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House members debated H.B. 1167, the General Amended Appropriations Act, today as rain pelted the Gold Dome all morning.
The mid year budget plan is approximately $750 million in new spending and raises the current budget to $12.3 billion.
Highlighted in the bill is $72 million earmarked for the $205 million income tax cut already passed this session, $35 million to upgrade 27 rural publicly owned airports, $4 million to study a rail line between Atlanta and Macon, and more than $200 million in new education spending.
Some local projects such as $50,000 to construct a recreation complex in east Augusta, $50,000 to improve the historic and commercial district of Waynesboro, $5,000 for Westside Highschool improvements to the field house, $25,000 for the Lakeside Highschool baseball field and $25,000 for playground equipment for Riverside Park in Columbia County, are also in the spending plan.
A few spending initiatives that received great praise from members included funding for two new positions in the Department of Audits to combat medicaid fraud and $686,260 to develop a war veterans cemetery in Milledgeville on seventeen acres of state owned land.
The bill passed by a vote of 149 to 23 and now must be approved by the Senate. Still awaiting action by the House Appropriation's Committee is the Governor's $12.5 billion budget for Fiscal Year 1999 that begins July 1, 1998.
Another spending measure taken up today was H.B. 1166, which allocates $152 million to correct
a glitch in state computers that cannot identify the year 2000. The bill passed overwhelmingly by a
vote of 170-0.
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