The 2009 legislative session ended with local lawmakers pointing to one major accomplishment -- a balanced budget.

Though it has yet to be signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue, the passage of an $18.6 billion budget by the Senate last Friday marked the end of a process that began with departmental hearings early last summer.

To local lawmakers, the passage of the 2010 fiscal budget not only is the culmination of months of line-by-line examination but also satisfies the sole requirement asked of them by the state constitution.

“There’s no doubt that the budget was what I was concerned about the most,” said Rep. Mark Butler, R-Carrollton. “There’s very few laws we didn’t have yesterday that we can’t live without tomorrow. All that other stuff is sometimes unnecessary, and I don’t think my job when I was elected was to go to Atlanta to create a bunch of new laws. Because of the certain situation with our economy, there’s no doubt that the budget was the number one priority.”

But even as a top priority, it was often a struggle to make the necessary cuts, Butler said. More than $1 billion in services ultimately were eliminated, reducing the budget to a level lower than what it was last year, a byproduct of statewide revenue shortages. The Legislature used $1.3 billion in federal stimulus money to prevent any further cuts, and because of that, was able to avoid increasing health care premiums for 225,000 teachers and state employees as had been previously discussed. Even then, Butler said, some hard decisions were made, and certain agencies were hit especially hard.

“This was one of the toughest session in my years. We worked long hours, and it probably was one of the most stressful sessions I’ve been a part of,” said Butler, who is in his seventh year in the House. “I think public safety is necessary. I think corrections are necessary. But when you do have to make the deep cuts, everybody is going to have to deal with it.”

At the same time, certain cuts were made to services that the state government simply shouldn’t be responsible for providing, said Rep. Tim Bearden, R-Villa Rica. Funding for such things as state-owned golf courses and various state-funded hall of fame museums has been axed, though the cuts will come on a stretched time frame, giving the courses and the museums time to procure private funding instead of completely shutting down.

“All these golf courses and all these hall of fame [museums] should be private functions, not part of government,” Bearden said. “We need to get back to where we’re handling things like education. You’ve got to make sure there’s no furloughs in the budget for educators before you fund something like a golf course.”

As the sponsor or co-sponsor of more than 40 bills and resolutions this year alone, there was much that Bearden wanted to see done that did was not addressed in the recent session. Specifically, he said he would have liked to see more attention given to an effort to expand a jury’s authority to administer the death penalty. The bill would allow for the verdict of death even if a jury did not find unanimously favor of such punishment.

“The death penalty may be grinding to an end in Georgia, and I don’t want to see that. If people go out there and murder other people, there should be obvious consequences,” Bearden said.

Legislation regarding the death penalty as well as that governing where firearms can be carried will be debated through the summer and fall, Bearden said, and hopefully next year, they will receive due attention in the Legislature.

In the meantime, said Rep. Randy Nix, R-LaGrange, it’s important to remember that the accomplishments of any legislator are limited. Real accomplishment, whether it be the paving of a road or the gradual move out of the national economic recession, comes from the bottom up, not the top down.

“We must realize that government will not get us out of this recession. The hard work of our citizens and the investments of our small businesses in their communities will,” he said. “They will be the ones who will create the jobs and create the spending to get our economy moving again.”