By Mark Burkhalter, House Speaker Pro-Tem

As our nation searches for proficient solutions to hasten economic recovery and return to sustained prosperity, Georgia is poised to become a national model for dynamic self-determination and effective governance.

Rather than pursue a recovery course that mortgages our destiny and burdens our grandchildren with insurmountable future debt, we have chosen a path that will ensure economic freedom for all future Georgians.

Faced with falling revenues and a serious deficit in our state’s operating budget, our legislature acted quickly and decisively to find acceptable spending reductions across all departments to bring our budget back into balance. Our amended FY 2009 budget is both responsible and thoughtful, while mirroring the tough choices that average Georgian’s have had to make in balancing their own family budgets.

Not only did we resist the urge to raise taxes, as other states have done, we in fact passed historic legislation to ease the property tax burden on our citizenry by freezing property tax assesments at their current levels of less for two years.  To spur the economy, we took a market-based approach and passed tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire unemployed Georgia workers and to make capital investments into their companies to grow their business and to create jobs. A majority of our current Georgia House and Senate members believe the catalyst for driving economic expansion lies with Georgia’s entrepreneurs and enterprising individuals rather than with an omnipotent government.

Understanding that our state’s education needs will continue to evolve as we lead the transition to a global and rapidly changing economy, we passed landmark education reform. Georgia’s junior and senior high school students will now have the choice to enroll early in an accredited college, technical or trade school, use their public education money allotted to them to help pay or defray the tuition and complete their high school requirements simultaneously. This provides our high school students and their parents with a vibrant opportunity to exercise freedom of educational choice as they prepare themselves for a prosperous and fulfilling future. In addition, recognizing a glaring shortage of math and science teachers, we passed bold legislation to increase the annual salary of math and science teachers by about $4,500 per year. This approach lets the free market work within our educational system.

There is no doubt that our transportation woes continue to plague our state, hampering both business commerce and citizen convenience. Our new transportation governance bill is designed to streamline our decision making process and to dramatically speed up new projects while prioritizing our most critical transportation initiatives. It may not be the perfect solution, but we had to change the current system, which had proved to be outdated, inefficient and ineffective. Although our legislative body did not come together in the current session to agree on additional funding, our priority now is to invest the funds we do have available to get the most important and pressing transportation projects done in a most timely and efficient manner. I am of the belief that when new taxes or fees for our citizenry are being considered, we best take a prudent and thoughtful approach. Once levied, new taxes tend to take a permanent foothold. So we need to get this one right.

Our Georgia model of governance has five basic tenants: balanced budgets, low taxes, limited government, personal empowerment, and self-determination. Our 2009 legislative session reflected those principles in a very cogent and compelling way through the bills we passed and the initiatives we championed. We believe that true and sustaining prosperity in Georgia comes in the form of each individual citizen having the freedom and the authority to choose their direction and to exert control over their government, rather than the other way around.