Candidate Profile: Rep. Betsy Holland

Georgia politics moves fast, and now there's a new place to keep up.

App and Media Group proudly announces the launch of GeorgiaPress.com,

a new statewide news website focused on Georgia politics, power and policy,

serving every corner of the peach state.

From the gold dome to your hometown,

GeorgiaPress.com delivers in-depth reporting, accountability journalism,

and the story's shaping Georgia's future.

And now it's officially the home of the Georgia Politics Podcast,

Georgia's number one political commentary podcast since 2019.

Smart analysis, trusted voices, real journalism.

Visit GeorgiaPress.com today.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to App and Media's Georgia Politics Podcast.

I am Lindsay Coates.

And today we are being welcomed or we are welcoming

Representative Betsy Holland of Georgia House District 54.

Hi, Betsy, thanks for joining us.

Hello, Lindsay, thanks for having me.

Excellent, excellent.

Well, we are glad you are here today to go through kind of what's happening

in the legislature, your history as well.

I kind of want to see where you came from and hear about that.

And then kind of get into matters that are affecting Georgians today,

and currently on a lighter note, just to kick things off.

What's your favorite dinosaur?

Oh, try serratops, I think.

Okay, that's incredible.

When you don't hang out with six-year-olds,

you don't get enough of that question.

It's your second or third favorite dinosaur.

He's frankly what a six-year-old wants to know.

That's right, that's right.

It's great to bring it back to the little ones every year and there.

Okay, so to get us started,

describe the geography of your district.

Sure, so I had a colleague who used to describe his district as God's country.

I describe mine as God's shopping malls.

I have Buckhead, the northern part of Atlanta,

going up into southern Sandy Springs.

So if you know where fits and Lennox are,

that's sort of the center of my district.

And then it goes all the way up to 285,

where you would find Northside Hospital in St. Joseph's.

So to middle of Buckhead, all the way up to that perimeter.

Excellent.

So you grew up in Huntington, New York, part of Long Island.

And what brought your family to Georgia?

And what was that transition like?

Like how over you?

I was still in elementary school when we moved.

And I have clear memories of my mother crying for three days

because my father's employer was moving us from New York

where she had grown up in Metro New York to the south,

which she knew nothing about.

And she was convinced her children would grow up

without any kind of culture or sort of diversity.

And my father's employer promised in three years

they would bring them back to New York.

It was a short-term gig.

That was 42 years ago.

And they are still in the same house

that they moved into and they came down.

They fell in love with Georgia, just the affordability,

the culture, their access to things in Atlanta

that they hadn't believed existed,

like wonderful sports and theater and music.

And so they became converts and so did I.

So the culture shock was there,

but we're all very quickly.

And it was different.

Now it certainly grew up in a very diverse,

particularly religiously diverse.

My father was a pastor when I was much younger.

It's sort of a very New York kind of suburban atmosphere.

And we moved to Cobb County

when Cobb County was still as far away

as you could possibly live from the city of Atlanta

and still commute every day.

So it was different.

There were horses that lived across the street

from where our subdivision, our brand new subdivision was.

So it was different.

And I went through high school thinking

all I wanted to do was get out of the south

and experience something else.

And I went to New England to go to college.

And it snowed for four years.

And I came immediately back.

I realized I missed the pace

and the weather being back in Georgia.

Yes, speaking of.

So you went to Smith College.

It's a historically all women's liberal art college.

I looked at that gorgeous campus.

How did that environment shape?

How you see your role in politics today,

especially as a woman, male dominated assembly?

So how did that help shape you?

I loved going to a women's college.

And I came from a long line of my mother,

my grandmother, my great-grandmother,

all went to all women's colleges.

So that was not an unusual thing for me to pursue

when I was graduating high school.

But something about spending four years,

A, being able to be the loudest voice in the room,

I had certainly grown up in an era

where all the science showed the boys got called on

before girls did that they tended to have the opinions

that got heard more when there were no young men

in the classroom to be competing against.

Suddenly, your voice mattered a lot more

and it carried a lot further.

