Perhaps no member of the Georgia General Assembly has spent the last few years more gleefully stirring uproar in his local district, or collecting more genuine outrage in the process, than Rep. Mitchell Horner of Catoosa County. The fury peaked this year when he pushed through a local act forcing a performance audit on the county school system. His justification was simple;: no other Georgia school district received a critical fiscal rating from the state Department of Audits two years running. Details aside, the education establishment and its chorus of administrators, teachers, parents, community leaders, petition signers, and sympathetic local officeholders decided enough was enough. The man had to go. They found a primary challenger. Judging by the rhetoric and heated campaign, it really seemed that Horner’s short political life was barreling toward a reckoning.
It was. He spanked his opponent and won 70.6% of the vote.
That sound we heard in May was not an establishment guillotine coming down to end his political career. It was five thousand Catoosa County voters politely declining to lynch the man who asked to see the receipts and stood up for them over and over.
He is not the only one making noise and talking local acts. In neighboring Walker County, Reps. Mike Cameron and Steve Tarvin recently announced plans for a local act requiring a forensic audit at the start of every commission chairman’s term. In Paulding County, their state senator filed a bill to repeal Hiram’s city charter entirely, which is less a reform measure than a municipal execution. He allowed the bill to die quietly this session. The mood that produced it did not and is spreading across the state. Elsewhere lawsuits have been filed against local acts to stop them.
For anyone upset over these local acts I believe you should count yourselves lucky. Rep. Horner is playing nice. Georgia legislators have been here before long ago with your grandparents era of bureaucrats, and last time they brought out the thumbscrews.
A century ago, when Progressive Era governments and taxes swelled and the New Deal swelled them even further, the General Assembly and state legislators fought back with local acts that read like declarations of war.
In 1923, Warren County commissioners were ordered to publish, every three months, an itemized statement of all expenditures showing to whom each sum was paid, the amount, and the purpose. Payee by payee. In the newspaper. Failure was declared malpractice and cause for removal.
Candler County that same year saw a local act give any twenty-five freeholders the power to present a delinquent commissioner’s failure to comply to a judge, who could declare the office vacant on the spot. In Muscogee County, a missed report was a crime, an actual misdemeanor. Coffee County’s local act required monthly published statements of receipts and disbursements on top of its audits. Montgomery County had grand juries with the power to remove or reprimand negligent commissioners after a hearing. A Walker County newspaper from 1949 shows what transparency looked like in practice after a local act compelled county government to shape up in 1939: the county itemized its spending all the way down to one single dollar for post office box rent. One dollar. Published for every taxpayer to see.
Notice who held the whip in those days. Not the county manager. Not the elected official. Not the Sheriff. Not the county employees. Not the clerk behind the counter. It was the citizen. Citizens were not expected to file requests and wait. They were deputized as enforcers. It was their government.
The good ole days indeed.
A newspaper writer in 1932 explained things well. Amid a statewide movement to push for monthly statements of what local governments took in and paid out, he argued the public could never shrink the cost of government until it first learned how and for what its money was spent. Audits, he grumbled, were complicated yearly rituals that told you everything except the thing you asked and needed to know.
He was right, and the Georgia Supreme Court agreed with him half a century later. In 1988, Greene County tried to satisfy its old local reporting act by lumping salaries under vague headings like “Payroll Account.” A citizen named sued. The county insisted the modern statewide Budget Act had quietly repealed the local law requirement. Wrong, said the court. A budget is a prediction. The local act concerned money already gone out the door. The county had to publish payroll in real categories and state its total debt and creditors outright. Detail was not optional. Hiding behind aggregates and estimates no more.
Which brings us to the sorry present. Georgia’s local governments reported about $10.7 billion in spending in 1999. By 2024, roughly $45 billion. Population grew about 44 percent over that stretch. Spending more than quadrupled. That is not even mentioning the ever expanding government run school system.
And what does the modern taxpayer have for transparency today? An open records law that might give them an answer in three business days with a fee, state databases full of vague categories, and, in some counties, fewer public meetings than a decade ago. We have replaced mandatory full itemization and disclosure with legalese and records requests and made enforcement of the law out of reach for most citizens.
The public has begun to wake and notice. That is why Horner won by forty points, why Cameron and Tarvin feel safe announcing forensic audits, and why a state senator thought dissolving a whole city government would not cost him his seat.
So local governments and school districts stand at fork in the road. Path one: get ahead of it. Cut the spending, trim the taxes, publish all spending and revenue in transaction level detail voluntarily, and govern like people who remember whose money it is.
Path two: keep doing what you’ve been doing and wait for state legislators theGeneral Assembly to get creative again. Georgia’s history shows what creative looks like, and it involves vacant offices and criminal charges.
As for me, I am quietly rooting for path two. I want to see what medieval torture device dressed up as legislation Mitchell Horner devises next to set the local bureaucratic crowd aflame. Whatever rack or iron maiden he rolls onto the House floor, the bureaucrats will howl, big government democrats will cry, the petitions will circulate, but my guess is the voters of Catoosa County will do what they did in May. Applaud and say, “More of that please!”