For a General Assembly that has come to town trumpeting affordability as its goal, a revision to a recent report published last week by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts should have been a dash of cold water in the face.
An earlier version of the study published last month reported that the $474 million in tax breaks given by the state to data centers had added a total of more than $4 billion to the state’s economy. Researchers apparently discovered that this estimate had not subtracted the amount that would have been produced with or without the break. This cut the amount of money generated and the number of jobs created to less than a third of the original estimate.
It was an honest mistake, but a reminder that what taxpayers get back when others get tax breaks can be easily overestimated. And it came at an inopportune time for defenders of this particular tax break.
On Friday, two Senate bills aimed at ending the data center tax break were dropped. SB 408, a bipartisan bill, moves the sunset for all receiving the break to the end of this year. SB410, a Republican bill, ends the break for all future data centers, but leaves the break for existing data centers. This looks like an attempt to ease the concerns of Gov. Brian Kemp, who vetoed a similar measure, saying it undermined the investments companies had made in the state.
This year’s hopper includes bills covering a variety of subjects, from one that prohibits foreign contributions to Georgia candidates to several aimed at regulating abusive homeowners’ associations.
Notably, in this midterm election year, however, there don’t seem to be as many conservative social issue bills as you might see in another year. Banning cellphones in classrooms might have some similarities, but it’s different from banning books in school libraries. Whether this session really turns out to be about helping taxpayers pay their bills or not remains to be seen, but a lot of lawmakers clearly have gotten the message.
Kemp’s final State of the State message last week had a decidedly old-school air about it, or to put it another way, a powerful whiff of asphalt.
Any driver who unexpectedly runs into the Eagle’s Landing crawl on I-75 will be happy to hear that, in 2030, something will be done about it. But at a time when healthcare is becoming an even more difficult problem across so much of the state, spending $1.8 billion to build a few more miles of express lanes on I-75 seems like almost willful avoidance of the problems that the Pathways to Coverage program hasn’t solved. There’s also $210 million to improve Highway 316 between Atlanta and Athens, a stretch the governor himself must travel on a regular basis.
Kemp didn’t mention data centers in the State of the State message, either, but his veto last year of the tax break freeze spoke for itself. A lot is going to be said about the downside of data centers in this session, but there will be a lot of needle-threading involved in getting any kind of legislation that disentangles the state from subsidizing them. Meanwhile, there are almost weekly stories from around the state about citizen groups irate over their county commissions approving data center projects, or triumphant that they’ve blocked them.