But the other thing was that it was an environment

where you really looked at all topics, economics, history,

politics, English, from the lens of how did these things

impact both women and men,

where I think they tend to be taught

through the lens of men first.

And so it gave you a much more inclusive way

of thinking about the impacts of things.

And I talk a lot even in politics

about the unintended consequences

or sometimes the most dangerous things

about the legislation that we pass

because we think about how it's going to impact us

and our own lived experiences.

And if we don't have enough exposure

to other people's lived experiences,

we don't realize sometimes how negative things can be.

So I think it made a huge difference

and perspective for me growing up.

Sounds that way.

And it is.

It's that whole, we heard it.

We know it now.

And it is when you're able to be in that room,

not worrying about the boys

and not having them being overshadowing us as women,

it makes a huge difference.

And so very,

it just completely, a world that I had not have much experience

and it's so foreign to me when I started looking into

I was like, that sounds really awesome, quite frankly.

You're degree.

You got it in American government and women's studies.

So were you always kind of,

did you have politics in the back your head

or was there something that wasn't really what you imagined?

Oh, I loved politics from an early age.

I liked current events.

I liked reading about them.

Again, I liked being outspoken and talking about them.

I was talking about it a lot at home, right?

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

I certainly had parents who were always very civically

and community involved and made sure

that I was talking about that stuff.

And my junior and senior years in college,

I interned for the Democratic Party of Georgia

and did not have the world's best experience

and suddenly said, oh no,

I've made a terrible mistake.

This is not at all what I want to do.

I don't think I can work in politics.

And I went and got a corporate job doing a corporate function

that I loved very much.

I completely put any kind of politics out of my head

for the next 20 years

until I was approached to run for the seat.

And I thought, well, I guess I could run,

but not hide from the idea of getting involved in politics.

So I tried.

I tried to act.

And it found you still speaking up.

So you were a Turner broadcasting for 20 years

and a couple of decades.

And then Warner Media as well.

During that time, both iconic Atlanta institution.

So what drew you there initially?

And what did that career teach you

about how organizations actually were kind of from the inside?

Absolutely.

Well, I grew up in Metro Atlanta.

At the time when Ted Turner was just a local hero.

He was a hero when he was a sailboat racer

before he became the founder of this whole media empire.

It was still the era when the Braves and the Hawks

and the Thrasher's were all part of Turner.

And so when I came back to town looking for a job

and deciding I wasn't going to work in politics,

I still had this drive that I wanted to do something

that would benefit the community.

That would benefit sort of making the role to better place.

I was 21 and wildly optimistic.

And Turner had just opened up a department that would do that.

There was their community relations department

and it was the group that would decide

how to make grants on behalf of the company,

looking at some of our content

and making sure we were being socially responsible,

organizing volunteers, organizing pro bono services.

And for the most of the 26 years I was there,

Turner and then Warner Media and then Warner Brothers Discovery,

which were all the same company, just different names.

That was the kind of work for the most part that I was doing.

And I loved doing that.

I loved our properties.

I mean, that included working with HBO

and working with Warner Brothers.

It was a really, really neat environment

to kind of come up and learn about

just the workings of a company and how things go.

Yeah, I mean, it really shows that you were kind of in a position

where you're bridging the gap between this corporate power,

this huge hefty thing, and especially in media as well.

And then also down to the community level,

like you're bridging that.

Do you think corporate America is like,

do you think that they have the ability

to truly move the needle on social issues?

Do you feel like you made and not just you specifically,

because I'm sure you accomplished quite a bit

that you do feel comfortable about.

But in today's present day,

society, let's talk about that

and the weight that corporations can hold

and the heft that they can move.

It's becoming a thorny issue for corporate America.

And it doesn't look like the corporate America.

I started working in the 90s, either.

There was something about working at Turner,

especially under Ted Turner's guidance

where CNN was practically his philanthropic baby.

I recognize the network has to make money,

but everybody else could make money

so that CNN could lose money

because it was so important to Turner

that you have quality journalism on television.

