Cover Story: The 10 plagues of Georgia

Yea, and it came to pass that the land of Georgia was ruled by Sonny the Bitter, who seethed in silence while he didst avoid the hard work of governing.

And in the Legislature’s 40 days, when the rulers assembled under the Gold Dome in Atlanta, Sonny didst turn his hardened heart even on those of his own party. And the people’s problems multiplied – painful injustices and woeful ignorance, droughts and traffic jams – even as Sonny led the lawmakers in wrongful directions, or not at all.

In ancient Egypt, the Lord sent Moses to free the Hebrews. To punish the oppressors, He beset Egypt’s people with 10 plagues. In Georgia, there is no Moses, and the plagues have been brought upon us by our own rulers.

1 The waters run dry

The drought of the century exposed something other than tires and beer bottles long buried by Lake Lanier. It also laid bare the inevitable collision between North Georgia’s limited water supply and its unfettered development.

For nearly 20 years, the state’s leaders frittered away chances to avert a crisis, instead butting heads over water rights with Alabama, Florida and parts of South Georgia. And they always seemed to peddle solutions sure to exacerbate conflict with our downstream neighbors: Dig new reservoirs. Transfer water from one basin to another. Spend billions of dollars to pipe it from Tennessee or the Atlantic Ocean.

God forbid we impose anything that might inconvenience developers, who are, after all, the masters of our political leaders. Conservation? Land-use planning? Fuhgetaboutit.

One hopeful sign was the creation in 2001 of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District, followed by a 2004 mandate for a statewide water plan. But the district has been a mild-mannered disappointment – backing off an effort, for example, to retrofit existing houses with low-flow toilets. And this winter the state plan, which the Legislature may or may not pass this session, became a power brokers’ battleground: Planning districts based on watersheds were gerrymandered overnight to conform instead to political boundaries, with council members handpicked by the governor and top legislators.

This session, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson plan (of course) to push for new reservoirs. Given North Georgia’s dire straits, the state eventually may win approval for some of them. But reservoirs also are likely to infuriate neighboring states and South Georgia on the suspicion that metro Atlanta wants to hoard even more of nature’s bounty.

More importantly: They’re bound to put off the day that North Georgia finally reins in its development machine with slower growth and less wasteful community planning.

2 Wailing and gnashing of teeth over taxes

Taxes may be unpleasant, but they’re not the real problem here. The problem is Richardson’s political ambition, which he’s tethered to his ill-considered and still murky GREAT tax “reform” plan.

In short, the speaker would replace stable property taxes with a 4 percent levy on services and products now exempt from taxes. Although he initially planned to rid Georgia of all property taxes, stiff resistance from cities forced Richardson to target just school levies, which still account for the lion’s share of property-tax bills.

Perdue, Cagle and other critics charge that, in addition to its practical faults, GREAT isn’t a tax cut. Rather, it’s a shift to a less predictable form of taxation that falls heaviest on poor and middle-class folks, who must spend a high percentage of their incomes. Plus, it amounts to a power grab for local purse strings, giving the Statehouse near-total control over school spending.

Richardson is attempting to add “tax reformer” to the résumé he’s beefing up for a future run for governor. But in doing so, he’s unleashed a pack of competing tax bills from other ambitious politicians up for re-election this year. Among them: Sen. Majority Leader Eric Johnson’s proposal to freeze property taxes until a homeowner sells his or her house.

According to legislators on both sides of the aisle, the General Assembly probably will devote a sizable share of its semivaluable time this year grappling with Richardson’s ego – er, we mean, proposal – and its legislative offspring.

Good thing we don’t have any actual problems to solve around here.

3 No pity for the mentally ill

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s stellar reporting on Georgia’s dysfunctional mental-health system revealed something startling but sadly not surprising. One hundred and fifteen people died in seven state hospitals from 2002 to 2006, and there were nearly 200 substantiated cases of physical and sexual abuse against patients.

The exposé started a cascade of action, including an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, a state review of the entire system and a flurry of bills in last year’s legislative session. Yet during and even after all that, 21 more suspicious deaths occurred.

