State lawmakers should be commended for passing a balanced budget in difficult economic times and for a host of other achievements, Speaker of the House David Ralston said.
Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) met with Savannah area Republicans on Tuesday and boasted of the job legislators did with a quickly and severely shrinking budget.
“I think we did a pretty good job of steering the ship between the rough waters,” he said.
Ralston praised the work of the 180-member House in passing the $17.9 billion budget.
Higher education took a cut of $140 million, and the quality basic education formula suffered a $527 million reduction from the FY10 budget.
The previous fiscal year allotted $7.4 billion in state funds, and more than $9.4 billion total, for education out of an $18.6 billion budget. Education received $9.6 billion in the FY11 budget, with almost $7 billion coming from state sources.
“When we started out back in January, we were staring down the barrel of the worst budget shortfall in the history of this state since the Great Depression,” he said. “The budget was getting worse. Morale was down in the House; we had had some distractions and upheavals.
“I saw 179 men and women go to work, putting all that behind and committing everything they had to doing the job the people of Georgia sent them to do. They balanced the state budget without a tax increase, which I think in this era is a tremendous accomplishment.”
It wasn’t that long ago, Ralston pointed out, that the state’s budget topped $21 billion — but that was before the economy cartwheeled off the tracks and state revenues plummeted.
“I hear politicians talk about cutting the waste out of government and cutting the fat out. We have cut more than 20 percent out of the state budget in two years,” said Ralston, who has been in the House for eight years after serving three terms in the state Senate. “When I hear those speeches, I say, show me a dollar that needs to be cut out. I’ve never gotten an answer to that question. I’ve never been taken up on that offer.”
Ralston decried politicians and others who use budget cutting to pick up what could be considered cheap political points.
“It’s easy to talk in terms of bumper stickers and it’s easy to talk about problems,” he said. “But these men and women up here have to come up with solutions, and that’s what we tried to do this year.”
Action, not necessarily laws
Ralston was elected House speaker on Jan. 11, and he said he didn’t get the feeling that Georgians wanted scores of new laws on the books.
“I didn’t sense a great outcry from Georgians for more laws,” he said. “But they wanted us to do a few things and do them right.”
Ralston was named House speaker following the tumultuous reign and ignominious end of Glenn Richardson, who had been the first Republican elected speaker of the House since Reconstruction.
The first-year speaker called the ethics legislation passed by the General Assembly in the wake of Richardson affairs some of the best in the nation.
“I thought it was important that we look at the people of Georgia in the eye and say, ‘we had a problem, we dealt with it and we cleaned our house up,’” he said. “As a result of the ethics package we passed, our ethics laws governing the conduct of public officials at every level and lobbyists are now in the top tier of the strictest in the entire nation. I think you can be proud of that.”
But Ralston and the House Republican leadership also championed the passage of a proposal that lawmakers hope will alleviate the state’s
transportation construction problems. Using the state’s regional commissions as a rough guide, there will be 12 special taxing districts and residents of each will be able to vote in 2012 whether to add another penny to the sales tax to go toward roads and transportation improvements.
Lawmakers couldn’t find an answer between competing House and Senate plans before agreeing to the measure that will go before the voters.
“Georgia now has something we haven’t had before,” he said, “a transportation policy that’s befitting one of the fastest growing states in the nation, and no longer a transportation policy that’s rooted in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Finalizing the transportation proposal was the second most important thing, behind only the budget, to come out of the 2010 session, according to Ralston.
“I told all the players involved we were going into a room and put aside some of the issues that had bogged us down,” he said. “Transportation just had to be done this session.”
Ralston also praised passage of a water conservation act that will “put us at the forefront of taking care of our most precious natural resource,” he said, and also trumpeted passing a trauma care network initiative that will be on the November ballot. He also praised the creation of the special council on tax reform, a bill he co-authored with House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, Rep. Larry O’Neal (R-Bonaire) and Rep. Bob Bryant (D-Garden City).
The panel includes two selections each by Speaker Ralston and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, along with Gov. Sonny Perdue and four economists — Dr. David Sjoquist of Georgia State University, Dr. Roger Tutterow of Mercer University, Dr. Jeffery Humphreys of the University of Georgia and Dr. Christine Ries of Georgia Tech. The council also includes the 2010 chairman of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia chairman of the National Federation of Independent Business.
Ralston said the group will have business people who “have created jobs, created capital.” The council will make recommendations on changes in Georgia’s taxing structure.
“One of the most exciting things to come out of this session was the creation of the tax reform council,” he said. “ Our goal is to make Georgia a job-friendly, small business-friendly, growth-friendly state. I believe the best stimulus package is a job and not throwing money at it.”
State Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Garden City) said Georgia has the lowest per capita tax in the nation, even as the state gained 1 million people in five years. The state also has slashed its budget by $3.2 million in a little over a year.
