Speaker Harrell calls House back in July
The State Legislature will come back sooner than they planned to deal with some of Gov. Nikki Haley’s vetoes to the 2012-13 budget.
House Speaker Bobby Harrell says his chamber will convene to address the budget at 1:00 p.m. on July 17. The House votes on the vetoes first and the Senate is likely to follow suit sometime that week.
House budget leaders said earlier they would meet as late as September to take up vetoes, unless they encountered a more pressing issue.
Harrell says despite their plan to come back later in the summer, “the ambiguity created by some of the Governor’s vetoes, like whether teacher salaries will be funded and whether or not some agencies will still have the authority to continue operating, needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.”
Read the list of the governor’s vetoes
In his statement, the House Speaker jabbed at the governor: “With the Governor’s DHEC Board giving Georgia its approval to dump toxic dredging sludge on the proposed Jasper Port site for the next 50 years, our state needed these measures to make our port and our state’s small businesses as competitive as possible.”
House and Senate leaders from both parties are calling the new budget a good one—as it restores some funding that had been cut back in previous years to schools, law enforcement and tax cuts for business.