Riding the momentum of heightened awareness, mental-health advocates are pushing this year for more money and oversight. The chief complaints: Employees are overworked and underpaid; cash-strapped and undermanned hospitals have to shuffle patients because of lack of beds; and an ombudsman’s position created in 2000 to oversee the mess still lacks funding.It’s not just the hospitals that are underfunded. Community groups that often are the sole resource for discharged patients are even more starved for resources.

If lawmakers don’t gather the will to solve the crisis, the state’s mental-health system seems ripe for a federal court order – not often the most economical way to solve such a problem. It wouldn’t be the first time the feds forced Georgia to treat its citizens like human beings. Just add mental health to a list that began with slavery and ran through civil rights, voting rights and our perennial mistreatment of prisoners.

4 Ignorance

Let’s just state the obvious: Georgia has lousy schools. Our children isn’t learning. And none of the minor fixes over the past few years have brought about much improvement.

Last year, GOP legislators crowed over passing a bill that gives vouchers to disabled students, but fewer than 1,000 took advantage of the program, and many parents complained the vouchers were of little help. Mucho hype for meager results. Again.

Many Democrats contend Georgia could improve its schools by funding laws already on the books. But Perdue’s repeatedly put off a mandate for reduced high-school class sizes. And he’s managed to withhold more than $1 billion promised under the Quality Basic Education Act. (If a lawsuit by Joe Martin, a one-time state school superintendent candidate, finds its way before a judge, the state may be forced to pony up for QBE regardless of lawmakers’ wishes.)

Money isn’t always the answer. Radical policy changes may be needed to kick-start our schools. Among them: an overhaul of the way teacher raises are doled out, increased local control within systems and, that big bugaboo, reforming the tenure system. At the same time, conservatives in the Legislature seem set to sideline any serious debate about fully funding or truly reforming public schools with their perennial call for vouchers to subsidize private schools.

It seems that this year, again, the main initiative will be of the small-fix variety: a bill to allow individual schools to petition the state for charter status, circumventing local authority. More promising is a GOP-backed measure to beef up vocational training to stem Georgia’s sad 30 percent high-school dropout rate.

Meanwhile, this year’s QBE shortfall has already been projected at $140 million.

5 The wrath of automobiles

Plenty of ideas have been floated for solving metro Atlanta’s transportation problems: streetcars, commuter rail, bus lanes and, of course, a 22-mile ring of transit circling the city.

None has gotten very far because none has received more than token funding. Rural legislators and even some suburban ones argue – contrary to the experience in other states – that mass transit’s a boondoggle. Instead, they’ve sent the state on a wild goose chase to solve the crisis (and to enrich contractors) with privately funded toll roads and Popular Mechanics-style visions of double-decker tunnels that would bypass the inner city by going under it.

The result: a stalemate. Last year lawmakers were confronted with a choice between a road-builder-backed push for a statewide sales tax that would fund highways while giving lip service to alternatives, and a Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce proposal to give the region a chance to raise money for a more balanced mix of projects. They settled on neither.

The state’s delay in answering the funding riddle already has cost us millions of dollars in matching federal money for such projects as commuter rail and a downtown “multimodal” station. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Dallas are among the cities gaining on Atlanta by paying for light rail with regional sales taxes.

Perdue and Cagle spent a lot of time at a pre-legislative-session press conference predicting that the governor’s new commissioner will put the Transportation Department on the road toward ending the crisis, and she’s taking many of the right steps by digging into the agency’s dysfunctional bureaucracy. But only funding will unclog the pipeline of overdue projects.

The regional-sales-tax plan – being pushed again this year by the Chamber and advocacy groups – is the most promising live proposal. By allowing two or more counties to vote to tax themselves and to decide what transportation projects they want, the metro area could avoid rural complaints about tax dollars going to metro-only projects. One good sign: Cagle recently told the Marietta Daily Journal he favors allowing such a regional approach.

