Fillion runs new Senate Budget Office
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

MPA Advisory Board member Kevin Fillion (M.P.A. ’95) heads an influential new Georgia office at an interesting time in state politics. The 2002 election of Sonny Perdue, the state’s first Republican governor in more than a century, and the General Assembly’s rapid shift to a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate has brought many new faces to the Capitol.

Fillion was named director of the newly created Senate Budget office in October 2003, three months before the Legislative Session. He moved there after serving as director of the state’s Budgetary Responsibility Oversight Committee Research Office. Fillion’s first experience in government, after several years in the private sector, was the required 200 hours he logged in as a Georgia State University M.P.A. intern at BROC.

The Senate Budget Office was created to develop budget documents specifically for the Senate. Since the early 1970s, the state’s joint Legislative Budget Office had served both houses. After the 2002 election created a Republican majority in the Senate, says Fillion, “they felt they needed staff who were loyal to the Senate, a budget office that would answer to the Senate. They wanted a place where they could walk in to get answers.”

Fillion and his staff of six develop appropriations bills and documents that explain the bills. “Outside the session,” he says, “we do a lot of reviewing, particularly of budget programs and contracts, and answer anything the senators want to know about the budget.

Georgia’s general revenue stands at about $16 billion, with federal and other agency funds contributing to a total $30 billion annual budget, says Fillion. Sales and income taxes make up about 85 percent of the general funds generated by the state. By Georgia’s constitution, the budget submitted must be a balanced one.

Fillion says the current economic climate makes it difficult to meet this law. “The state’s expenditures are going to outpace normal revenue growth for awhile. Because of the dot.com bust, 9/11 and the recession, Georgia lost capital gains from the 1990s that we haven’t gotten back. Some tough decisions have to be made.”

To provide solid advice in this climate, Fillion says he is trying to do something a little different in his office. “The traditional budget person is an accounting person, and that’s not my background. I am more interested in grooming evaluators to put a budget together, so that they can actually tell a senator whether a program is working or not working. They’re willing to do cost analysis to do a budget.

“The traditional emphasis in state budgeting has been on ‘what’s new.’ What I’m trying to drive for is not asking what’s new, but asking what’s best,” says Fillion. “Given that we have this structurally imbalanced budget, and we have it for the foreseeable future, the only way you’re going to get around some horrendous cuts is to cut programs that are inefficient, ineffective, or the need for them has passed.”