ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate unanimously passed a bill Tuesday that would let city and county governments decide how to regulate e-scooters in their own backyards.
A Senate study committee considered last fall whether to
apply statewide rules to the motorized scooters, which have proliferated in
cities across the country including Atlanta.
A dozen Georgia cities have banned e-scooters recently.
Atlanta, which still allows them, has placed a ban on riding the devices at
night and on sidewalks following several deaths involving vehicles and scooter
riders.
Ultimately, state lawmakers went with a hands-off approach
in Senate Bill 159, which would only limit the devices to speeds of up to 20
miles per hour and to a maximum weight of 100 pounds.
Sponsored by Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, the bill
approved Tuesday explicitly gives cities the authority for regulating
e-scooters.
The bill has fewer provisions than when it was originally
filed such as allowing e-scooters to use bicycle lanes and imposing caps for
impound fees.
The light touch is meant to let e-scooters and other transit
technology develop further in order to help ease traffic congestion, Gooch
said.
“We didn’t want to overregulate the industry. We didn’t want
to put a lot of barriers in the way,” Gooch said Tuesday from the Senate floor.
“In fact, we wanted to encourage the development of this technology.”
An amendment was added Tuesday calling for local governments
to consider requiring e-scooter companies to hold liability insurance.
“There’s a consideration that needs to be taken into account
when the local governments set their regulations,” said Sen. Lindsey Tippins,
R-Marietta, who authored the insurance amendment.
The bill passed by 47-0 in the Senate. It now heads to the
state House.
Gooch hashed out the hands-off approach during the study
committee hearings last fall. He and other lawmakers decided fewer state rules
would be best for e-scooters.
At the time, Gooch said he agreed the scooters needed some
regulating but that he wanted to “offer a private-sector solution to a problem
that’s been around for years.”
E-scooter proponents have said the devices help ease traffic
congestion in heavily crowded areas like Atlanta and provide a more environmentally
friendly mode of transportation than cars.
ATLANTA – A push to give Georgians the legal ability to sue the state and local governments has been revived in the General Assembly, but it may not go as far as some lawmakers would like.
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Andrew
Welch, R-McDonough, would ask voters whether they should be allowed to sue
government agencies to overturn unconstitutional actions.
As a constitutional amendment, his
measure would need two-thirds approval from the legislature before going on the
ballot.
Currently, Georgia law prohibits the state
or local governments from being sued for most reasons under a legal protection
called “sovereign immunity.”
Under Welch’s proposed amendment,
Georgians could sue their government to secure a judge’s order blocking an
unconstitutional law. It would not allow winning plaintiffs to collect monetary
awards.
“We are trying to look at a very concise
approach to this waiver,” Welch said Monday during a meeting of a House
subcommittee he chairs.
If passed, the amendment also would
require citizens to sue the government or agency itself, not an individual.
Government officials themselves would have to be sued by other provisions under
state law besides constitutional grievances.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur,
took issue with that limitation but said she still supported the constitutional
amendment.
“I’m a little concerned that we seem to
be taking a step back” just to get some sort of legislation passed, Oliver said
at the subcommittee hearing.
The measure passed unanimously Monday and
now moves to the full House Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over civil
law.
Welch brought similar legislation last
year that both the state House and Senate passed unanimously. But Gov. Brian
Kemp vetoed it, arguing the waiver would hurt the government’s ability to
function.
Former Gov. Nathan Deal also vetoed a
similar bill that passed in 2016.
Bids to undo sovereign immunity stem from
Georgia Supreme Court rulings that gave state and local governments broad
leeway in claiming sovereign immunity. But the high court also opened the door
for lawmakers to pass a waiver removing that legal protection.
“Put simply, the constitutional doctrine
of sovereign immunity forbids our courts to entertain a lawsuit against the
state without its consent,” Justice Keith Blackwell wrote in his opinion in a
2017 ruling.
ATLANTA – The
Georgia House of Representatives is putting forth its own version of “surprise
billing” legislation.
A committee
the House formed last year to explore ways to increase access to quality health
care passed a bill Monday to set up a rating system Georgians could use to
determine which physician specialty groups in their insurance plan’s provider
network serve a given hospital.
The measure
would apply to anesthesiologists, pathologists, radiologists and emergency room
doctors, typically specialists responsible for the most incidents of surprise
billing, the extra hospital charges that result from procedures performed by
out-of-network specialists.
The
legislation would strike a blow for transparency in the delivery of health-care
services, said Rep. Mark Newton, R-Augusta, the committee’s chairman and the
bill’s chief sponsor.
“If I want
to have elective surgery … I don’t know if the anesthesiologist at my hospital
is in my network,” he said. “I have no way to find out.”
Under the
House bill, when an insurance company advertises a hospital as in its coverage network,
the insurer would be required to disclose that hospital’s “surprise bill
rating.” If the hospital’s rating is less than four, the insurer would have to
disclose which of the four types of specialties are not in its network.
Kathleen
Polvino, legal counsel for the Tifton-based Georgia Alliance of Community
Hospitals, said the organization supports greater transparency in hospital
billing. But she said the proposed rating system could cause confusion among patients,
who might interpret a rating of less than four as a negative mark on a
hospital.
“Patients
might not know what it means,” she said. “We don’t want it to look like a
hospital has failed.”
Newton
responded that the proposed rating is meant to apply to insurance plans rather
than hospitals.
“It will
bring a spotlight of transparency on health plans,” he said.
Rep. Spencer
Frye, D-Athens, the only committee member to vote against the bill, said he
doesn’t believe it goes far enough.
“If we’re
going to tackle this, we should be reining in these out-of-control insurance
companies,” he said.
A Senate
bill on surprise billing, in fact, would go further than the House measure. The
legislation, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, would essentially prohibit
the practice. Disputes between insurance companies and medical providers would
be subject to arbitration conducted by the state Office of Insurance.
