It looks like there won’t be much sunlight in how the State House works in its pork barrel projects:

Meeting with reporters recently, Majority Leader Jerry Keen said House GOP budget writers may decide to hold off considering proposed capital projects until the spending plan reaches a conference committee with the Senate, the last step before lawmakers adopt the budget.
[…]
The idea of waiting until the conference committee meets to take up capital projects is modeled after an approach the legislature already has begun taking with so-called “special projects,” the local grants lawmakers insert into the budget each year that critics deride as “pork” projects.

This year, the conference committee added $6.5 million in local grants to the budget during their final negotiations.

Keen, R-St. Simons Island, said the process worked well because those projects became associated with the full General Assembly rather than with the parochial interests of an individual legislator or legislative chamber.

“Projects that are good for Georgia should be good for Georgia,” he said. “They shouldn’t be labeled as ‘this person’s project’ or ‘this body’s project.’”

Rep. John Heard, R-Lawrenceville, chairman of the House budget subcommittee on special projects, said he likes the idea of expanding the concept, as long as capital projects receive the same vetting that his panel gave to the local grants individual House members requested.

As Chris Farris notes, this is the exact same way Democrats in the United States Congress have been adding their pork projects, a move that has been severely criticized by bloggers and fiscally conservative political commentators.

It didn’t take long for Georgia Republicans to let the power get to their heads.

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