When Zell Miller stepped down as governor in 1999, he had accomplished two things that would stand as his legacy: the HOPE scholarship program that financed a college education for high-achieving students and criminal sentencing laws, notably the "two-strikes" legislation, that would keep people in prison for many years.
They seemed like good ideas at the time. HOPE scholarships would keep our brightest young people at home to attend college. Criminals would stay behind bars so that they couldn't prey on innocent people.
Miller's legacy, alas, is starting to fade away. The culprit is the long economic downturn that has ravaged Georgia's tax revenues and knocked gaping holes in recent state budgets.
The get-tough crime program was so effective that it stuffed Georgia's prisons to the breaking point and put people there who may not have posed as large a threat to society as the more violent offenders. Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens estimated recently that about 40 percent of the 53,000 inmates in our prison system are serving sentences for drug offenses or nonviolent crimes.
It costs nearly $20,000 per year to provide each of those inmates with a "hard bed," which is why the corrections budget now totals more than $1 billion annually.
"It is draining our state treasury and depleting our work force," Gov. Nathan Deal said shortly after he was inaugurated in January.
Chief Justice Carol Hunstein of the Supreme Court picked up on that theme in her speech to the legislature last week: "Georgia's leaders in all three branches of government recognize that we can no longer afford the more than $1 billion it costs us annually to maintain the fourth-highest incarceration rate in the nation."
House Speaker David Ralston, who hails from the same North Georgia mountains as Miller, agreed: "We now know that the cost of those programs and the cost of those sentencing changes is exorbitant. And I think that it was probably a higher number than we estimated at the time."
Deal, Hunstein, Ralston and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle have called for a special commission that will review Georgia's sentencing laws and recommend some changes. Those recommendations will likely dismantle much of what Zell Miller signed into law a little more than a decade ago.
Just as we can't afford to put everybody behind bars anymore, we also can't pay the tab for every student who maintains at least a B average in our university system. The Georgia Lottery has provided billions of dollars over the years for the HOPE program, but that money is no longer sufficient to meet all the demands for scholarships.
HOPE will spend roughly $240 million more than it takes in during the current fiscal year and will be in the red by more than $300 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1. That kind of payout can't be sustained anymore.
Deal has been working on recommendations that would cap HOPE scholarship grants at about 90 percent of the current tuition levels. That amount would not increase, even if the Board of Regents should vote to hike tuition in coming years. Books and fees also will not be covered by HOPE grants.
If those changes are approved by the General Assembly, it will mean the end of Miller's grand dream of paying the way for every student who kept his or her grades at the B level. While most of the tuition costs would be covered at first, the percentage of tuition that HOPE reimburses will get smaller as future tuition increases are adopted.
It could well be that 10 years from now, a HOPE scholarship will barely cover one-third or one-half of a student's yearly tuition. That's certainly better than nothing, but it's a long way from the original vision of the program when it was implemented in the early 1990s.
There aren't any villains in this story. I don't think anyone in the legislature takes any joy at cutting back on HOPE, but the lottery funds are no longer enough and there isn't the political will to raise taxes or move money from another source to keep providing full scholarships.
Zell Miller's dream was a good one, but when the money runs out, the dream dies.
Tom Crawford is the editor of The Georgia Report, an Internet news service that covers government and politics in Georgia. His column appears Wednesdays and on gainesvilletimes.com.