The Senate bill
is pending before the Senate Insurance and Labor Committee. The House legislation
needs only to clear the House Rules Committee, the chamber’s traffic cop for
bills, before heading to the House floor.
Lucrative tax exemptions and credits in
Georgia could come under close watch from independent auditors under a bill
that passed out of a Senate committee on Monday.
Senate Bill 302 comes after a scathing
set of audits the state Department of Audits and Accounts released last month
that found Georgia’s film tax credit has been poorly managed while being touted
as having more economic impact on the state than it actually does.
Sponsored by Sen. John Albers, the legislation
would let the governor’s budget office contract with outside auditors to
scrutinize up to five tax-incentive programs each year, upon request from state
lawmakers.
Auditors would dive into the economic
pros and cons of the state’s many tax credits, exemptions, rebates, deferrals
and other business incentives.
“All the things that each one of us would
do if we were investing our money,” Albers, R-Roswell, said Monday of the
audit’s scope.
The bill passed unanimously out of the
Senate Finance Committee and heads to the floor for a vote of the full Senate.
Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, the committee’s
chair, said tightening oversight of tax programs would help put Georgia on par
with other states that do a better job tracking the performance of their incentives.
“We can do better here at making sure
we’re making the best use of taxpayers’ dollars,” Hufstetler, R-Rome, said
Monday.
Albers’ bill follows similar legislation
he brought last year that Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed since it did not give his
office authority to hire independent auditors.
Albers and Hufstetler both sat on a
Senate study committee in 2017 that found shortcomings in monitoring whether a
given tax incentive is spurring business and job creation as it was intended to
do.
The committee’s report looked at several
different tax credits, including the film tax-credit program, and found some of
them were either too tough to evaluate or were potentially not spurring
economic growth.
It recommended creating the kind of
auditing oversight that Albers’ bill proposes, as well as for all tax-incentive
measures in the state to sunset after five years.
That 2017 report seemed to predict the
harsh criticism state auditors heaped on Georgia’s film tax credit program last
month.
In two back-to-back reports, the state
auditing agency found the credit program generates about $1 billion less in
statewide economic impact than estimates from the state Department of Economic
Development had claimed.
That agency and the Department of Revenue
have also kept shoddy controls over the program, leading to many credits being
doled out improperly to companies that should not actually qualify, according
to state auditors.
The pair of reports put the film-credit
program under fire in the early days of the 2020 legislative session as the General
Assembly began tackling tough budget issues. But prominent lawmakers like House
Speaker David Ralston have pledged to block any efforts to abolish the credit.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan,
R-Carrollton, reiterated in an interview last week that the film tax credit
might be tweaked eventually but will not be outright discarded.
“Nobody wants to get rid of film tax
credits,” Dugan said.
ATLANTA – A bill that would allow crematories in Georgia to use dissolving chemicals along with the usual furnace burning cleared the Georgia Senate on Monday.
Senate Bill 296 would permit crematories
to undertake the process of alkaline hydrolysis, which combines water, alkaline
chemicals, pressure and heat to liquify most human remains. The dissolving
process breaks down fat and tissues into liquid, leaving behind bone fragments.
Alkaline hydrolysis, or “aquamation”, is
used as an alternative to traditional fire-burning furnaces or burials in
several states, according to the advocacy group Cremation Association of North
America. The group describes it as more environmentally friendly, a “gentler
process.”
Sen. Bill Heath, the legislation’s
sponsor, said he brought it to clarify that Georgia law already permits
alkaline hydrolysis on paper but the state board that licenses funeral homes
still does not permit it.
Heath, R-Bremen, said he drafted the bill
after hearing from a crematory owner who bought equipment able to perform
alkaline hydrolysis but was told he could not use it.
“It has been an accepted process,” he
said.
Mindy Miller-Moats, a fourth-generation funeral home operator in Tallapoosa, said she purchased equipment to dissolve bodies as a way to give families another option to cremate their loved ones. The process is fast and produces much less energy than combusting fire, she said.
“Given the option, a lot of families do
find that this is less abrasive than fire,” Miller-Moats said at a Senate
Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee meeting last week.
Asked about the watery discharge from the
dissolved body, Miller-Moats said the “effluent” produced is made up of
harmless compounds like amino acids, sugars, nutrients, salts and soap. Typically,
the dissolved water is flushed into an area’s sewage system for disposal, she
said.
Many sewage treatment utilities consider the
discharge as “a welcome addition” because it can help clean underground pipes, she
added.
“These are all just the basic building blocks of what our bodies are made of,” Miller-Moats said. “This whole process is taking your body’s natural decomposition process and speeding it up.”
She noted the process is also used by research facilities, veterinary hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
The Georgia Funeral Directors Association backs the bill and
alkaline hydrolysis as a more environmentally friendly and efficient cremation
process.
“You’re giving the public a choice (and) this is a much cleaner choice,” said William Hightower, the association’s president.
Still, Senate Minority Leader Steve
Henson, D-Stone Mountain, said he would like to have assurance from state
environmental regulators that the water would indeed be clean before it’s sent
into any wastewater system.
“My big concern is that I would like to make sure that that water is going to be tested,” Henson said at last week’s committee meeting.
Jacqueline Echols, board president of the nonprofit South River Watershed Alliance, agreed funeral homes that dissolve human remains should fall under treatment regulations overseen by the state Environmental Protection Division.
On Monday, Henson also tried to tack an
amendment onto the bill Monday that would give city and county governments the
ability to set their own rules on licensing crematories, but it failed along
party lines.
The bill passed by a 35-10 vote Monday. It now heads to the state House.
This story has been updated to include testimony from the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities committee meeting held on Jan. 28, 2020.
