Senate budget seeks to shield health departments, troopers
ATLANTA - A Georgia Senate committee wants more money for county health departments, state troopers and a runway extension in Macon.
The Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously Monday to pass out its version of midyear budget cuts. As Gov. Brian Kemp proposed, it would cut $159 million in state spending in the budget year ending June 30.
The cuts stem from a slowdown in state revenue, despite good economic times, that began after lawmakers cut Georgia’s top income tax rate. Kemp ordered more than $200 million in midyear reductions, but the total cut will be smaller than that because the first-term Republican didn’t order cuts to most education and Medicaid spending, and those programs continue to grow with Georgia’s population.
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Democrats have called the budget cuts a result of what they see as an ill-founded tax cut, months before all 236 seats in the General Assembly are up for election.
Kemp is seeking $300 million in cuts in next year, as he looks to increase pay for teachers by $2,000 a year. House Speaker David Ralston, a Blue Ridge Republican. has been advocating for an additional income tax cut, projected to cut $500 million to $600 million.
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Lawmakers can’t alter the $27.4 billion ceiling in state revenue that Kemp set. But like the House before them, Senate budget writers want to shift money to fund different priorities.
“I think we’re at a pretty good place. I think we have lessened the effects on children, the elderly, foster kids,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Jack Hill, a Reidsville Republican.
His committee voted to put another $3.78 millon back into county health departments, meaning they would not be cut at all. The House had already reduced the $6.4 million that Kemp had originally wanted to cut.
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Senate budget writers also put $2.4 million back for more state troopers, money the House had cut after state officials fired a group of troopers for cheating on a test. There’s also $1.5 million for what Hill described as a runway extension at Macon’s Middle Georgia Regional Airport. Hill said the expansion is meant to help attract industry.
The Senate committee found the money for that and a number of restorations by making a series of cuts to the justice system, as well as cutting more than $2 million from scholarships administered by the Georgia Student Finance Commission, instructing the commission to instead pay awards using existing reserves.
The Senate also reaped $3.2 million from an adjustment to the state’s K-12 funding formula.
“We found funds that maybe weren’t available to the governor when he wrote his budget,” Hill said.
The changes are small considering Georgia will spend more than $27 billion in state money and billions more in federal money this year.
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