Thursday, March 5, 2009

New Schedule for End of Session

After rumblings for more than a week, it turns out to be true...General Assembly will now adjourn April 3rd. Leadership feels they now have a good enough idea of how much and how to use the federal Recovery Act funds coming to Georgia. It was just two days ago that the Governor gave a clear signal that he was going to apply for all the avaiable funds. For way too long, he was hinting that he'd follow some of the other Republican Governors and take a "conservative stand" to not accept "strings" that come with federal dollars.

So, now they think they can come up with a bidget and be out of here April 3 instead of having to break and come back in June.

In addition, it was announced that the 40th day would NOT have a Rules Calendar and would only deal with Agrees and Disagrees...which are bills that have to be reconciled after House and Senate pass diffferent versions of the same bill. In the past there was a huge amount of criticism when these bills came out of Conference Committee (Reconciled) and were slipped in between other bills on the calendar for agree or disagree votes. This process was extra chaotic because legislators were forced to vote on bills that were changed and they did not even know how they were changed .

Most folks in the halls were pretty happy that folks would not have to return in June.

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