Access to the Georgia Archives will not be reduced after all. Secretary of State Brian Kemp says Gov. Nathan Deal has found $125,000 in the budget to keep the Archives fully open through the end of the fiscal year which is June 30.
Access was to have been reduced to appointment only beginning November 1 due to cuts of $733,000 to Kemp’s budget.
“When you’re requiring every state agency to cut 3 percent… I’m grateful that he found what he did to be able to keep the hours accessible to the public,” Kemp tells WSB’s Sandra Parrish.
“They’ll be able to provide different sorts of things that will support Archives really better than we can in our agency without having more dollars, which in these days, are hard to find,” he says.
Kemp says come January, the General Assembly will be asked to move the Archives from his agency to the University System of Georgia where it would fall under the direction, and budget, of the Board of Regents.
Kemp could not yet comment on the status of the seven Archives employees who were to be laid off under the old plan.