The Goodwill Games was a big thing

that Ted had promoted about giving an opportunity

for there to be real competition

between athletes and the world outside of the Olympics.

So he had a lot of those philanthropic things

that he invested in.

And I think as a media company,

we had a lot of responsibility

to think about what we were airing

either on film or television.

And the influence it was gonna have

over people watching it.

And so the old example was how often

we would not allow smoking on film

because that's the oldest one

that the film companies came to an agreement on

unless it was historically necessary.

You just didn't show tobacco use on screen

if you could avoid it.

That was being responsible.

The flip side is we live in a capitalist society

and the number one job of any company

is to make money for its owner or its shareholders.

And so when you have really good leadership

that believes in finding the balance

of investing in community work,

that's great.

Sometimes you have leadership

who does not see the value in doing that.

Doesn't see how it protects your reputation.

Doesn't see how it better serves your customers.

And that's a whole nother

and where the pendulum's playing us.

And so that was one of the more difficult things

for me about leaving that world.

As I loved the company

and the people I worked with,

but I'd had about enough of corporate mergers

and depending on who the leader was,

feeling like whether they were being ethical

in the way they were leaving the company.

Yeah.

And there's so many,

the millennium that millennials and younger

down are looking for those corporations now.

Like they want to work at companies

that are contributing positively.

And so it's the ones

that I think are going to find that path

that are going to hopefully we'll see.

In the end, trial.

But that's my take on it at least.

What was there a moment at during this time

during your tenure,

like a decision made from above?

You touched on it a little bit,

like it kind of depended,

but a policy that you couldn't change

that was kind of like,

okay, I'm ready.

Like was there a moment

or was it was just like you just kept seeing

the change and change and change?

And it was a lot of merger after merger.

And so you know,

you would merge and you would have huge layoffs.

You would have a new corporate mandate

for how you were supposed to do things.

Sometimes it was great.

Sometimes our budget would explode

with new leadership

because there was a great commitment

to being able to do work in the community.

Other times you'd get a leader

who said, why is this even a department?

Why do we care about what we're doing for people?

And there came a point

under leadership one of these times

around where I was talking to my boss about something.

And both of us he had been at HBO

for as long as I had been a Turner.

So we had we grown up together.

And I without even meaning to you,

I set out loud.

I said, I'm just not even sure

I want this to be my job anymore.

And it's not something

you can build your boss probably.

Yeah.

Wait a minute.

But he was very kind and say,

let me see if I can find you a runway out of here

so you can go find something

that you can do that you're more passionate about.

And that was a great opportunity.

I could not have bought the lessons

and that I got out of working at that company.

But I was sort of done this time.

It was time.

Yeah, you would run it.

So in 2018,

you ran a three-way Democratic primary

and you won with over 60% of the vote

and then unceded a Republican incumbent.

And so what do you think you did differently to win

at what most would call a long shot?

Like what do you think that there was something

in the pudding other than just you being you?

I love this question

because I was approached to run.

I didn't come up with this idea on my own to run.

And apparently women have to be asked seven times

every time a man has to be asked

once to run for office.

So it took some convincing to do.

And I had the reaction.

You might expect us to.

I live in Buckhead.

There's not going to be a Democrat elected

district. You've got to be out of your mind.

But it was midterm season

after Donald Trump's first presidency.

And so I think there was a lot of hope

that there might be some momentum.

I had done the work in the community.

People knew who I was

because I had done all of this work

with nonprofits and schools

and government agencies on behalf of a company.

I was hugely active in my church,

which is a very socially social justice-minded congregation.

So I was engaged in a lot of things from there.

And I had served at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce

on their board.

So I kind of had a policy perspective from there.

I did not expect anyone else to run in that primary.

And then the next thing you know,

two more people showed up.

But I think I had a real focus on

here realistically the things

that we could be doing differently in our community.

And I knew all the people who'd been doing it.

It wasn't all entirely surface knowledge.

That's not to say I didn't have to learn miles

of policy area that I'd had no interaction with.

But I wasn't somebody who had just moved to town

and decided to eat us.

