U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler speaks at the State Capitol after qualifying for the 2020 election on March 2, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – The Justice Department has dropped an investigation of stock transactions U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and two Senate colleagues made following a closed-door briefing in January on the looming coronavirus pandemic, Loeffler’s office confirmed Tuesday.
Loeffler, a wealthy Atlanta businesswoman, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., turned over documents to investigators after political opponents and media reports called attention to the buying and selling of millions of dollars in stocks by the three senators shortly after the briefing.
A fourth senator, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, remains under investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Loeffler has said the stock transactions were made by a third-party advisor without her input.
Last month, she liquidated her holdings in individual stocks and converted those assets into broader exchange-traded funds and mutual funds. At the time, she said she was doing so not because of any wrongdoing but to end the distraction over false allegations.
“Today’s clear exoneration by the Department of Justice affirms what Senator Loeffler has said all along – she did nothing wrong,” Loeffler campaign spokesman Stephen Lawson said Tuesday. “This was a politically motivated attack shamelessly promoted by the fake news media and her political opponents.”
Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Loeffler to the Senate last December to succeed retiring Sen. Johnny Isakson on an interim basis. To finish out Isakson’s six-term, she must win in November in a crowded “free-for-all” contest featuring 21 candidates, including both Republicans and Democrats.
The field of hopefuls includes U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, and – on the Democratic side – the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church; Matt Lieberman, son of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman of Connecticut; and former U.S. Attorney Ed Tarver of Augusta.
Left to right: Sens. John Wilkinson, Butch Miller, Ellis Black and Jesse Stone of the Senate Appropriations Education Subcommittee discuss budget cuts on May 26, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Story by Beau Evans and Dave Williams Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The state could avoid furloughing pre-school teachers if they would be willing to absorb pay cuts rather than stay home, members of a Georgia Senate budget subcommittee suggested Tuesday.
The Senate Appropriations Education Subcommittee kicked off two weeks of hearings on 14% spending cuts agencies across state government are being asked to make to offset the loss of tax revenues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Disagreements over how and where to make those cuts surfaced immediately, with some senators pitching the idea for preschool teachers to take a salary cut instead of saving costs by reducing the school year by several days.
“I am personally very much opposed to across-the-board cuts,” said Sen. Ellis Black, R-Valdosta, who chairs the education subcommittee. “I think we need to make cuts based on the needs.”
Dozens of state agencies submitted proposals last week for budget reductions totaling about $3.5 billion for the 2021 fiscal year, which starts July 1. The proposals were requested by top budget-writing lawmakers in the General Assembly, who are poised to make passing the budget the top priority once the legislature reconvenes next month.
If passed as is, the 14% cuts would translate to furloughs and layoffs for teachers, social workers, prosecutors and more, according to a review of agency proposals released last week. That would help close Georgia’s expected $3 billion to $4 billion tax revenue shortfall, though critics have called for raising revenues rather than spending cuts.
From the start of Tuesday’s meeting, influential Republican members of the Senate education subcommittee disagreed over whether the state’s roughly 80,000 preschool students should be forced to take off 13 instructional days or whether their teachers should have smaller salaries for the time being.
In the worst-case scenario, a 14% budget reduction would slice more than $61 million from the state Department of Early Care and Learning, which oversees Georgia’s pre-kindergarten programs. To bridge that funding gap, agency officials have proposed reducing the school year by 13 days, eliminating 4,000 open slots for preschool students and closing 180 pre-k classrooms statewide, Commissioner Amy Jacobs said.
“You can imagine, that is quite an impact to Georgia’s pre-k program,” Jacobs said.
The assessment by Jacobs prompted some members of the education subcommittee to wonder whether having teachers work for less pay would be a better course than taking 13 school days away from students.
Black floated the idea of teachers taking a “special virus deduction” in their salaries to avoid the 13-day shortening of the school calendar.
“If we follow through with this, they’re going to be getting less money and the kids will be getting less education,” Ellis said. “The question is how dedicated are these teachers and are they willing to make that much of a sacrifice so these kids can get that education.”
Sen. Jesse Stone, R-Waynesboro, framed a teacher pay cut as a sacrifice during a tough time, without which children might suffer from fewer educational opportunities.
“Everybody has to make sacrifices on a temporary basis,” Stone said. “But we’re imposing the sacrifices on the public and in this case the children.”
But the proposition drew pushback from Sen. John Wilkinson, R-Toccoa, who said pay cuts would also have to be distributed across other agencies like the state Department of Corrections. Just forcing teachers to work for less pay would not be fair, he said.
