Monday, January 11, 2010

Day One starts today!

You have seen me running around this morning trying to get this recorded, posted, eat breakfast, and head out the door--just on time!
 
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Good morning, today is January 11, 2010 and today is the first day of the session for GA General Assembly.

When I get off of work about 8:30-8:45am this morning I'm going to be headed up to the Capital so that I can help keep you up to date on what’s happening in the legislature this year. I've scheduled my classes--for the most part--in the afternoon and evening so that I can attend as much of the session, and as many committee hearing as I can attend. You can follow along at my blog. Also please go to my website www.JimN2010.com and sign up for the email list. I'm creating an urgent action email list to keep citizens up to date as important bills go through the legislature--things change in a heart beat and citizen phone calls can help put pressure on legislators to do the right thing.

If there are questions you have about what’s going on, please contact me and let me know. I might not have the answer but I'll working on finding it out for you. Also I need your help. If you'd like to volunteer with my campaign during the session we have a number of opportunities to get involved either working with me at the Capital, on specific issues, or by working on reaching out to voters in my district to let them know that they might not have a State Representative that is looking out for them, but there is a citizen up at the Gold Dome who wants to help them stay up to date on the latest news on important issues facing the state.

For a quick update the GA Legislature has failed for a number of years to fix revenue shortfalls in the budget--basically the Republicans haven't been raising the revenue needed to pay for state services--like education, health care, and criminal justice. The fact that Republicans have failed to either find place to cut the budget or raise taxes to make up for the shortfall has meant that now that once the economy took a turn for the worse the state was unable to take the needed action to protect vita programs and services.

The state has the 8th highest deficit in the nation and we will be getting by on about the same amount of revenue that we did in 2005. But at the same time we have 600,000 more residence than we did in 2005..

During the first half of this fiscal year — through December — tax collections were down by about $1.1 billion from the same period in 2008 as individual income tax and sales tax revenue took huge hits. The Obama administration and the stimulus package pushed through by the Democrats helped fill about 9% of the budget shortfall last year. Because of Republican opposition to more federal money to the states to help keep state governments afloat we aren't very likely to see any more money coming our way to help sustain us as the economy slowly begins to grow again.

As the AJC noted yesterday the problem lawmakers run into is that most of the money the state spends goes for things that are difficult to slash: education, health care and prisons. The state helps fund the education of 2 million students and provides health care to about 1.5 million Georgians.

Our teachers are going to see more furlough days and schools are talking about cutting days of instruction down to four days a week. You'll also likely be seeing some small state agencies shutting down and thousands of state and school employees could lose their jobs. You're going to be waiting longer in line at driver’s license offices, you'll see parks close and doctors getting reimbursed less for their Medicaid patients and its likely that some low income families will lose their health care coverage.

Anyways please stay tuned, I’ll be doing my best as time allows to embedded myself at the gold dome. Please follow along on the biog. and sign up for the email list. Send in those questions, news articles, and other info. I need to out source some of this work to you so that together we can stay informed and hold our elected officials accountable during this very important session.


Posted via email from Jim Nichols

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