From the Albany Herald Newspaper:

Budget request gets OK

• The House Appropriations Committee approved $5 million in bonds to build a nursing/health science building at Darton College.

Dave Williams

ATLANTA — State employees, Darton College and families with disabled children are expected to see more state taxpayer money come their way under the budget set for a vote in the state House today.

Lawmakers are expected to set aside $7.6 million for families who have been dropped from the Katie Beckett program, which gives financial help to certain families with disabled children, because of stricter eligibility requirements being enforced by the state.

"We're going to take care of these families who were depending on Katie Beckett and lost it," Rep. Ben Harbin, R-Evans, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said Tuesday before the panel approved Gov. Sonny Perdue's $18.7 billion 2007 budget request and sent it to the full House.

The committee approved $5 million in bonds to build a nursing/health science building on the campus of Darton College.

John Millsaps, a spokesman for the state University System Board of Regents, said the Darton building was not among 13 "minor" capital projects recommended by the governor for next year —projects costing $5 million or less. However, it was on the list of projects the system requested, he said.

The 28,000-square-foot building would allow Darton to consolidate its nursing and allied health programs under one roof. It would include classrooms, labs, faculty offices and a 150-seat meeting room.

The House budget panel also rejected Perdue's recommendation to zero out state funding for the Eufaula, Ala.-based Historic Chattahoochee Commission, which operates over a wide swath of western Georgia and eastern Alabama. In fact, the committee wants to double the agency's current funding to $105,000.

Doug Purcell, the commission's executive director, said Alabama budget writers also are eyeing the commission favorably, agreeing to a significant increase after yanking its funding during the recent economic downturn.

"We hope to be able to expand and get back to some of the things we've been doing in the past," he said.

The committee also tacked on 3-percent pay raises for about 10,000 state public safety employees, on top of the 2-percent to 4-percent increases Perdue recommended for teachers and state workers.

That means employees of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the departments of Corrections, Juvenile Justice, Pardons and Paroles and Public Safety would receive raises of least 5 percent.

And House budget writers made a host of changes to the governor's proposals in health-care spending, including funds to provide community-based services to an additional 2,000 of Georgia's elderly, mentally retarded and developmentally disabled.

The Katie Beckett coverage would go to more than 1,600 Georgia kids with diseases including Down syndrome and autism whose families have lost coverage since last fall. That's when the state Department of Community Health began tightening eligibility on orders from the federal government.

Several weeks ago, Senate Democrats spearheaded an amendment to the 2006 midyear budget earmarking $3.6 million to help those families get through the rest of this fiscal year, which ends on June 30.

House Republican leaders put in another $4 million during subsequent negotiations with their Senate counterparts.

"It's not going to cover everybody who wants to get in the program," Senate President Pro Tempore Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, said Tuesday. "The ones we're trying to take care of are the ones who did qualify and then the criteria changed."

But the money would come with strings that have advocates for the Katie Beckett program concerned.

The budget the House will take up today refers to the $7.6 million as "one-time" funding. It calls for the creation of an independent foundation to handle the program in the future.

Johnson said lawmakers hope the foundation will be able to "leverage" private contributions to augment what the state provides.

"The state can't afford to take on the whole Katie Beckett program," he said.

Heidi Moore of Alpharetta, a leading advocate for Katie Beckett parents, said they're worried about getting a foundation up and running.

"My concern is what foundation can step up to the plate and implement this as soon as we need it," she said.

Harbin said the "supplemental" raises for public safety employees would let Georgia catch up with what surrounding states pay their troopers and prison guards.

"We should have been embarrassed," he said. "We were way under everyone around us in payroll for these people."

The additional funds the budget committee earmarked for community-based services would allow the state to serve another 500 elderly Georgians and 1,500 mentally retarded and developmentally disabled half children and half adults.

The state has been plagued for years with long waiting lists for those services.