ATLANTA - Gov. Sonny Perdue chose a ripped-down, abandoned state office Thursday to announce he's about to start cutting millions in government waste - especially unused buildings.
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|
|
|
Have a thought?
Go to the Forums or Chat.
|
|
|
Last year, the Republican governor set up a commission of volunteer business leaders to identify places where the state's $16 billion budget is leaking money.
Among the problems announced Thursday: The state doesn't know how much office space it has, and some employees work in expensive leased buildings while older state offices languish unused.
The businessmen also said it was inefficient to have each state agency make its own decision about how many cars to buy. Georgia owns about 20,000 vehicles, and the businessmen wrote, "information on what it costs to operate the fleet is sketchy at best."
Mr. Perdue released only a list of the problems Thursday, with no specific plans to fix them. Many of the inefficiencies had already been reported in state audits, some of them done before Mr. Perdue took office.
But Mr. Perdue said he's starting a fresh push to "look under the hood" of state government and save money, rosily predicting his commission could one day save as much as the state lottery brings in. The lottery had sales of $2.1 billion last year.
Continuing the motor analogy, Mr. Perdue said, "We're talking about more than an oil change here."
Mr. Perdue appointed Lonice Barrett, a longtime commissioner of the Department of Natural resources, to a new job called director of implementation.
Starting Aug. 9, Mr. Barrett will leave his $115,000 job at DNR for the new job in Mr. Perdue's administration. Mr. Barrett's new salary wasn't announced.
The commission also recommended spending more to promote tourism and trying harder to attract new businesses.
Mr. Perdue said that job layoffs weren't "off the table" but that he considered them unlikely. Instead, he said, money could be saved by finding efficiencies.
