Over the last week and a half or so, much ado has been made about potential cuts to colleges (including cutting several degree programs at Albany State and other institutions) and the 4H program. Indeed, this is what motivated my first discussion on the budget last Friday.
Now, I keep hearing from legislators and some pundits that this isn’t the legislators’ fault – it is the Board of Regents’ and the Presidents of the colleges themselves. They claim it is a Constitutional issue, that the Georgia General Assembly can’t dictate to any school, or the Board of Regents as a whole, exactly how to spend its money.
Most people may see this as a cop-out, as the legislators trying to dodge a bullet.
But the legislators are correct.
Per Article VIII, Section IV, Paragraph 1(c) of the Constitution of the State of Georgia:
All appropriations made for the use of any or all institutions in the university system shall be paid to the board of regents in a lump sum, with the power and authority in said board to allocate and distribute the same among the institutions under its control in such way and manner and in such amounts as will further an efficient and economical administration of the university system.
Yep, you read it right. The General Assembly must lump every penny for every program at every school the Board of Regents controls into one big, fat check and hand it over to the Board of Regents – who then doesn’t have to listen to a word the General Assembly says about what the money is for.
Because the General Assembly doesn’t have the power to dictate funding inside the “black box” that is the Board of Regents, the only thing the General Assembly can do is dictate how much money goes into the black box. If that amount of money rises from one year to another, the Board of Regents exclusively gets to decide where to spend the extra money – even if they decide to spend it all on the Chancellors of the Board of Regents. The General Assembly can’t tell them not to do that.
On the flip side, if the amount of money put into the black box drops from one year to the next, the Board of Regents exclusively has to decide where to make the cuts. The General Assembly doesn’t get to make these decisions either, and has absolutely no say in the matter once the level of money to put into the black box is decided.
In other words, when you hear that 4H is going to be cut or that your degree program is going to be cut before you get a chance to graduate due to budget cuts, know that your own Department Chair, your own Dean of your school, your own University President, and your own Board of Regents screwed you over.
It was NOT the General Assembly. It was NOT the Lt Governor. It was NOT the Governor.
It was the very people you and the citizens of Georgia entrusted to teach you.
When your President, your Dean, your Department Chair, your professors tell you that it was the General Assembly, know they’re playing you for a fool. They think you don’t know any better, and had you not read this post or read the Constitution of the State of Georgia, you probably wouldn’t know any better.
But if you hear them doing this again, kindly point them in the direction of the nearest copy of the Constitution of the State of Georgia you can find. (A fully html version is available on this site at http://www.swgapolitics.com/ga_constitution, which we provide as a service – it does not add to our page view statistics in any way.) Point them to Article VIII, Section IV, Paragraph 1(c). Show them where it says that the Board of Regents exclusively controls how all money within its system is spent.
And (politely) ask them to stop playing you and make the hard choices.
