ATLANTA - The state budget for next year shows a big fat zero on the line for Fort Discovery, the interactive educational museum for science and math in Augusta.
But the budget actually includes $1.2 million for the museum, although its impossible to find that specific appropriation in the budget bill lawmakers approved last month.
It's another example of how seeing isn't always believing when it comes to how the state writes budgets.
Budget writers say the Fort Discovery expenditure is one of many grouped together and listed simply as $45.7 million worth of contracts in the Department of Educations budget.
It's far from the only example of how the spending bill doesn't always reveal what's in it, and it is typical of the way budgets have been written in Georgia for nearly 30 years. Gov. Sonny Perdue wants that changed.
He is proposing the first major budget overhaul since the 1970s, when then-Gov. Jimmy Carter required state agencies to justify their budgets from the ground up each year, rather than merely heaping new requests atop existing spending.
Carter's so-called zero-based budgeting program worked for a few years. Then subsequent governors moved away from it, in part because of complaints that it was too time-consuming.
As a result, budget writers now spend most of their time weighing new programs. Existing programs are lumped into a massive category referred to as continuation and are rarely examined individually by top decision-makers.
"That means the state may be spending scarce dollars on programs that no longer are a priority or whose top legislative advocates may be long gone from the scene," Perdue said in an interview last week.
"As a new governor writing his first budget," he said, "I've been amazed, surprised, offended and - frankly - insulted as a Georgia citizen that we were spending money in some areas."
He did not offer specifics, but said the problem is the result of a culture he hopes to change.
"The mantra of the day when I came to the General Assembly was that if you got something into a line item of the budget for two to three years, then it would magically move into continuation. I think that was really the culture of the day, and I think that has happened over the years."
Perdue plans to reintroduce something like Carter's zero-based approach, although he has not yet spelled out the details.
He said he will appoint a task force of business professionals to help reform the budget system and get down to the smallest details of what the state is spending and why.
"I think it's important every so often to just bare everything in the spirit of transparency for the public as well as the Legislature," he said. "We ought to lay everything bare from time to time and then justify on an ongoing basis what the needs are."
At a time of budget cutbacks and mounting costs, Perdue is hoping the exercise will uncover millions of dollars of potential savings.
"Some of it may be waste, but a lot of it is going to be things that we simply have to re-prioritize and say, unfortunately, this is serving a purpose but we simply cannot afford it any longer," he said.
Government bureaucrats are famous for their reluctance to accept change, but Perdue said he doesnt expect a problem.
"These are public taxpayer funds. No department head or agency owns these funds. And if anyone gets possessive about them, then well find somebody that gets us information," he said.
Perdue added, "I'm pretty optimistic they are willing to pull back everything and show whats really happening."
Sunday
September 7th, 2025
12:03AM