I was someone who'd been around who was a PTA mom.

You know, who had just been part of this community

for a long time.

And I had done the work.

Was there a little bit of an ego check

as your campaigning?

Because it's such a different

like to go from this corporate world

and you know, you've got expense accounts and whatever

and then you're going begging for money from other people.

And I know that it's always raising money for candidates

as always.

It could be a little it's one of the hardest things ever.

I know it was for me myself.

But so was it a little bit of an ego check

to have to go and do that?

Or did you find it kind of naturally?

Oh, no, absolutely.

I had I hate asking for money.

I hate asking for money to this day.

That part was by far and away the worse.

And the other lesson I learned

is that you are always the candidate,

no matter what time of day it is.

So if you choose to go to the grocery store

and sweat some no makeup,

you will run into somebody who knows

that you're running for that office

or now knows that I hold the office.

But the part of it I loved and loved to this day

is I did always like going to living room meetings.

Like going to meetings where you'd have 10, 15, 20 people

who were interested and excited about

how government impacts their lives

and having conversations with them.

That I found really, really energizing

and especially starting with that three way primary race

was kind of excited by the momentum

that that gave me that, you know,

I would speak to one group of 15 people

and then a handful of them would say,

well, I'm going to have a living room meeting too.

Come to my house and talk to a group of people.

To this day, those are my favorite ways

to either campaign or give updates to people

about what's happening in government.

That's the part of the community piece

that I just really, really love.

It really does.

Even if you're an introvert, some of those things

because it is a smaller setting,

it does provide you energy and talking with people

and getting to hear what's happening regularly.

Your district is a fluent, right?

It's highly educated.

How do you make sure to balance

representing the interest of your district

with the whole of Georgia?

So usually what's best for the whole of Georgia

is also good for my district.

It's explaining that to the people

who live in my district that that's the case.

And it is difficult.

There was a movement a couple of years ago

to annex the Buckhead neighborhood

out of the city of Atlanta

because there was this feeling of

Buckheadians were paying so much more in taxes

and not necessarily receiving more services

from the city of Atlanta.

Shouldn't they be able to put up

essentially a gated city to keep all their own tax money

and their own influence?

And so it's sometimes reminding folks

that while, for example,

they have some great hospitals.

So they're within driving distance of their home.

So hospital closures doesn't seem to strike fear

and then, but the more hospital closures

we get around the state

because we're not funding health care appropriately.

The bigger of an impact

that's going to have on their ability

to access health care.

We don't have enough nurses.

We don't have enough new doctors

graduating from medical school

that choose to stay in the state of Georgia.

Yeah, we don't have hospital facilities

and so many of our rural counties

which means those populations

are coming to Metro Atlanta

to utilize our medical resources.

So the things that we're going to make

economic development and job readiness

and higher education that impact

all of the communities of Georgia,

they're also good for Atlanta.

It's just a matter of having to kind of see

the bigger picture.

The biggest example I give

is when people have concerns about public safety

and they say, well,

we're worried about the car break ins

that are happening in our neighborhood.

And I point out that it's mayor

and city council has to worry about

that problem happening today.

I have to worry about whether that problem

is going to be happening in 15 to 20 years.

Are these folks getting a good

elementary middle high school education?

Are they getting the opportunity

to pursue secondary education

to be able to find a job?

Is there a job that is here

that is going to pay well

that's going to give them access

to being able to find a home to live in,

being able to provide for a family?

Are they coming from a food

and secure home

or they're not having to worry about food?

Are there medical cares being addressed

because they have access to medical care?

So all of that makes for a safer

and more productive society.

I just have to take the long view

of getting us there.

Your municipal government has to worry

about the car break in that happened last night.

Yeah, that's a good separation of hour,

courtesy.

The legislator, you are in the middle of session right now.

It is a 40 day session in Georgia,

which is one of the shortest in the country.

So with this compressed schedule and calendar,

what is it really like

inside the capital during these 40 days

give us a little sneak peek at how the pace is

and what you're facing on a day-to-day?

