Statehouse verdicts on local issues

As reported by staff writer Chuck Williams, the Georgia General Assembly last week passed legislation that will change the licensing procedure for liquor stores in Muscogee County.

That’s an issue of very real and pressing concern to the people directly involved. But why it should have to be decided in Atlanta is a larger question that just keeps coming up again and again.

It’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s an elephant that’s been in the room — two “rooms,” really, because Alabama’s degree of centralized government is at least as absurd as Georgia’s — for decades.

The argument could be made that this was legitimately a state matter because the liquor store issue concerned a state law in the first place. Only … well, not exactly. It was one of those laws passed by the state, true, but applicable (at the time, which in this case was the 1970s) only to Savannah. It was one of those “population-triggered” things (like the stalled casino legislation was written to be) that, as of the 2010 census, now applied to Columbus.

As reported in Williams’ story, liquor licenses are the subject of several lawsuits in Muscogee County Superior Court. So 53 senators and 155 representatives from all over Georgia voted on specifics of how these licenses are to be granted. Now the governor has the final word.

This liquor bill involved a quirk in state law, which makes it perhaps not the best illustration of why that curious hybrid of statecraft called “local legislation” is such a wasteful oxymoron. A better example is to remember that the vote on whether to keep or phase out the Muscogee County property tax assessment freeze — a purely local matter — had to get approval in Atlanta before the people it directly affected could render their verdict. Likewise, if gambling legislation ever passes, then local voter approval would not be the final hurdle to a casino — another OK from the statehouse would.

It’s noteworthy that while the Senate and House votes for the Muscogee liquor store bill were overwhelming — 48-5 and 142-13, respectively — they were not unanimous. We don’t know, offhand, by whom or for what reasons the dissenting votes were cast. But there are many issues, even if this was not one of them, in which matters of personal ideology or partisan interest might override some lawmakers’ usual deference to local control.

As the 2017 regular session of the Georgia General Assembly winds down, legislators aren’t going to call for rewriting the state constitution over a vote to clarify liquor store property lines and zoning distances in Columbus, nor should they.

That said, there are far less important problems lawmakers will no doubt address than taking a fresh look at which local issues should be subject to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from Atlanta.

Replace “local” and “Atlanta” with “Georgia” and “Washington,” and the picture should click into focus.

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 5:07 PM with the headline "Statehouse verdicts on local issues."