“I think we need to be very careful and look at the big picture,” Wilkinson said. “I think you’ve got to look across the board.”
For her part, Jacobs, the agency commissioner, said she doubts there would be much appetite among educators for the pay-cut plan.
“I can’t imagine that they would look favorably upon that if they’re having to work more days for less pay,” Jacobs said. “I think there needs to be a hard look at what lottery revenues look like.”
The $61 million in cuts was the bleakest of several options Jacobs gave lawmakers and would depend on whether there is a steep decline in Georgia Lottery revenues, which the agency relies on heavily. So far, lottery sales have remained stable while the pandemic continues hammering other sectors of Georgia’s economy.
The word from other agency heads who testified Tuesday was less dramatic. Several department heads told members of the Senate Appropriations Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee they plan to avoid layoffs or furloughs by freezing vacant positions and shifting available federal funds into positions that otherwise would face elimination.
“We wanted to avoid furloughs,” said Richard Dunn, director of the state Environmental Protection Division. “We have a lot of competition for the talent we have. I was afraid furloughs would wreck that.”
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Gary Black, whose agency faces $5.6 million in spending reductions, said he’s relying on eliminating vacancies and shifting full-time employees from jobs targeted for elimination into other duties. While some food safety inspector jobs are getting the axe, Black said meat inspectors would be exempt from the cuts.
However, the department’s marketing and promotional efforts would take a big hit. The agency’s Georgia Grown program will not have a presence this year at either the Georgia National Fair in Perry or the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Black said.
“It is unrealistic to suggest this plan will not impact services,” he said.
The full General Assembly will reconvene in mid-June to wrap up the 2020 legislative session, though an official date has not yet been set.
Counties in South Georgia see low completion rates for the 2020 U.S. Census in this map created on May 22, 2020. (U.S. Census Bureau)
Georgia is lagging in its count of the 2020 U.S. Census as outreach workers struggle reaching communities in isolated areas for counting amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The decennial count affects the state’s share of a huge pot of federal dollars given annually for a wide range of programs like Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps, housing vouchers, highway construction, child-care services, special education and more.
Roughly $1.5 trillion will be available for states to tap into depending on the size of their census-determined populations, according to research from Georgia Washington University. The larger the population, the larger the share.
But so far, only 56% of households in Georgia have filled out the census this year, far fewer than the 72% completion rate the state saw in 2010, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The low response rate ranks Georgia 35th among all states and trails the national average by about 4%.
That has prompted worry among local workers and volunteers tasked with boosting Georgia’s census count this year.
“From a statewide standpoint, we’re just not doing well,” said Michele NeSmith, research and policy development director for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. “Unfortunately, the counties with the worst response rates are the ones that need to have as accurate a count as possible.”
The bulk of the undercounting is in rural parts of the state that were already at risk of flying under the radar due to poor access to the internet, which is how most people complete the census.
As of Friday, 32 counties – mostly in rural South Georgia – of the state’s 159 counties had a census completion rate of less than 40%, according to Census Bureau data. Combined, just 15% of those counties’ residents had filled out the census via the internet.
Those counties are already experiencing population declines that could be worsened if less federal funding is available due to census undercounting, said Rusty Haygood, a deputy commissioner for the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, who is co-leading the statewide census outreach effort.
“This is the area that I’m most concerned with, us getting on the ground and getting some good responses in the near future,” Haygood said.
Metro areas have not been spared from the low census rates, though the trend is being seen most dramatically in rural South Georgia. To date, completion rates are down roughly 5% or more in Fulton, DeKalb and Cherokee counties in metro Atlanta, as well as counties covering other metro areas including Augusta, Savannah, Brunswick, Athens, Macon, Valdosta and Columbus.
The counting shortfall has coincided with social-distancing practices prompted by coronavirus, which quickly handcuffed outreach volunteers who had been planning for months to help people in hard-to-reach areas take the census in local libraries, churches and big events that have been shuttered.
Door-to-door Census Bureau workers were set to start canvassing houses where people had not completed the census earlier this month. But with concerns still high over the virus’ spread, that kind of close-contact outreach has not happened yet.
“We are getting farther and farther away from the national average,” said Anna Miller, planning and research director for the state Office of Planning and Budget, who is co-leading statewide outreach with Haygood. “So it’s not great. We have some work to do.”
Food banks and other meal programs have picked up some of the slack as many people have been encouraged to take the census while picking up lunches for themselves or out-of-school children. But outreach workers had planned to lean more on churches and other common social spots to drum up interest in the census before those establishments started closing in March.
