October 21, 2024
ATLANTA (AP) — An amended Georgia budget that includes pay boosts for employees, more money for education and an earmark for tax refunds passed the state Senate on Thursday by a 52-0 vote, as it nears Gov. Brian Kemp's desk.
While the bill has even larger raises than originally proposed for prison guards and school nurses, it strips out additional money that could have gone to elected officials and judges, which senators said would have been illegal.
The House must agree to the Senate changes in House Bill 910, covering the budget year ending in June, before the measure goes to Kemp. It spends $30 billion in state taxes and $54 billion overall.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, a Vidalia Republican, said that bountiful tax collections have helped the Georgia government to financially recover from cuts imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, he said, state government is "standing on the top of the hill, wondering what might lie on the other side.”
The bill includes $5,000 pay boosts for university and state agency employees, $2,000 bonuses to teachers and $1,000 bonuses to other K-12 workers, including school bus drivers, part-time employees and cafeteria workers. It also restores $383 million to the state’s K-12 funding formula that had been cut when lawmakers feared revenue decreases at the beginning of the pandemic.
Beyond the spending, the document also earmarks $1.6 billion for state income tax refunds. A separate bill to actually pay those rebates is progressing in the House.
State and university employees who have been on the payroll since July 1 will get a $3,750 bonus for time worked through March 30, and a $1,250 pay raise over the remaining three months of the year.
On top of the $5,000 raise for state employees, the Senate plan would add another $4,000 in raises for guards in the state’s prisons and juvenile justice detention centers, costing $8 million.
Senators also added $2 million to give school nurses $2,000 bonus payments, instead of the $1,000 bonus payment proposed by the governor and the House.
Using money it saved elsewhere in the budget, the Senate would set aside nearly $190 million to cover the 20% state match for the recent federal infrastructure law.
The Senate plans also continue a trend that began in the House of spending cash on construction projects and equipment purchases that the state would normally finance through borrowing. The Senate would spend $20 million for rural downtown development grants and direct universities to spend $30 million of their own accumulated money on building projects instead of using state money.
“If we can take care of future liabilities right now, it puts us in a position to be nimble, to react to the needs of our citizens," Tillery said.
This year is seeing a huge burst of spending even as Kemp and lawmakers face reelection later this year, thanks to bountiful state tax collections. A $2.35 billion surplus was left at the end of the 2021 budget even after filling the state’s savings account to its legal limit of $4.3 billion. That led the House to agree with Kemp’s plan to give $1.6 billion in tax rebates in April — $250 to every single person filing state income taxes, $375 to every single person heading a household and $500 to married people filing jointly.
