WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Gov. Brian Kemp signed off on the FY23 State Budget last week with hopes to strengthen public safety, healthcare efforts, education and business ventures. The budget was the topic of interest at Wednesday’s Eggs & Issues meeting hosted by the Robins Regional Chamber.
The guest panel included legislators from the surrounding area, such as: Rep. Health Clark of District 147, Rep. Shaw Blackmon of District 146, Sen. Larry Walker of District 20, Sen. John F. Kennedy of District 18, Rep. Robert Dickey of District 140 and Noel Williams, Jr. of District 148.
Rep. Clark highlighted K-12 education efforts and funding to improve the lives of past and present veterans.
“The biggest thing that we fund every year is education; that’s the largest chunk of the budget,” Clark said. “We’re required constitutionally to provide for a quality basic education for every student in the state.”
Legislators restored the financial cuts made as a result of the pandemic, and the quality basic education formula was fully funded again.
“There’s a formula that tracks how much each school district should receive based on their student enrollment numbers, and that is fully funded again,” he explained.
Teachers were given $3,000 a couple of years ago, and this recent budget offered an initial $2,000 added to their basic salary. Every other state employee received a $5,000 pay raise, he said.
“We were taking in so much money that we added as much as we could to the rainy day fund, and then we were able to give back a billion dollars to the taxpayers and do all these additions to the budget,” he said.
Clark also serves as the chairman of the Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, and they made moves to exempt the taxation of service members’ retirement pay.
An additional $3 billion was added to the Department of Veterans Services, with a large chunk of that funding veteran suicide prevention and their transitions from the service to the private sector.
Rep. Robert Dickey that the Freedom to Farm Bill was a priority for himself as well as Sen. Walker.
“We called it the ‘Freedom to Farm’; it’s really a freedom from nuisance lawsuits that farmers have been facing as urban encroachment starts coming in and new neighbors experience the farm maybe next to their subdivision,” Dickey said. “Those neighbors are maybe unhappy with some activities going on — noise, smell, dust — and a lot of farmers are facing lawsuits and those type of things. So it’s really a legal bill.”
Challenges are still present for the “#1 state to do business.” Sen. Walker spoke on the increased workload and business costs for citizens involved in the agriculture industry, referencing the cost of machinery, diesel, fertilizers and herbicides.
“One of the projects that Chairman Dickey and I have been working on we’re very excited about is an integrated precision agriculture research farm that is going to be located in Houston County across the street from the fairgrounds across Elko Road,” Walker said. “It’s going to be a 250-acre farm that’s going to be used to develop and test and demonstrate the latest technology in agriculture.”
He said the countywide K-12 agriculture education program implemented in local schools is successful and can provide students a hands-on way to learn about science, technology, engineering and math, even if they do not go on to work in the agriculture industry.
He said the Quality Basic Education Act (QBE) was enacted in the 1980s, but it had never been fully funded until 2019. The pandemic complicated that and led to some cuts in the budget not solved until the recent budget discussion.
Some of the financial needs of college students were addressed in this recent budget as well, Walker explained.
The “public institution fee” was addressed — a fund used “to ensure continued academic excellence during times of reductions in State funding” — ranging from $200-500 a semester across the systems’ 26 universities.
“So it was just recently that we’ve been able to fully fund the formula for QBE,” Walker said. “We restored the funding — the austerity cuts — to the University System of Georgia, which allow them to take off the Special Institution Fee that students and families were having to pay.”
He said state law enforcement agencies have received raises, but local agencies also need special attention — potentially in the form of a non-profit donation foundation. Donors could receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, and law enforcement agencies could benefit.
“Eligible things they could use it for would be bonuses, training, purchase and maintenance of equipment,” Walker added. “And lastly, if they wanted to, they could establish a mental health crisis co-responder program where they could have mental-health trained professionals ride with law enforcement when there’s a call that involves a mental health crisis.”
Sen. John F. Kennedy spoke on tort reform and supporting business owners statewide in the process.
“Occasionally we’ll have a decision come from the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court that actually changes an interpretation which happened this past year in 2021 with regard to how the apportionment of damages happens in a civil lawsuit,” Kennedy said. “It really rocked the fundamentals of how the business community viewed its exposure to liability in the event there is a defendant in a lawsuit and the damages being apportioned above the people that were truly at fault.
“The Supreme Court’s decision really took that away in a significant way. So we rallied, and we passed significant legislation and put it back to the way it was — and just trying to, again, maintain those pro-business policies. So from the state’s standpoint, we’re not doing anything to get in the way of businesses but rather just create a pro-business environment.”
Rep. Noel Williams delved into the healthcare side of the budget.
“Our state budget in 1992 was $4 billion,” Williams said. “This year, it’s $30 billion — but of that $30 billion, 24% — or a little over $7 billion — goes into healthcare. So we’re taking care of Georgians, and we’re taking care of friends and family.”
Williams said the legislation wanted to place an emphasis on financing for rural hospitals, raising the funding from $60 million to $75 million.
“The money that you earmark through state income tax, you can earmark to rural hospitals — any hospitals or counties with less than 40,000 people,” Williams said.
Shaw Blackmon spoke on returning money to the taxpayers, saving at the pump and future plans for a potential reduction in the overall income tax.
“It reduces the rate, flattens it, simplifies things and it also raises our standard exemption,” Blackmon said. ”For instance, a family of four, even with all the phase-in, wouldn’t pay one penny of state income tax over the first $30,000 of income. And that same family, at roughly $75,000 of income, would see a $650-plus a year savings.”
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