The latest session of the Georgia General Assembly is one that will be remembered more for what didn’t get done, as opposed to what did. The high hopes that Republicans had for implementing tax relief, funding transportation improvements, upgrading trauma care, and de-emphasizing public education through private school vouchers went down the drain on the session’s final day. They were all, to some extent, victims of the bickering between Speaker Glenn Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, as well as the absence of Gov. Sonny Perdue.

“It is hard to call this session a resounding success,” Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson said after it was all over. “We could have done better.” Johnson was among those legislators whose dreams went down in flames, as his school voucher bill and his legislation to ban robo-calling by political candidates both failed to pass. There are a lot of other lawmakers complaining about pet bills that died as well.

To be fair, the session was not completely lacking in accomplishments. Lawmakers did perform their constitutionally obligated duty of adopting a state budget and even managed to do it with several hours to spare on the final day instead of ramming it through in the final minutes.

Legislators also managed to adopt a statewide water management plan and two bills that were heavily lobbied by influential, out-of-state interests: a revision of the state’s certificate of need laws that will allow Cancer Treatment Centers of America to build a controversial cancer facility in metro Atlanta and an NRA-backed rewrite of the state’s gun law that will allow firearms to be carried in state parks, restaurants that serve alcohol, and MARTA trains headed for the airport.

The biggest failure of many was the inability to achieve closure on the signature issue of the session, taxes. This is a failure that likely will reverberate for months as Richardson, Cagle, and Perdue blame each other for the deadlock.

Richardson spent more than a year talking up his plan to eliminate property taxes, making more than a hundred speeches and appearances around the state. Opposition from local governments forced him to retreat to a measure that would have eliminated the property tax on license tags, but even that slimmed-down measure died in the session’s waning hours.

Cagle and the Senate put out their plan for tax relief, a 10 percent decrease in state income tax rates, but that failed to gain traction. A last-ditch attempt to salvage the elimination of the tag tax also foundered - this was the fault, according to Richardson, of Cagle, who allegedly kept moving the goal posts to keep negotiators from reaching an agreement.

“When you go home on the tag tax, tell everybody that it has a new name,” Richardson said in an angry speech to the House shortly before adjournment. “It’s called the Cagle birthday tax, and every time they pay it, they can think of Casey Cagle because Casey Cagle solely and exclusively left it on for them. And I hope Georgians by the nine million will thank him and flood him with emails and tell him we’re sick of Casey Cagle. It’s time to get a new lieutenant governor in this state.”

“It was my hope that we would come to an agreement on tax cuts and we came to the table, many times, in good faith ready to achieve true tax relief for Georgians,” Cagle replied. “It is unfortunate that those who were in the position to join us in providing tax relief were blinded by ego and unwilling to come to an agreement.”

The one person missing from the drama of the final day was Perdue, who flew to China on a Delta Air Lines junket and was still thousands of miles away as the session crashed to a close Friday evening.

Capitol observers noted that past governors stayed close at hand, even sleeping in their offices, during the final days of General Assembly sessions so that they could influence negotiations on the state budget and other burning issues. Not Perdue, even though he said before his departure that the tax cut proposals from both the House and Senate were not a good idea with an economic slowdown threatening state revenue collections.

As it turned out, even in the governor’s absence the tax cut measures he disliked so much did not pass. In a session dominated by negative events, that was only fitting.

Tom Crawford

Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that covers government and politics in Georgia.