This is a terrible way to run back

from being perfectly honest.

We shoved it into a three-month period.

We were very, very fast.

And you have to remember for the majority of people

in the legislature, this is not home for them.

So they are leaving home on a Sunday night,

living in an apartment or a hotel for the week

and then driving home to Savannah

or Veldosta or Columbus on the weekends.

And so we move really, really slowly at the beginning

because you have to go through a certain process

to get bills to vote on.

So you have a very quiet January.

You have a very building,

frenetic, February.

And then you have a march that is essentially

a full-time job.

And unfortunately, what happens is

you don't always get the deliberative time

that you want to introduce bills,

to work on making them better,

to make sure that whatever hits the floor

of the House and Senate

is the best version of what it to possibly be.

You are very, very dependent on other advocates,

lobbyists, legislative counsel

to help you find the cracks and concerns

that you have with bills.

And the good news is, I mean,

we vote overwhelming majority on probably 90%

of the bills that come through the House.

And so most of what we're working on

we're collaboratively working on

because we think it's good for all Georgians.

But unfortunately, there are some things that are sticky.

Like I mentioned before,

things that have unintended consequences

that look really good on the surface.

And we wind up having to come back

two years later to fix those bills

because we didn't have enough time

to really deliberate with them in the first place.

I'm giving you an example.

We literally just had to fix a typo in a bill,

but not necessarily.

But there was one that we did in higher ed

where we were trying to create a bridge

for seniors in college

who had some sort of financial misfortune

and needed a small grant

to be able to get them across

the finish line to graduation.

We were trying to keep a busted muffler

or an illness from keeping someone from finishing

when they were almost done.

And we wrote the bill saying

as long as you had completed 80%

of your coursework towards graduation,

you were eligible for this help.

Well, school years aren't divided that way.

They're divided by four.

What we needed to do was say 75% of your way to graduation.

And essentially, that would cover the first three years

of college.

We're here to help you in the fourth year.

None of us on higher ed caught

that 80% was a terrible number to use.

Nobody on the floor of the House caught

the 80% was a terrible number to use.

The grants were in place for a year

before the university system came back to us

and said, you know what would help?

See if you guys actually thought about 75% of a college experience

being three years.

And so we had to go back and fix it.

Again, we were all well-meaning

and intention in the way that we did it.

But we accidentally knocked out a tremendous number

of the students we were hoping to help.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought about it.

Yeah, it's just one of those little things

that this, you don't see.

You serve on several committees,

higher education, small business development,

creative arts and entertainment,

and intra-governmental coordination.

Out of these committees,

or one that you might not serve on,

what work, what committee work

gets the least public attention

but almost matters more.

That's a great question.

Because I probably enjoy my higher ed committee work the most

because you do find we're all working towards a common goal.

We want to prepare well-educated workforce.

We want as many people as possible

that access to secondary education.

There are certainly things we fight over

but that's sort of the place

where we can get some really good things done.

Hope scholarship discussions.

You know, that sort of thing.

Intrigue of our mental coordination

is the one that no one understands what it is.

Yeah, I'm gonna say it's a new play now.

But it actually winds up having huge implications.

So any bill that we pass

that's considered local legislation

so it's only going to impact one municipality or one county

goes through intra-governmental coordination.

So when we're deciding how much you're going to pay

your city council members

or how many judges are gonna be on a municipal court

or you know, can they raise the sales tax

for your county or your municipality.

All of that has to flow through intra-governmental coordination.

The thing is each of those bills

only impacts a tiny part of the state

but the impact can be really big

in that tiny part of the state

if we're not being thoughtful about what's going through.

So that's the one that no one talks about

but actually has more of an impact on your day today.

So is it typically like for a municipality

if they're gonna change something that's listed in their chart?

I mean, you mentioned sales tax.

So Rosswell, if they decided to raise the sales tax

that still goes through this.

It depends on how they're planning on raising it

and what the rate is gonna be

but there are certain things where you have to be enabled

by the state in order to be able to do it.

