News & Views You Can Use
Shifting the Tax Burden
State or Local: Pay Either Way
originally published January 24, 2007
Ben Emanuel
Changes afoot: Where a run-down apartment building stood until late last year at the corner of East Broad and Willow streets, contractors for an Atlanta developer of luxury apartments have begun moving earth. Up the hill toward town, workmen have begun putting the façade on the Georgia Traditions high-rise seen in the background.
State legislators have been shifting costs for education and other programs onto local government, even as they limit the ways that local governments can raise money, Athens State Representative Doug McKillip told citizens at a “town hall” meeting Jan. 17. The forum was cosponsored by Rep. Keith Heard. “Everybody needs to pay very, very close attention to the burden-shifting that’s been going on in the legislature for the last few years,” McKillip said in response to a question from Mayor Heidi Davison, who was in the audience.
Legal costs for indigent defendants are being shifted back to local government, the mayor complained. “I don’t know where they think we’re supposed to get the money from,” she added. “You’re really strangling us at the local level.” McKillip agreed that many legislators like to be able to claim they’ve cut state taxes, even if it means local taxes will go up. “Unfunded mandates” - additional state requirements on schools and other local programs, without additional state money to pay for them - are just “cost-shifting to the local level,” he said. “It’s what causes all of our taxes to go up on property and everything else…. The answer is keep an eye on it, and absolutely stay in touch with all of your local representatives and let them know that you’re not happy.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Heard added, legislators should look at restoring state funds that have been cut from local schools. But the state is increasingly in the hole financially for employee health insurance, he added. “Each year, that hole gets deeper and deeper and deeper,” and some changes will need to be made in the state’s benefits programs, he said. But contrary to rumor, health benefits won’t be eliminated, he said.
And noises from legislators about replacing property taxes with a higher sales tax probably won’t come up this year, Heard said. That’s not a good idea anyway, added McKillip: it would raise total sales taxes to 14 percent in some Atlanta-area counties, and would make the state’s revenues go up and down too much with economic cycles. “That’s what we look for in government is some stability: the social system of laws and services that allows us all to do our business or be employed, or pursue our endeavors,” he said.
But, both legislators said, some tax breaks for businesses need to be eliminated. “Georgia over the last 10 to 12 years has given tax breaks to almost every [business],” said Heard, and eliminating them all could allow the state sales tax to drop from 5 percent to 2.3 percent, McKillip added. Mayor Davison suggested that Internet purchases should be taxed just as local purchases are. “They’re doing Internet taxes in other states, and by not doing it, you’re also hurting local businesses,” she said.
And while both the Democratic legislators said they favor raising Georgia’s minimum wage, many Republican legislators disagree. “You do have those heavy [business] lobbying groups” working against it, noted Heard, who added that it’s not a “cure-all” for low-paying jobs. “I want us to put the emphasis on training and re-training,” he said, to meet employment shortages in fields like health care.
Aside from an initiative to train prisoners for jobs, Heard said the legislature has not taken steps to reduce the numbers of Georgians being imprisoned. “When we passed mandatory sentences, that is what a lot of the citizens want,” he said. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the rate at which U.S. citizens are imprisoned is over three times higher than it was in 1980. Slightly over half of state prisoners committed violent offenses, with the rest divided about equally between property and drug crimes, according to a department website.
McKillip added that he would be cautiously watching attempts by some legislators to reduce wetlands protections, and to develop Jekyll Island State Park.
Voting & Jury Duty
Who Serves Most and Why
originally published January 24, 2007
Voting and serving on juries are said to be two basic duties of citizenship, but that doesn’t make people eager to do either. Voter turnout in the United States is far behind other democracies, at around 50 percent of eligible voters, according to the Center for Voting and Democracy, a national group that advocates for proportional and instant-runoff voting. In most democracies, that figure is over 80 percent, the center says. In the November 2006 General Election, only 52 percent of registered Clarke County voters actually voted, according to Cora Wright of the ACC Board of Elections office. Other eligible voters may not be registered, and voters will eventually be dropped from the list if they don’t respond to postcards from the elections office. “The system can only keep so much going,” she says.
In most democracies, citizens are registered to vote automatically, and an electoral reform commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and James Baker recommended last September that they should be here, too. That would add 30 percent to the number of eligible voters, according to the Center for Voting and Democracy. But Ryan Griffin of that group tells Flagpole he thinks a big reason more people don’t vote is “there’s just lack of competition in U.S. elections. Most of them are more or less decided beforehand, and most voters know it,” he says. “People are aware that it’s not going to make a whole lot of difference.
“Most congressional races are won by a landslide margin. Every once in a while, there’s a year like this year where there’s a big change, but for the most part incumbents have re-election rates of something like 98 percent,” Griffin says. That’s partly because decisions are made in party primaries by a minority of voters, he notes. And while increasing numbers of Americans call themselves Independents (rather than Republicans or Democrats), “they are left without an option,” he says, because third parties often cannot get candidates’ names onto the ballot. (The very large number of petition signatures required to get onto statewide ballots in Georgia has so far kept Green Party candidates off the ballot, for example.)
