ATLANTA – Georgia Senate budget writers advanced a $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 spending plan that invests heavily in prisons and education.
The budget, which now heads to the full Senate, includes $170 million in new spending to hire more correctional officers, give the current staff a pay raise and upgrade prison system technology to crack down on the smuggling of contraband to inmates, including cellphones. That’s less than the $250 million in the House version of the budget but above the $125 million Gov. Brian Kemp requested when he unveiled his spending recommendations in January.
The emphasis on improving conditions inside Georgia prisons follows a federal audit last fall that criticized the system for failing to protect inmates from violence.
Like both the governor’s version of the budget and the House version, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to fully fund the state’s per-pupil funding formula for elementary and secondary schools.
The committee also voted to fully fund Georgia’s new private-school vouchers program at $140 million, returning to Kemp’s original recommendation and disagreeing with the House, which had cut the program to $40 million.
“This will allow 21,000 students and their families to have options to pick other schools when the school they’re attending falls in the bottom quartile of schools in the state,” Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, the committee’s chairman, said Thursday.
The committee also rejected $28 million the House added to the budget for services to economically disadvantaged students.
The budget panel also decided to delay spending $7 million for infrastructure improvements associated with the staging of the Super Bowl at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in 2028 and college basketball’s Final Four in 2031.
The Senate version of the spending plan would pay cash for a series of building projects rather than borrow the money. The state has a large enough budget surplus to take that pay-as-you-go route.
However, Tillery warned his committee colleagues that the “sugar high” of federal spending that followed the COVID pandemic is over and that an uncertain national economic outlook means the state must be careful not to overspend.
“All the federal COVID spending did was delay the inevitable for five to six years,” he said.
The 2026 budget will take effect July 1.