The length of, I mean, to your point, the charter

if you have a service system,

your charter for your city council members

so if they were serving two year terms

and you wanted to change them to four year terms,

literally the pay for the mayor of Rosswell

needs to go through local electric work and be approved.

So it's, yeah, it's little bits like that

where legislators have to go sort of put out bills

on behalf of their municipality or their county.

That's a deep little outfit.

I didn't realize that because I knew we had to go through the state

if we were gonna change the charter in some way,

like to move to district dead city council seats,

but didn't.

Anyway, that's it.

Thank you.

There's one little committee that just does that.

Yes.

And handling it out.

You are in the minority party.

I don't think that's surprising anybody.

Practically speaking though,

what power does the minority power have actually have

and how are you able to utilize that currently?

It's sometimes it feels like we have absolutely none.

That's not entirely true.

So there's a few ways.

One is, and this surprises people,

your Georgia General Assembly is not as divisive

as what you're seeing at the US Congress.

And so there's a lot more bipartisan work happening

behind the scenes in the Georgia General Assembly.

So you're not gonna see my name at the top

of very many bills sponsoring them

because the minority party's not carrying very many bills.

Instead, you're gonna find me in a Republican's office saying,

hey, we both have districts that are facing this issue.

Let's work together on crafting the language.

Let's work together on finding support among our colleagues

to be able to pass the bill.

So some of it's about relationship building.

The other piece of it that is a numbers game

is that there are certain pieces of legislation

that cannot pass unless they get two thirds

of a majority vote.

Now, the Democrats don't have 50%,

but we have enough to be able to throw off

a two thirds majority vote.

So on certain things that are constitutional amendments,

we are able to exercise and leverage some influence

in ways that we can't necessarily

for something that only requires majority rule.

And then the final thing is that sometimes

we're the subject matter experts on things

that our colleagues are not.

And so we get pulled into conversations

because we can provide some of the context that's necessary

to be able to work our way through

some of the issues that we're working on.

Excellent.

Cross over day as a sweet.

I think that's not earlier.

And that is the deadline for bills to pass

from one chamber to the other,

from the House to the Senate and vice versa.

What bills are you watching most closely right now?

And what do you think is going to make it through

that you'd be proud of?

Or is there one that you're potentially and or?

Is there one you're potentially alarmed by?

I'll start with the one I'm alarmed by

because the one I'm excited about is big.

But the one I'm alarmed by right now

is that we are talking about the speaker's bill

that would eliminate property tax in the state of Georgia.

Which sounds great on its face.

It sounds like it's going to contribute

to home affordability and home ownership.

It sounds like it's going to be lifting

what is often a really difficult tax,

particularly on seniors.

The problem is we don't have a great plan

in place for how we're going to replace

that five billion dollars of revenue

that funds our police departments and our fire department

and our parks and recreation and our schools.

So I think a lot more work needs to be done on that bill

and I'm hoping we'll take it back and work on it

as opposed to push it forward for a vote on the floor.

And we've got to a Friday to find out

how that's going to happen.

Yeah, so it's fingers crossed.

One I'm really excited about

is that we just passed the amended budget for the state

and for the first time ever,

it includes money for a needs-based college scholarship

in the state of Georgia.

We are one of only two states in the country

that does not offer needs-based assistance

for Georgia citizens

that want to go to college or technical college.

And that bill, so now there needs to be a bill

on how we're going to spend that money.

I am going to my higher ed committee meeting

after this call and we're going to start parsing out

how do we distribute a needs-based scholarship in Georgia?

I was graduating high school

when the Hope and the Zell Miller were introduced

and I remember how transformative

that was for this state

for the merit scholarships to be in place.

It exploded UGA.

I mean, it's used to joke about how easy it was

to get into UGA.

Now nobody can get into UGA.

I mean, it really rose.

It really brought up the talent

that was going to our schools

and it made the schools themselves better.

This is an opportunity to reach out to kids

who maybe don't qualify for the Hope or Zell Miller,

but are bright, who are hard workers,

who want to stay in the state of Georgia

and not have to chase scholarship money outside the state

and then potentially stay outside the state

when they become productive employees.

