UPDATED

Richardson Takes GREAT Plan To Audience That Matters Most Of All

(Update at 4:45 p.m. adds comment from DuBose Porter. New material highlighted.)

(12/10/07) After taking his GREAT plan to audiences across the state this summer and fall, Speaker Glenn Richardson began taking it Monday to the one that really counts at this stage of the effort - the members of the House who will be asked to vote on it in the ’08 session.

He needs a two-thirds vote, which would require Democrats to join in the effort even if he gets all of his own Republicans on board. (If it passes the House and the Senate, it also must win voter approval next November.)

“I believe we’re on good ground and that we’ve got a good chance of getting this to the next step,” said House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, who ducked out of the meeting early to hold a press conference on his bill to restore the residency restrictions in the sex offender bill.

Keen said the session - which included both Democrats and Republicans - was “just an educational period for House members that are interested to come up and see the latest generation of HR 900 and what he’s proposing and what will be proposed to the House this coming session.”

No new changes were announced Monday to what Richardson has called a work in progress, Spokeswoman Clelia Davis said.

The plan calls for replacing the school property tax on homesteads with an expanded sales tax on consumer services and lottery ticket sales and a restoration of the state sales tax on groceries.

Cities and counties would continue to have the power to levy property taxes, but assessments would only be allowed to rise by 1 percent per year and local government spending increases would be restricted to the rate of inflation plus 1 percent - unless voters approved a greater increase in a referendum.

“I believe that when we eventually open that (roll call) board up there for a vote, most House members are going to look at an issue as how it relates to the voters in their district,” Keen said. And the latest poll, he said, shows that tax relief scores 2-1 among the voters, “whether it’s a Republican district, whether it’s a Democrat district, rural, urban virtually any type of demographic.”

House Democratic Leader DuBose Porter said he continues to worry about the effect the Speaker's plan would have on the federal income tax deduction for property taxes Georgians pay. The original plan, which called for erasing all property taxes, would have eliminated a deduction worth $1 billion to Georgia taxpayers, he said.

"As it keeps changing, you've got to do an analysis on each version, but we've got to remember that this is the crowd that cut $1.3 billion out of the education budget and forced property taxes to go up," he said. "The Democratic plan has been, how do you offset the state's growth against peoples' homes - their homestead exemptions - or allow local governments more options with sales tax to rollback those property taxes, is again we still think the better direction to go than what we have seen so far in any of the GREAT plans."

Richardson will have another session for House lawmakers on Tuesday.