General Assembly facing difficult session
ATLANTA — The Georgia General Assembly returns to the Capitol on Monday to finish possibly the oddest legislative session on record.
Lawmakers started the year with hopes of passing hundreds of bills, giving pay raises to 200,000 teachers and state employees, and cutting the income tax. Just the kind of political goodies welcome to any incumbent seeking re-election in November.
Instead, legislators are coming back to a disinfected Statehouse after a three-month break caused by the coronavirus pandemic and now face the prospect of approving little beyond a recession-wracked budget that will cut state services and could force tens of thousands of staffers — from state troopers to educators — to take days off without pay.
With many legislators masked up and social distancing the norm, debates and votes could take hours rather than minutes. Fewer bills may be approved in the past 11 days of the 2020 session than typically pass in the final two hours of more traditional sessions.
“The budget is going to take up so much oxygen in the room, those 11 days will go by quickly,” said House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge. “It’s going to be a much slower and more cumbersome process.”
While lawmakers must, by law, pass a spending plan before the start of the next fiscal year — July 1 — there will be a push for plenty of other measures as well, including hate-crimes legislation stalled
in the Senate, proposals to shield companies from legal liability if workers or customers contract COVID-19, bills to make assisted living communities safer, and yet another bid to increase gaming in Georgia.
All of it will occur amid the backdrop of the threemonth fight to control the pandemic, the recession and the record unemployment it produced, the shooting of black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County by a white man and death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the weeks of protests against police brutality and racial injustice that followed, and a bungled primary ahead of a highly charged election in November.
Legislative sessions begin the second Monday of each year and typically end in late March or early April. It’s rare that they last beyond the week of the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, in part because many legislators like to attend.
This session lawmakers went in knowing Gov. Brian Kemp wanted spending cuts to prepare for a possible downturn in the economy and have enough money for his top priority, a pay raise for teachers.
Lawmakers spent two months passing legislation and debating those cuts. In mid-March, the House passed its second cut in two years to the incometax rate and a $28 billion budget that included pay raises for teachers, state workers and university employees. But the Senate didn’t take them up before the pandemic forced a shutdown after lawmakers ratified emergency powers for Kemp on March 16.
At least six lawmakers have tested positive for COVID-19.
Officials recognized the shuttering of many businesses to stem the spread of the virus would wreck the state budget, which relies heavily on income and sales tax collections to help fund schools, public health programs, state police, corrections, business regulation, highways and much more.
Revenue collections quickly plummeted. As of the end of May the state was almost $860 million behind for this fiscal year — which ends June 30 — and Kemp projected a $2.6 billion drop in revenue for fiscal 2021 as the recession lingers.
Georgia budget writers joined colleagues in other states in asking Congress for aid to help fill budget gaps, without success so far. Congress did, however, supply money to help pay to fight the pandemic, which Kemp made his priority in part to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
The governor mostly avoided talking about the financial damage to state coffers until early June, when he projected the shortfall.
“COVID-19 has undermined our economic growth, stability and prosperity,” Kemp said.
Meanwhile, House and Senate leaders couldn’t agree on when they would come back. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan wanted to return in May, a few weeks after Kemp began reopening Georgia’s economy. Ralston favored June 11, two days after the Georgia primary, which had been moved because of the pandemic.
They eventually settled on Monday, and by then they’d talked for more than a month about what the return would look like.