One group, the nonprofit Fair Count, had installed wireless internet and laptops in 140 churches, daycares, community centers, barber shops and other establishments in hard-to-count areas for people to take the census before the virus hit. One a third of those establishments have since reopened. The group also embarked a 50-stop bus tour to promote the census but had to pause the tour after only six stops.
Now, Fair Count is planning a largely virtual push to boost census participation via phone banks, text messaging, online events, tele-town halls and local media interviews, said the group’s program director, Ed Reed. But outreach workers across the state are also having to balance urging people to take the census and being mindful of the tough economic and health issues that the virus has brought them.
“We are finding that the census is not necessarily a priority on people’s minds,” Reed said. “They are worried about the job they lost or the health of a family member.”
Miller, Haygood, Reed and dozens more state and local leaders working on census outreach are now eying moves by the federal government to extend the timeline for wrapping up the census. Lately, they have seen promising signs of the outreach campaign’s revival.
Importantly, Census Bureau workers reopened offices May 11 in Georgia after being shuttered for weeks due to coronavirus. They began mailing out census questionnaires in mid-May and are poised to start door-to-door outreach in August for people who have not returned their census.
Congress is also expected to approve deadline extensions that will allow the Census Bureau to formally submit census data to the president by the end of April 2021, instead of the original deadline at the end of December 2020.
That could also push back the timeline for state lawmakers to begin negotiations next summer over redrawing General Assembly and congressional district boundaries, which are also dependent on census-driven population counts.
Meanwhile, members of a state committee tasked with overseeing census outreach met Wednesday to start rekindling marketing campaigns. With $1.5 million on hand, the committee initially planned to launch television and online advertisements last month but now aims to do so in July and August.
The committee is also reaching back out to hundreds of county, city and neighborhood census-outreach groups that were set to play a key role in raising awareness of the count before coronavirus hit.
Like Fair Count, those groups will need to rely more on virtual outreach for the foreseeable future as social distancing remains a widespread practice, said Holger Loewendorf, a research analyst with the Georgia Municipal Association.
“While we can’t do big personal outreach events and hand physical objects to people to promote the census, we’ll have to find other ways,” Loewendorf said. “We’re working on that.”
Particularly challenging for outreach workers will be locating and counting thousands of college students who left campus as state universities and schools started shutting down in March. That movement is already affecting census counts in college towns like Athens, where roughly 10% fewer census forms have been returned compared to 2010.
Still, census workers and volunteers like Haygood view the upcoming outreach push this summer as critical. He stressed Georgians should not accept having a low census count and less federal funding just because coronavirus has made tallying up people more difficult.
“Coronavirus did impact us,” Haygood said. “But coronavirus is not our excuse. We can’t lay everything at the foot of coronavirus.”
ATLANTA – Georgia lawmakers will get their first look next week at how deep state agencies must cut their budgets to comply with spending reductions the legislature’s leading budget writers ordered in the wake of coronavirus.
Revised fiscal 2021 budget proposals the agencies submitted this week would freeze vacant positions, furlough workers and scale back vital programs and services to achieve $3 billion to $4 billion in cuts to offset the impact of declining tax revenues resulting from the pandemic-driven lockdown of the state’s economy.
Starting on Tuesday, Georgia Senate budget subcommittees will begin examining the spending cuts state agency heads have offered. The Senate gets first crack at the revised budget because the state House of Representatives passed a pre-coronavirus version of the budget in mid-March, shortly before the pandemic forced the 2020 legislative session to be temporarily suspended.
While the targeted spending reduction in the revised budget is 14% across the board, some cuts are larger and some are smaller.
A sampling of the proposed reductions includes:
a 50% cut in state support for charter schools, for a savings of about $2.1 million.
closing six of the nine state farmers markets leaving only the markets in Atlanta, Valdosta and Moultrie, for a savings of $780,028.
reducing grant funds to county boards of health by $17.8 million.
closing 50 Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) offices, for a savings of $1.6 million.
freezing vacant corrections officer positions in state prisons, for a savings of about $9 million.
12-day furloughs for employees throughout the Department of Public Health, the agency in the front lines of the fight against COVID-19, for a savings of about $1.8 million.
24-day furloughs for employees in the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, which services the state’s mentally ill population.
eliminating 111 part-time and 41 full-time staff at the Department of Driver Services.
Such steep reductions would be counterproductive to the state’s economic recovery as well as devastating to Georgia families, said Danny Kanso, a policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
“Layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes will only slow Georgia’s economy and exacerbate the problems underscored by COVID-19,” Kanso said.
