way to budget for our transit in Atlanta,” said Gooch, R-Dahlonega.
The fee measure would have landed on Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk in mid-March had House lawmakers not elected to make changes clarifying that revenues from the fee would be earmarked for public transit.
That change forced the bill to return to the Senate for more voting, which was put off for three months after the 2020 legislative session was suspended due to the pandemic. Lawmakers returned this week to close out the last days of bill-wrangling.
Ride-share companies have been paying sales taxes since April 1 when the measure taxing online sellers took effect. That has helped put Georgia on track to collect as much as $15 million per month in additional tax collections amid severe economic strain caused by the pandemic.
If signed into law, the fee could drum up between $24 million and $45 million for the state in its first full year in effect, according to a fiscal note. County and city governments, which would not benefit from the fee, would lose out on between $16 million and $26 million the first year.