And this is a really, really huge opportunity for us.

So I'm excited for us to get that out of committee

and then I'm really hoping we get it over the finish line

by Friday.

As someone who needed hope

and Pell scholarships and things like that

from the federal,

like that's huge.

This is really exciting

and I had not heard about it yet.

So thank you for championing.

I'm excited about that.

In switching gears to something that's not in place,

term limits.

If you could change this tomorrow, would you?

And what would that look like?

So I find this question fascinating

and I feel like it's a little bit different

at say a national level

where someone serving in Congress

is working a full-time job

where that is 100% of their time should be dedicated

to serving their citizens who voted for them.

And then you have state government

where none of us are here full-time.

As you noted,

this is a 40 day a year job.

We are not given any kind of competitive salary.

We're given $22,000 a year.

So most of us, including me,

balance another full-time job

or another way of earning income on top of being here.

It also means you don't have anywhere near as much time

to build up expertise and influence

while you're here

because you're only here for 40 days.

And so I'm not sure what I would do

about term limits here

because I find some of our most valuable legislators

on both sides of the aisle

are ones who have some tenure

who have been here six, eight, ten years

and kind of figure out how the system works.

But the flip side of that is the way that the maps

are drawn for districts in the state of Georgia

is that if you are a Democrat

and you are elected in a very blue district,

you're going to keep being the Democrat

in that district as long as you keep running

because you're the incumbent.

And same thing is true in a deep red district.

So I am open to this idea

that maybe we don't let people stay here forever in service.

But I'm figuring out what that timeline would be.

I think it would be longer at a state level

than I would probably advocate 40 U.S. level.

I think that makes sense

and provides a little insight into that

because you're right at the 40 day mark.

And you don't want to go losing

that institutional knowledge every couple of years.

Like you do need to be there longer

in your right with a shorter session.

You can only after six or eight years

really start to get the feel of it.

I would imagine.

I mean, this is the end of my eighth.

This will be the end of my eighth session.

Just now kind of figured out

some of the ins and outs

have had to get things done around here.

The other thing we don't talk about enough

I mean, I just jokingly complained about our pay.

But more importantly,

we get almost no money for office expenses.

So we are each allocated $7,000 a year

to pay for all of our office expenses.

That includes the cost of staff.

So if you think about what that means

for how we can surround ourselves with experts

who can help us do research on bills

or research on legislation in other states

or constituent concerns

just even being able to answer someone's question

about getting their unemployment benefits

or being able to access something

on a road that's a state road.

We have next to no resources to do that.

And so one of the things I advocate for a lot

is not necessarily that we have to be here longer

or get paid more.

But boy, do I wish we were better staffed

and had a better way to be able to respond

over the course of a year.

It always feels like it's the system itself in Georgia

is ripe for reform

and the way that we go about the whole thing.

Well, it's coming from this good old boy society

like back in the day

and you didn't want to spend if you're in office

and you're legislating, you're spending money

and we don't want to do that.

I don't know.

It just feels very antiquated

and kind of outdated at this point.

Absolutely.

Well, it was all structured to serve farmers.

That's why we do this in January, February and March

because those are the three months

that the farmers around the state

could leave their farms to be able to do some governing.

It's not a practical way to serve.

When you have folks like me

who have a nine to five normal job

that are figuring out how to balance all of that as well.

And the joke we always said was

you're either going to draw in people

who are so wealthy that they don't need the money

so they can come and serve in legislature

or people who are so hard up for money

that making $20,000 a year is a good deal

and they'll come to the legislature.

And chances are the actual representation you want

is falling somewhere between those parties.

And so how do you make sure that it's accessible

for those folks?

So we're going to wrap this up here

in another couple of questions

but what's something that you have changed your mind on?

Oh, that's a great question.

Oh, and I'll go to a really, really specific issue

that I'm in trouble.

I imagine with some of my voters

but something that has come up year over year

over year has been whether we legalize sports betting

in the state of Georgia.

