General Assembly accomplishments: Teachers, tax relief, trauma care

The General Assembly adjourned for the year on April 3. I have previously written an update on several initiatives that were passed during the last week of the session. However, I wanted to follow up with information on some additional measures that were passed by the General Assembly and are on the Governor’s desk awaiting signature.

Facing the toughest economic times in recent memory, the 2009 General Assembly session proved to be a successful one for Georgians. In addition to passing a balanced budget and addressing the governance of DOT, the legislature addressed several important policy areas, including tax relief, education and our state’s trauma network.

Over the past year a statewide task force of educators, policy makers, school administrators and other education policy experts have worked to identify issues that need to be addressed in Georgia’s public education system. One of the most critical problems identified by the task force is a shortage of math and science teachers.

In recent years, Georgia has beefed up its math and science curriculum to ensure our students come out of high school ready to compete in college and in the job market in a world that gets more levered to technology every day.

However, currently there is a shortage of between 15 percent to 20 percent, depending on the subject, of the number of teachers necessary to teach this new math and science curriculum. According to the task force, the shortage of math and science teachers is, by far, the greatest area of needs in terms of teacher recruitment.

To underscore the problem, Georgia’s colleges last year only produced one physics teacher and nine chemistry teachers.

To address the issue, several legislators, including myself, introduced a measure to provide pay incentives to math and science teachers in an effort to encourage college students that excel in math and science to consider teaching as a possible occupation, rather than other opportunities.

This is a market-based, common-sense approach to employee recruitment that has been used successfully in the private sector forever.

Simply put, if you have a need that is not being met at a given salary and benefit level, you must enhance the salary and benefits to provide incentives for additional prospective employees to consider the position.

This will benefit all of Georgia’s students as they move out of high school and into college or the workforce.

Further, this is an economic development issue, in that it will help make sure Georgia continues to have the kind of technically proficient workforce that will entice technology-based companies to invest in and bring jobs to Georgia in the decades to come.

Tax relief for Georgians was a key issue for the General Assembly this year. It is critical in these difficult economic times that we provide measures aimed at helping financially strapped families and businesses, while encouraging economic activity, job growth and increased investment in our economy.

The General Assembly passed a measure that will prevent property tax assessments from increasing at all over the next two years to help Georgians who are already struggling with out of control property tax bills.

In addition, the House and Senate passed the Jobs Opportunity and Business Success Act (JOBS Act), which was introduced as a package of legislation to create, expand and attract jobs for Georgians.

By combining a series of tax cuts, fee suspensions and incentives to hire unemployed Georgians, this legislation actually encourages private sector economic activity, rather than the federal government’s version of a stimulus plan that seemed only focused on using taxpayer dollars to stimulate the growth of the size of the federal government.

Finally, the General Assembly worked to provide for a more robust trauma care system in this state. Georgia has the worst per-capita access to Level I trauma care in the southeastern United States. We are losing thousands of lives every year in Georgia because individuals involved in traumatic accidents are not treated quickly enough to mitigate the physical harm caused by the accident.

In that regard, the legislature and Gov. Perdue worked together to craft the “Super Speeder” legislation that provides for enhanced fines for excessive speeding, reckless driving, habitual DUI offenders and other dangerous driving activities that are the leading causes of traumatic accidents on our roads.

As one of Gov. Perdue’s floor leaders, I was significantly involved in the passage of this legislation out of the House. The increased fines are intended to make drivers think twice before excessively speeding or engaging in other dangerous driving activities that endanger all of our families every day on Georgia’s roads.

The additional funding derived from the violators of these laws will be used to help fund a statewide trauma care network that will benefit any Georgian that suffers a traumatic accident.

I believe the legislature implemented a number of common-sense measures this session that will benefit millions of Georgians. The information above is but a few of these bills.

I welcome any questions from constituents on these or any other matters relevant to our state government. As I’ve said before, thank you so much for the opportunity to serve this great community in the General Assembly.

[Matt Ramsey, an attorney in Peachtree City, represents District 72 in the Georgia House of Representatives.]