In an election year, however, when talk about new taxes scares the bejesus out of politicians, it seems unlikely that legislators will arrive at a consensus. Commuters may instead spend another long year stuck in traffic – with no sign of an end to the gridlock.

6 Scapegoats and false idols

How big a problem was the threat of gay marriage in Georgia? Certainly nowhere near as big a one as the nanny-state meddling a few years back of lawmakers on a homophobic tear.

Sadly, Georgia is still a place in which fear-mongering and political demagoguery can pay off like a slot machine – and create a lot of collateral damage. We saw that two years ago when House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, R-St. Simons, was able to spook colleagues into passing draconian restrictions on where convicted sex offenders could live and work. In early December, the state Supreme Court overturned the residency restrictions (which sheriffs said were unenforceable); a federal lawsuit could scuttle the rest of Keen’s law (which civil-liberties groups say is unconstitutional).

None of that will stop the majority leader from coming back this session with a slightly toned-down rewrite, allowing some offenders to keep their homes. But he’s kept up the overheated rhetoric, accusing the High Court of “inviting sex offenders to come to Georgia and live anywhere they want to.”

Expect lawmakers to try again this session to win popularity by outdumbing each other. Last year, the House came within a whisker of voting on a bill to outlaw adoptions by gay couples; this spring, it could become reality. And right-wing Christians are rallying around a new bill to proclaim a just-fertilized embryo to be a person possessing a right to life.

The biggest culture battle this session will likely be an internecine duel among pro-gun groups. The increasingly fringey NRA is gunning for a law barring employers from telling workers they can’t bring shootin’ irons to work, while Georgia Carry, a homegrown Second Amendment group, is backing a “compromise” bill to allow motorists to conceal guns in their cars.

In wacky Georgia, there’s an ever-present threat that the culture wars will rear up to divert time and attention in the midst of a legislative session.

7 Grady, heal thyself!

After complaining for years of funding crunches, Grady Memorial Hospital finally caught the state’s attention this summer when it announced it was almost broke. The hospital ended 2007 $55 million in the red. Another $200 million or so is needed for capital improvements.

These aren’t insurmountable problems for a state with an $18 billion budget. But they do require a political will that’s long been lacking. Some GOP legislators – Richardson, and Sens. David Shafer and Cecil Staton, most prominently – have adopted a reassuring bedside manner, promising to rescue the state’s largest indigent-care provider and top trauma center.

Each may have heartfelt reasons for wanting to protect Grady. But, as the epitome of compassionate conservatism, it’s also a shrewd career move: The hospital’s savior would earn vast reserves of goodwill in metro Atlanta. And the very act of resuscitating it would confer bragging rights for reforming a dysfunctional quasigovernmental institution – and for prying it loose from local Democratic control.

Lacking leverage, the besieged Grady authority agreed in November to hand control (mostly) over to an independent board. Most details of the hospital’s new governing structure may be hammered out within weeks. And, if the Legislature makes good on a pledge to provide grants to the state’s cash-strapped trauma centers, Grady surely will benefit.

But Grady’s not yet out of intensive care. Its defenders fear that cost-cutting conservatives hanker to jettison some indigent services, notably dialysis and HIV care. Religious fundamentalists are appalled that the public hospital has performed abortions and may seek to curtail its family planning clinic. Other, more cynical pols would like to use Grady’s future as a bargaining chip for loosening up state rules to allow private medical centers to compete with intown hospitals (that means you, Emory) for high-profit patients.

And, as the session begins, it’s not entirely clear that Grady will avoid the political land mines that could close the doors of the vital hospital.

8 Citizen, insure thyself!

In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney backed and signed into law legislation mandating that all residents be insured. When it comes to solving Georgia’s health-care crisis, our government’s gone fishing.

Around a fifth of the state’s population now lacks health insurance, placing us near the bottom when it comes to coverage. Even opponents of universal care must realize that the more uninsured people fall through the cracks, the greater the burden on emergency rooms and public hospitals. But ideology has a way of trumping pragmatism. Medicaid, PeachCare and other programs associated with the “welfare state” have had targets on their backs since the Republicans took over the Gold Dome. Even Perdue’s modest proposal to offer $50 million in state subsidies for employer-based coverage already has been attacked by leading lawmakers as an entitlement.

