Just one thing may keep Gov. Roy Barnes from giving tobacco farmers a share of the state's $4.8 billion tobacco settlement: the Georgia Constitution.

Direct payments to farmers might violate the constitution's so-called gratuities clause, Barnes told the Georgia Tobacco Community Development Board on Thursday. That clause, he said, prohibits the state from simply giving money away to private citizens unless it gets something of value in return. "We've got a little problem here," Barnes said. It could be a political problem for the governor. He has repeatedly vowed to use part of the settlement proceeds to compensate tobacco farmers for their mounting losses, which they attribute to financial pressures in the tobacco industry created by its $204 billion national settlement with the states. "Your suit caused us to lose 45 percent of our income," Marcus Collins, the tobacco board's executive director, told Barnes, who became governor after the tobacco lawsuit was settled. "The state lawsuit ran over us poor farmers." Tobacco farmers, said board member Donnie H. Smith, want "compensation," not "gratuities." "You can come up with something," Smith told the governor. Barnes said he would appoint a task force to study ways to get around the gratuities clause. Among the options, according to John Ballard, an assistant state attorney general, are a loan program, scholarships for farmers' relatives and a welfare program for tobacco farmers. The state could buy part of the tobacco crops that farmers are allowed to grow, but Barnes said he doubted farmers would like that idea. Whatever option Barnes chooses, Ballard said in a memo to the governor's office, "the more tenuous the benefit to the state, the more difficult would be the legal argument that the gratuities clause is satisfied." The idea of paying tobacco farmers with tobacco settlement proceeds upsets anti-smoking activists. They say the state sued the tobacco industry for two reasons: to recoup money spent treating the smoking-related illnesses of Medicaid recipients and to fund smoking prevention programs. "I'm sure there are a lot of economic needs that cry out to be addressed," said June Deen, a vice president of the American Lung Association's Georgia chapter. "But when we're looking at expending these funds, health needs and tobacco disease prevention needs should be the priority. Let's spend the money for what we got it for." Just $15.8 million of the first $150 million in tobacco money allocated by the Legislature went to smoking prevention. But $62.1 million went to the OneGeorgia Authority, a new agency chaired by the governor that will promote rural economic development. That's where Barnes wants to get the money for payments to tobacco farmers. The governor has not decided how much he wants to pay the farmers, said Joselyn Butler, Barnes' press secretary. But he told the tobacco board that other states are considering similar giveaways, and "Georgia farmers ought to be treated equally with any others."

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