Click here to hear audio of press conference
Coosa Valley Technical College will have to cut adult literacy classes for more than 350 students in May and June, if the House and Senate adopt a proposed compromise on the state’s mid-year supplemental budget.
CVTC President Craig McDaniel said he will have to lay off as many as five full-time instructors if state legislators follow through on plans to strip $1.8 million from the adult literacy instruction budget.
Statewide, all 246 instructors will be furloughed and more than 95,000 students will be affected, according to Ron Jackson, interim commissioner of the Department of Technical and Adult Education.
“This is a serious cut to our budget this late in the year,” he said in a Wednesday message urging CVTC board members to contact their legislators.
Program funding will likely be restored in the 2008 budget, effective July 1, but students will have lost two months of schooling, and instructors — some of whom have been on the job for 20 years — will have an employment gap.
“You’re looking at two months they don’t get paid,” McDaniel said. “We have to figure out how to help them continue their health insurance, how to continue their retirement benefits.”
McDaniel said he is less concerned about the planned elimination of $882,000 to train workers at the Kia Motor Co. plant set to open in West Point because the money is not immediately needed.
Another possible transfer to the new 2008 budget is $500,000 earmarked to offset costs of a classroom hangar for CVTC’s new aviation program at Richard B. Russell Regional Airport.
“The $500,000 is going to help us get the building we need, but it’s not the biggest thing on my radar screen right now,” McDaniel said. “What’s much closer to home for me is the people — our faculty and our students. If you cut our funding, we have no choice but to put them on the street.”
Tax refund part of the plan
The funding cut is part of a compromise between state Republican House and Senate leaders that includes a $142 million refund for taxpayers.
At a press conference announcing the mid-year budget agreement, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson said the money would be sent to counties for distribution.
“We’re urging the counties to issue checks,” Richardson said, but added that local officials have the option of crediting this year’s property tax bill.
The average homeowner would get about $100 back.
Floyd County Tax Commissioner Jim Ford said it’s unclear right now how taxpayers would get their refunds “but I do know it would be a nightmare to try to cut that many checks.”
The logistics likely will be discussed at the May 16 annual meeting of the Georgia County Tax Commissioners, he said.
The budget proposal still has to make it through the full House and Senate — and past Gov. Sonny Perdue, who could veto it. If the tax refund provision stands, refund calculations are expected to be done by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
Republicans in the two chambers have been battling about the supplemental budget — with the House proposing the traditional route of funding one-time local projects and the Senate backing a new policy of saving the surplus money.
Cagle said the compromise is in line with both sides’ philosophy of fiscal conservatism.
“The best way to resolve this issue is to give it back to the taxpayers,” he said.
Floyd County’s Republican delegates — state Sen. Preston Smith and state Rep. Katie Dempsey of Rome and state Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Cassville — could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening.
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