Jon Burns
Weekly Capitol Update

The 2007 General Assembly session is moving along at a good pace. Elected county and city officials from all of the counties I represent have spent valuable time in Atlanta. At this point in the session, a problem has become apparent to us in our Amended Fiscal Year 2007. We are short about $57 million dollars for our PeachCare program, the state-federal program that provides health care for children in our state whose families' income levels are too high to qualify for Medicaid but too low to afford health insurance. As many as 270,000 children and their families may find themselves affected by the funding deficit.

The deficit is due to the effectiveness of the program as Georgia registered many families who fit the program's need-based requirements, but like so many things with the Federal Government, was not fully funded by them. I know that our Governor was so moved by the situation that he flew to Washington to ask Congressional leaders for help with the program, but the new United States Congress rejected his plea at this time.

This is a problem. The PeachCare program has allowed many of our hardest working families the ability to protect their children with affordable health insurance. Rest assured, we are committed to finding a solution to the problem. We are slowing the pace of the General Assembly to give more time to the congressional appropriators to hopefully come through with their previous commitment. Saying that, we are vigorously working on a contingency plan, should the federal government come-up short. The first thing we are doing is reviewing the state's budget for programs that can be funded at a later time, or cancelled all together. In addition, we are looking for other cost-saving measures like not replacing state employees who have left or retired. Much will be decided in the upcoming weeks, but we are committed to fixing the funding gap for this important program. We also will be slowing down our use of the remaining legislative days.

This week's legislative highlight will have been our 2nd Legislative Family day. It is a chance for the citizens of Georgia to come to the Capitol to see their legislature in action. It truly is a chance for the working families of Georgia to see the laws of their state being made and it is an excellent opportunity for our children to glean a lesson in civics.

Some of the bills we passed this week were of the non-controversial nature. We easily passed three bills which have a limited impact on the general population but are important. The first was House Bill 79, a bill that would exempt certain vehicle's tinted windows from current window tinting restrictions. Included in the exemption would be federal, state, and local government vehicles, as well as vehicles belonging to private detectives.

We also passed a bill further revising various provisions for catching shrimp and the shrimping process. These recommendations came from a public stakeholder process that was coordinated by the Coastal Resources Division of the Department of Natural Resources. These changes were not contrary to the wise use and conservation of our famous Georgia shrimp. Lastly, we passed legislation excluding equine feed from current feed regulations that would now list horse feed by predominance by weight, and use common terms like wheat and oats vs. grain prod- ucts. All of these bills go to the Senate for consideration. If I can be of service, my contact number in Atlanta is 404-656-0213 and my email address is jon.burns@house.ga.gov.