After the PR thumping President Bush took last year for vetoing expanded funding for SCHIP, the state-based programs that subsidize insurance for lower-income children, one might think the governor would think twice about cutting more kids off PeachCare. Currently, there are about 275,000 children from low-income Georgia families covered by PeachCare and another 300,000 who are uninsured.

On the other hand, with federal funding now in a holding pattern, conservatives may feel emboldened to make a run at trimming the program’s eligibility – and expanding the ranks of uninsured children. Certainly, Richardson has few qualms about being the bad guy, as he showed last year when he openly, albeit unsuccessfully, attacked state PeachCare funding.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan bill to replace PeachCare with state-sponsored universal health coverage for all Georgians under 21 has been languishing in committee since last year. Hmm, what’s the likelihood the Gold Dome crowd will even get a chance to vote on that idea?

9 Blessed are the moneylenders

Last session, House Rules Committee Chairman Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, tried to revive payday lending – the practice of making temporary loans carrying astronomical interest – two years after it had been outlawed in Georgia. Now, with the bottom falling out of subprime mortgages and thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure, surely no one would have the chutzpah to back another push to expand exploitative lending.

Dream on. Ehrhart knows no shame when it comes to carrying water for his favorite industry (and among his biggest campaign contributors). In the distorted world of payday lobbyists, the downturn provides a rationale for loosening lending regulations. In these hard times, they can argue, folks teetering on the edge of a financial precipice need easy access to temporary cash – triple-digit APRs notwithstanding.

Georgia has a horrid record of protecting residents from sleazy lending practices. We’re the birthplace of the title-pawn industry, and lending rules designed to turn families out on the street in as little as a month have made us the Reno of quickie foreclosures.

When we do make progress, we tend to backslide. Two years after Gov. Roy Barnes passed his Georgia Fair Lending Act, the state’s new GOP majority gutted the nation’s strictest mortgage-lending law, thereby setting the stage for the current foreclosure crisis. (Don’t believe us? A recent Wall Street Journal investigation connects the dots between the mortgage mess and campaign donations by subprime lenders.)

At the very least, lawmakers could lengthen the foreclosure process to give borrowers more time to work out their problems. The chance of that happening is a lot slimmer than that of Ehrhart getting his payday bill passed. Even before the mortgage crisis hits rock bottom, he’ll be working to dig us a deeper hole.

10 Heat forever lasting

Just outside Macon, a coal-fired power plant bellows more carbon dioxide than does Brazil’s entire power sector. That’s troubling. Perhaps even more troubling is that legislators last year conducted a “study” panel simply to promote fatuous doubts about global warming.

Legislators from Florida to Alaska and California to Maine have taken steps to reduce climate change’s impact, be it by setting greenhouse-gas reduction goals or starting statewide incentive programs for residents. But Georgia’s leaders remain mired in a debate that most intelligent people have settled by now.

The mere question of whether lawmakers will do something about climate change is met with laughter – as if you’re a kook for daring to ask whether they’ll address the issue.

For serious policy makers, however, the big question no longer is whether global warming is happening, but what we can do to lessen its impact. Aiding and abetting new coal-fired plants, like one the state Environmental Protection Division recently approved in southwest Georgia, and banking on more roads to solve transportation woes don’t bode well on the preparation front.

Until legislators get their heads out of the asphalt, the burden of doing something falls on your lap. If you want to cut your greenhouse gases, you have to ride on poorly funded public transit or dig deeper into your pocket to buy a more energy-efficient refrigerator.

There’s talk of legislation that would ease that burden – think an extended sales-tax holiday for Earth-friendly products or tax incentives for installing solar panels – but those are baby steps compared to the brisk pace of change in the other parts of the country.

Continued inaction by the General Assembly leaves the responsibility at your feet. Pretty daunting. Especially when that carbon-belching monster is wheezing outside of Macon.