But some ACC citizens shun voting for another reason: they believe voting means they’ll be called for jury duty. “I’ve had people come into the office and request their names be removed because of that,” says Wright, especially doctors and elderly people.
Beverly Logan, ACC Clerk of Superior and State Courts, says that the peculiar way jury lists are assembled in Georgia means that some groups - young black men, for example - can get called more often than others. “The young black males are the group that gets called the most,” she says. In most states, jury calls are simply drawn from a list of all residents, but in Georgia, the state supreme court decided several decades ago to use a more complex system. The list that jury summons are drawn from in Georgia does not include all residents, but only a fraction of them. However, it is carefully balanced to resemble the makeup of the community. That representative list (known as the “jury box”) is revised every two years.
“We balance our jury box based on age, race and sex of the demographics of the whole community,” Logan says. But, she explains, “it’s really hard to find [racial] information on people” since driver's license records, for example, don’t include it. In fact, only voting records include race, so people who don’t vote may be less likely to be called for jury duty. Young black males especially tend to be under-represented on voter and driver’s license lists, Logan says, so young black males who do vote or have driver’s licenses tend to be called for jury duty more often than people in other age and racial groups. “How do you find them?” she asks. “It’s a very mobile community.”
Since driver’s license lists do not include racial information, questionnaires are sent out to a random sample of driver's-license holders (2200 during the last cycle) so the jury box won’t be drawn entirely from voter lists. By law, utility lists and church rolls can also be used if available, Logan says. Jurors are then selected at random from the jury box list. “Some people complain, ‘I get a jury summons every five years,’” she says, “and that is possible” because a name could alternate in and out of the box every four years. The jury commission will also add the names of volunteers to the jury box. “We love people that say, ‘I’d like to serve,'” Logan says. Trials typically last a few days, but not all citizens summoned to jury duty are actually chosen to serve on a jury. Jurors are paid $25 a day for their trouble, an amount set by the ACC Commission. And while the law requires a citizen to respond to a jury summons, there are some who don’t. Occasionally a judge will send the sheriff out to round up such scofflaws. “The judge will give them the choice of serving on another date, or paying a fine, or going to jail,“ Logan says. ”And usually they all choose serving another date.” They have sometimes been fined as well.
A state supreme court committee is considering revisions to make the jury-assembling system more fair. According to local attorney Edward Tolley, who serves on the committee, the jury selection system may be changed “in the next four or five years” back to a random selection process of all residents. “There’s kind of a history to this,“ Tolley says. ”During the 1960s and early '70s, there were a lot of challenges to jury panels based on race and sex.” Lawyers, that is, would often charge that their clients hadn’t received fair trials because of the make-up of the jury. But, Tolley says, attempts to balance the jury box by race, sex and age have meant the selection process is no longer random.
Smokers & Lawyers
Grayness Around a Gray Area?
originally published January 24, 2007
When Athens-Clarke County decided to prohibit smoking indoors in public places, one line of reasoning against the ban that many citizens found compelling was not about public health, but about businesses and fair competition. Some bars and restaurants, everyone realized, would have a natural advantage over others in providing for smoking customers by virtue of having outdoor patios where they could host smokers without anyone violating the new laws.
In some cases, however, it’s taking time for a clear sense of what constitutes a smoking-safe area to come about. Witness the recent example of 8e’s bar, which Mark Bell opened last year almost directly across Washington Street from the ACC Police Department’s downtown substation. Late last fall, Bell received a citation for providing ashtrays to smoking customers in the front part of the bar, a three-walled patio with a floor and a ceiling directly in front of the bar’s front door. Bell found a lawyer (in last summer’s close runner-up for solicitor general, Bill Overend) and was all set to go to court to clear things up for the rest of Athens’ bar owners, but the ticket was dismissed by outgoing Solicitor Mo Wiltshire just a few days before the end of 2006.
Wiltshire tells Flagpole he certainly remembers the “vigorous debate” Athens had over the smoking ban before its passage, and says he took to understand from a recent Athens Banner-Herald article about Bell’s ticket that there was some gray area that needed clearing up in the enforcement of the ordinance as it applies to “enclosed areas.” Hence he thought it prudent and fair not to prosecute Bell’s ticket. ACC Commissioner Elton Dodson (also a lawyer), however, says there is no gray area, and that Bell was indeed in violation, though in Dodson’s opinion the smoking he’s allowing should not constitute a violation. That said, Dodson says he has no interest in the ACC Commission revisiting the smoking ordinance’s definition of an enclosed space (which ACC Attorney Bill Berryman says was taken verbatim from state public smoking legislation), and he doesn’t expect the rest of the Commission to want to tweak the ordinance either.
For his part, Bell says sure, he’s happy his ticket’s been dismissed, but a larger goal has been lost for now. “I wanted a precedent set, one way or the other, so it’s clear,” he says. “To me there’s still a gray area.” He says the ashtrays went back out on his patio the day he learned that the ticket had been dismissed. Given his proximity to the downtown substation, maybe he’ll get his wish - a ticket to contest, and a day in court - after all.
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