Georgia Realtors at the Capitol; Welcome State Rep Trey Rhodes

Tuesday was Legislative Day for Georgia Realtors, and about 845 of us descended on the Golden Dome to press our legislators to understand the importance of private property rights, home ownership, and our ability to continue to serve the public as Realtors.

Tuesday was also the day new Georgia State Representative Trey Rhodes was sworn in, and our delegation from the Lake Country Board of Realtors gave him his first taste of constituent appeal.

There are three key issues from a Realtor perspective:

• we want to change a proposal to allow attorneys to bring civil suits against anyone practicing law without a license - not a bad idea, but the current proposal is written in a way that could make Realtors assisting buyers and sellers with our contracts subject to these suits. Clearly adjustments are needed.
• we support a proposal to add condo and townhouse complex pools to the list of those considered private, and exempt from rules governing only public pools. Subdivision pools are already exempt, so this proposal makes sense.
• we oppose a proposal to elevate code enforcement officers to the status of first responders - the Realtors believe that more training should be required before subjecting private citizens to possible felony charges for interfering with a code enforcement enforcement officers.

We also discussed the efforts to bring the Horse Racing industry to Georgia - which would be a huge boon to the counties served by the Lake Country Board of Realtors (already home to one in ten Georgia horses) Senator Burt Jones is a co-sponsor of the Bill, and shared his optimism that this year we'll finally give Georgian's the change to vote on it.

Finally, we expressed our concerns about the proposed Transportation Bill, which would take funds currently used by counties and cities to maintain local roads and bridges, and use them for statewide projects.  We all support improving our infrastructure, but need a funding mechanism that will not increase local property taxes.

We had a productive and informative day!