A state House committee granted initial approval for a bill Thursday that would not change the collection of passport processing fees that local clerks and judges can currently take as personal income — a controversial practice that lawmakers initially sought to ban last year.
Instead, Senate Bill 19 will require quarterly disclosures of the passport fees be made to the county governments.
“What it does not do, is prohibit clerks and probate judges from keeping the fees as personal income, and it also does not comment on any formula for sharing the fees with the counties, although county resources and staff are utilized in most cases,” state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, who authored the bill, said in the committee meeting.
Superior Court clerks are elected constitutional officers who oversee record-keeping for the superior court, including real estate records. Clerks and probate judges that process passport applications are allowed under federal law to take the $35 fee as personal income, along with their salaries, if allowed by state law.
Last year, lawmakers sought to limit the amount of money superior court clerks and probate judges could collect from providing passport processing services. The initial proposal would have banned the practice altogether, but after pushback from superior court clerks, lawmakers changed the bill to allow more flexibility.
Kirkpatrick, a Republican from Marietta, began looking at the passport fee income after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that Cobb County’s Superior Court Clerk Connie Taylor had taken home $425,000 in her two years in office from the regular passport fees and the expedited shipping fees, on top of her six-figure salary.
Other media outlets reported on other clerks who had also collected a sizeable amount through the practice, which was originally implemented to supplement the clerks’ income to take on the additional service. Some opt to voluntarily share the funds with the county government or to cover their office costs. Under current Georgia law, they are entitled to take all of the passport fees as personal income.
The amended bill from last year would have directed one-third of the funds toward the county government, one-third to the clerk or probate judge’s office, and one-third to the clerk or judge as personal income, capped at 50% of their salary.
Now, the bill simply requires quarterly disclosure of the passport income to the county government. Kirkpatrick said to the AJC that she was concerned the bill would not pass at all unless the limits to the income were stripped out.
“I wanted to be sure that, at least, there was transparency in the process, and that the counties knew what was going on,” she said. “What I anticipate is, when these reports start coming out and the counties sort of see what the numbers are, especially in the bigger counties, that they’re going to want to make some changes, and I think there’ll be an opportunity to push farther with this in the future.”
The House Judiciary Civil committee approved the bill unanimously with little discussion. It will now advance through the legislative process.
After the AJC’s 2022 report on Taylor, the Cobb County Superior Court clerk, a whistleblower employee from her office came forward through her attorney Stacey Evans to allege that Taylor had ordered her to delete records in response to the AJC’s request under the Georgia Open Records Act. She also alleged that she had been retaliated against and placed on administrative leave for refusing to delete records.
The whistleblower no longer works there after she “made the decision to resign for a better opportunity” about a year ago, Evans said to the AJC.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced an investigation into Taylor’s office in response to a Cobb Superior Court judge’s request in 2022 — an investigation that was still pending as of Jan. 22, according to GBI spokesperson Nelly Miles.
