The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lawmakers’ report on European trip critical of Duncan and Miller
Georgia’s new lieutenant governor and Senate president pro tem took aim at their predecessors in a report focused on their travel to Europe at the expense of taxpayers only weeks before they left office.
The report follows articles last month by The Atlanta Journal Constitution about a delegation of lawmakers and other officials from the state who visited Germany and the United Kingdom after the 2022 elections as part of an economic development study committee. Leading that delegation were outgoing Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and then Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, whose terms both ended in early January.
The Georgia Senate voted to create the committee at the end of the 2022 session, and the panel was chaired by Miller.
Lawyers for the General Assembly declined to disclose the cost of the trip, citing an exemption state legislators gave themselves from the state’s Open Records Act. But the AJC, through records requests to state agencies in the executive branch and Senate sources, found that the cost to taxpayers was about $110,000.
Duncan’s and Miller’s successors, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Senate President Pro Tem John Kennedy, responded to the AJC’s articles with a call for an investigation into how taxpayers got stuck with the bill for the trip.
In a memo Jones and Kennedy wrote to senators about the findings of that probe, they said that while such travel by senators and staff is proper, it “must be clearly tied to pending or future legislative or policy business.”
“Without such connection,” they said, “travel, especially by outgoing members, has the appearance of nothing more than a taxpayer-funded vacation.”
Jones and Kennedy are proposing a ban on taxpayer-funded out-of-state travel by the lieutenant governor and senators within six months of the end of their terms or after they lose a primary election.