ATLANTA — Opponents of a bill the Georgia House of Representatives passed on the next-to-last day of this year’s legislative session are warning it could threaten a fund the state uses to pay unemployment compensation.
Senate Bill 160, which the House’s Republican majority passed 97-68 along party lines, replaces a state Department of Labor administrative fee that expired at the end of last year using money that otherwise would go into Georgia’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) Trust Fund. The Senate passed the measure early last month 34-21, with several Democrats supporting it and one Republican voting “no.”
Supporters said the estimated $20 million the fee would raise during each of the next three years is critical to an agency that has been underfunded for years. The legislation is set to expire at the end of 2026.
The labor department has lost $12 million to $14 million annually since the Great Recession struck Georgia more than a decade ago, funds it has never recovered, said Bruce Thompson, who was elected state commissioner of labor last fall and took office in January.
Then, when the pandemic hit three years ago, a typical annual caseload of 200,000 to 300,000 unemployment claims soared to more than 4 million in one month’s time, Thompson said.
“Customer service is just not where I want it to be,” he said. “We have a federal obligation and a moral obligation to provide these services.”
The bill’s opponents aren’t arguing that the labor department doesn’t need the money. Their beef is that the funds would come from an Unemployment Trust Fund already depleted by the demands of the pandemic.
“UI Trust Fund contributions should not be reduced to compensate for other funding allocations, as this risks the resiliency of a trust fund which already ranks below a majority of states in terms of solvency,” Ray…
Read the full article here