“Based on current agency proposals, public health departments working hard to combat the virus will lose millions in funding, public schools will be underfunded by $1.5 billion, causing teachers to be furloughed and class sizes to increase, and the millions of newly unemployed Georgians seeking to enroll in necessary financial supports … will experience longer delays in receiving their benefits.”
State agencies will be able to offset the impact of some of the cuts by swapping in available federal funds for state dollars. For example, the DFCS budget proposal calls for drawing down $46.2 million in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding left over from the last fiscal year.
In its budget submission, the Department of Community Health (DCH) notes the availability of federal stimulus funds Congress has allocated to help state Medicaid programs with their coronavirus response. However, the agency points out that money will only be available during the public health emergency declared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“There is a risk that if the current situation improves and the [HHS] secretary declares that the emergency no longer exists, then the entire estimated savings will not be realized,” the DCH wrote.
Another limit on the federal largesse is that the stimulus funds Congress has approved for state and local governments thus far may only be spent addressing COVID-19, not to plug holes in the budget opened up by falling tax revenues.
The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed an additional stimulus package last week with $1 trillion earmarked for state and local governments, most of which could be put toward revenue shortfalls. But the measure looks to be a long shot in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate.
“We have to deal with the cards we have on the table right now,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia.
Tillery’s committee has scheduled seven subcommittee hearings during the next two weeks to take up budget-cutting proposals from various agencies.
The full General Assembly is due to resume the legislative session in mid-June, facing a tight legal deadline of July 1 to pass next year’s budget.
Coronavirus has sickened thousands of people in Georgia and killed hundreds. (Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Gov. Brian Kemp urged Georgians Thursday to have patience with public health officials amid reports over questionable data-keeping methods for positive cases of coronavirus in the state.
The governor’s request came as the state Department of Public Health acknowledged in local news reports that it is combining test results for viral and antibody testing, which health experts worry could skew data trends that guide the state’s response and economic recovery.
At a news conference Thursday, Kemp said public health officials have been “working at breakneck speed” to collect testing data and organize the results in practical ways. That has led to some slip-ups in the way testing data has been presented on the agency’s website in recent weeks.
“We’re not perfect,” Kemp said. “We’ve made mistakes [and] when we do that, we’ll own that, change it and make sure people are aware of that.”
“Please afford them some patience and steer clear of personal attacks,” the governor added.
Meanwhile, the number of people hospitalized for coronavirus has fallen sharply over the past several weeks to below 1,000 patients this week, marking a promising sign the virus may be slowing.
That trend comes as state officials are sending out more personal protective equipment to hospitals, creating a training program for disinfecting elderly care facilities and boosting staff for Georgia’s new contact-tracing program.
As of 1 p.m. Thursday, more than 40,000 people in Georgia had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel strain of coronavirus that sparked a global pandemic. It had killed 1,754 Georgians.
For the last several weeks, Kemp has touted testing data that shows a declining trend in the number of people who have tested positive for coronavirus compared to those whose results were negative.
Mass testing to confirm whether a person has contracted coronavirus is critical for health officials to pinpoint where new outbreaks may be cropping up, as many people begin resuming aspects of their normal lives following Kemp’s May 1 decision to end the state’s mandatory shelter-in-place order.
But state health officials acknowledged this week that antibody test results are being grouped in with the total number of test results, according to multiple news outlets. Antibody testing is meant to find signs that a person may have contracted coronavirus in the past, not whether that person is currently infected like viral testing does. Lumping those antibody results with viral testing could make the state’s infection rate appear lower than it actually is.
Dr. Kathleen Toomey, the state’s public health commissioner, said Thursday the agency is instituting checks to avoid future data errors as well as ways to improve the layout for its website, where the public has access to the data.
She also emphasized the tough task health officials have in collecting huge amounts of data each day from a variety of sources like private doctors and local hospitals.
“This is an unprecedented ask of surveillance to be this agile and expand this quickly,” Toomey said. “We’re working diligently.”
Toomey also stressed that officials are considering many different types of data and pieces of information, not just positive test results.
“A website or data here or there should not be the holy grail,” Toomey said. “It’s just one piece, one tool that we use.”
One new source of data being used by health officials to contain the virus is contact tracing, which tracks the interactions a person infected with coronavirus has had with other people.
Toomey said about 500 contact tracers have been hired so far, with another 500 tracers on track to be hired by mid-June. To date, those tracers have conducted interviews with more than 3,300 coronavirus-infected persons and identified more than 9,000 people with whom they interacted.
She said whether people agree to meet and share information with contact tracers will make the difference in the state’s ability to fight the disease into the future.
“It is the cooperation of the community that will make this effect, not how many people we have on board,” Toomey said.