And I was firmly anti-bringing

any kind of gambling into the state.

I did not like the idea of building brick and mortar casinos.

I was really opposed to the idea

of any kind of horse or dog racing

and then you sort of rolled mobile sports betting into that.

I spent enough time with colleagues

who were working on the bills

to be able to present mobile sports betting

as an option for the state

but I got very much on board with mobile sports betting.

And then I had my sports obsessed child

who was almost 15 years old

get very interested in mobile sports betting.

And all of the sudden the pendulum swung the other way

and I started to understand the concerns the parents had

about what that was going to do with their children.

So I mean, just an example of one thing

where I came in, I'm 100% anti-gambling,

then had several years where I said,

this seems like a really good way

to generate some revenue for the state

and then swinging the other way saying,

oh, we've got to pull a lot more guard real on this

than I thought that we had to.

Because again, my lived experience

is now living with someone who's going to be vulnerable

to being abused by the system.

So you learn a lot about stuff around here

that you just never knew anything about before

and it really broadens the way you think about things.

Well, and it's good that you have that mindset

that you're able to change.

Like, we need that in our elected leaders to be able,

like, okay, maybe I wasn't so right on this

and I can change on that.

Absolutely.

So last question, Ed, before a little lightning round,

but when this chapter of your career is over

and someone's writing the sentence that sums up,

what Betsy Holland did in the Georgia House?

What do you want that to say?

What do you hope your legacy is?

So the first thing that came to mind

is not what it actually is.

I have a colleague here who says,

the subtitle on my autobiography

will be just because I'm being quiet,

doesn't mean I'm not silently judging you.

That was always his impression of me

sitting at any meeting at all.

But I think sort of being a quiet worker

is going to be the legacy I lead.

I am not interested in having my picture

on the front page of the AJC.

I'm not particularly interested in a higher office.

I'm interested in being here

and seeing the work get done.

And so hopefully when I am done here,

people will say, you know, I was always willing to chip in.

I was always willing to stay at the table

and talk it out a little bit longer.

I was always willing to show up at that neighborhood meeting

and hear what was concerning people.

Doing that actual boots on the ground work

is the part that I find really rewarding

and I'm hoping people will remember

that's what I tried to do.

Excellent, excellent.

All right, couple quick fast lightning round questions.

For your best bill, you ever voted against your party on

or have you and why?

I'm not going to remember the bill number

but you don't you don't find a lot of Democrats

that will support issues of charter schools

and I spent a lot of time working with a charter school

that serves refugee children.

I sat on their board for nine years

and I see the value of having some form of school choice

that is not always a popular topic

within the Democratic Party.

So I walk that line on charter schools.

That's very good.

One thing that you think Republicans got right.

Ooh.

No, it's investment in some of the secondary education.

So they're about to open a medical college at UGA

and they're opening an optometry college.

I think I'm gonna say Georgia Southern

but this idea of investing in having some graduate schools

particularly for areas

where we seem to have a lack of pipeline talent.

I think they're doing beautifully

and that's a great investment in our future.

Excellent.

Biggest myth about how state government works.

Like I said before, the fact that people think

we're constantly at each other's throats

that were so entrenched in our own beliefs

that we're fighting over every bill.

Like I said, more than 90% of the time

you see nothing but green names on the voting board.

We are mostly united in what we're trying to do.

You just hear about the stuff that we disagree on.

And where can we find you?

What are you doing on the weekends to relax and unwind?

This 14, almost 15 year old I have in my household

is obsessed with baseball.

So starting in April, every weekend

you will find me at a baseball travel tournament

somewhere in the state of Georgia or Florida

in my camp chair with my cooler full of cold drinks

watching teenagers play baseball.

I know that life.

It's just soccer for me, but I get awesome.

I really appreciate you being here today.

Thank you so much.

And I'm going to let you get back to it

because I know it's a busy week for you.

But thank you again for being here

and thank you all for joining us

and listening in on this episode of Georgia Politics podcast.

Thanks so much.

Thank you Lindsey.

This is great fun.