ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate passed legislation Tuesday aimed at loosening training requirements for volunteer fire departments in the state.
Senate Bill 342 would create a council tasked
with establishing training and certification rules for volunteer fire
departments in Georgia that are separate from those required for full-time
professional fire departments.
The bill passed the Senate unanimously
and heads to the Georgia House for consideration.
Its sponsor, Sen. Burt Jones, said the
measure’s intent is to loosen training requirements for volunteer firefighters.
Currently, volunteers receive the same kind of stringent training that
professional firefighters are required to take.
Jones, R-Jackson, said tougher training may
scare off qualified people interested in volunteering particularly in rural
areas where volunteer firehouses are often critical to a community’s public
safety readiness.
“This will alleviate those requirements
and hopefully improve our volunteer network again,” Jones said.
The bill would hand oversight functions
to a new seven-member Georgia Volunteer Fire Service Council tasked with
establishing training programs for volunteer firefighters and certifying anyone
who has received training as a federal firefighter.
It would also prohibit persons with
felony convictions from joining a volunteer firehouse, unless more than five
years have passed since the conviction and the person has both completed a
training program and been recommended by the trainers.
Last week, Senate Public Safety Committee
Chairman John Albers, R-Roswell, said changing the rules for volunteer
firefighters would greatly help rural parts of the state that are stretched
thin in terms of fire-safety resources.
“We all need to remember that the grand
majority of the land mass of this state is covered by rural volunteer
firefighters,” Albers said. “We want to make sure we set them up for success
and we’re doing the right things in order to maintain safety in each one of
those communities.”
ATLANTA – Legislation to reduce the number of standardized tests public school students must take in Georgia advanced in the state Senate on Monday.
Senate Bill 367, which would nix five tests and give the state Department of Education more leeway on how and when to administer two dozen other tests, passed unanimously out of the Senate Education and Youth Committee.
Under the bill, four tests would be
yanked from the roster of exams Georgia high schoolers would have to take.
Another test in social studies would be nixed for fifth graders.
Tests to be eliminated would include
American literature, geometry, physical science and economics.
The bill’s sponsor, Education Committee
Chairman P.K. Martin, said end-of-year testing in Georgia has grown too
rigorous.
“The testing has been too much,” said
Martin, R-Lawrenceville.
Representatives from several teachers’
groups voiced support for the bill at Monday’s committee hearing, including the
Professional Association of Georgia Educators and the Georgia Association of
Educators (GAE).
They highlighted how easing test
requirements would help relieve stress on both students and teachers.
“We test our kids to death,” GAE President Charlotte Booker said. “There comes a time when we have to say enough is enough.”
Besides fewer tests, the legislation would require the remaining tests to be given within 25 days of the school year’s end instead of at any time, so that teachers could focus more on teaching class subjects rather than preparing for exams.
Additionally, the changes would allow school districts discontinue a practice comparing Georgia’s testing standards with other states, and let them abstain from “formative assessments” meant to see how much students learned in a school year.
Amid an outpouring of support from local
educators, the bill prompted Gwinnett County Public Schools Superintendent J.
Alvin Wilbanks to call for a deeper probe of how to tighten Georgia’s
standardized testing regimen.
“I don’t know that it will be the best
for education,” Wilbanks said. “But I think it will make a lot of people who
are in education happy.”
The bill has backing from both Gov. Brian
Kemp and Georgia Schools Superintendent Richard Woods.
Kemp has made rolling back some
standardized tests in Georgia a key component of changes he wants to see for
the state’s public schools.
Woods, meanwhile, said fewer tests and
other changes outlined in the bill would make for a more accurate assessment of
what students have learned over the past year.
“We are not getting rid of tests,” Woods
told committee lawmakers Monday. “I think we are testing smarter instead of
harder.”
ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate passed legislation Monday that would bring additional scrutiny to the state’s lucrative tax credit and exemption programs.
Senate Bill 302, sponsored by Sen. John Albers, would let the governor’s budget office contract with outside auditors to examine up to five tax-incentive programs each year, upon request from certain committee heads.
The measure passed unanimously and heads
to the Georgia House.
Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed a similar bill
brought last year by Albers, R-Roswell, that did not give the budget office the
ability to contract with independent auditors to complete the audits.
Under this year’s bill, auditors would
dive into the economic pros and cons of the state’s many tax credits,
exemptions, rebates, deferrals and other business incentives that can fly under
state lawmakers’ radar during busy legislative sessions.
Only the chairs of the Senate Finance
Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee could order the audits.
“I believe this is great fiscal policy
for us,” Albers said from the Senate floor Monday.
Albers’ bill followed a Senate study committee
report done in 2017 that found shortcomings in how the state monitors whether a
given tax incentive is spurring business and job creation as it was intended to
do.
It also came amid back-to-back reports
from the state Department of Audits and Accounts 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.
Some local economists have pushed back on the findings of those two audits, noting they ignored the huge impacts the state’s film industry has even if the tax credit’s metrics and rules may be looser than they should be.
Even so, the film-credit audits spurred
calls from state lawmaker to keep closer watch over tax breaks and credits in
Georgia.
ATLANTA – Investments
in freight rail would land a permanent spot in annual state budgets under
legislation the Georgia House of Representatives passed overwhelmingly on
Monday.
House Bill 820, which was approved 162-1 and now heads to the state Senate, was among the recommendations of the Georgia Freight & Logistics Commission, a task force of legislators, business leaders and logistics industry executives formed last year to look for ways to move freight more efficiently through the state.
While the
bill does not guarantee state funding of freight rail projects, giving freight
rail a permanent line item in the budget would encourage more state investment
in badly needed rail improvements, said House Transportation Committee Chairman
Kevin Tanner, the measure’s chief sponsor.
“We have a
shortfall in investment in rail infrastructure in our state,” Tanner,
R-Dawsonville, told his House colleagues before Monday’s vote. “There’s just
not enough dollars in the budget.”
Tanner said
freight rail investment is particularly needed at the Port of Savannah, where
the amount of cargo handled each year is expected to double by 2040.
House
Majority Leader Jon Burns, R-Newington, said only 27% of freight moved through
Georgia travels by rail.
“Anything we
can do to increase that number will take traffic off our roadways,” he said.
The Georgia
Freight & Logistics Commission was due to complete its work by the end of
last year. However, a separate bill sponsored by Tanner calls for keeping the
task force alive through 2020.
A report the
commission released recently identified a series of challenges facing freight
transportation in Georgia. Tanner’s bill asks for additional time so the
commission can come up with solutions to those challenges.
ATLANTA – Legislation aimed at ending surprise bills for emergency hospital visits in Georgia under certain insurance plans passed unanimously out of the Georgia Senate on Monday.
Senate Bill 359, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, would prohibit hospitals from handing patients unexpectedly large bills for emergency procedures done by specialists who are outside that hospital’s coverage network.
If passed, the measure by Hufstetler,
R-Rome, could save patients thousands of dollars in surprise costs for
specialty procedures like anesthesiology. It would require medical providers
and insurers to work out how to pay for costly out-of-network procedures
performed at a patient’s in-network hospital.
It would not, however, include
employer-based private insurance plans or costs associated with specialty
procedures done in out-of-network hospitals.
Hufstetler said the federal Employee
Retirement Income Security Act prohibits state lawmakers from tampering with
private-sector health plans.
“We simply have no method of doing so,”
Hufstetler said from the Senate floor.
Despite the limitations, supporters have
hailed Hufstetler’s bill and an identical measure winding its way through the
Georgia House as a means to protect many Georgia patients from crippling
surprise hospital charges.
Rather than dropping the full cost for
specialty procedures on a patient, the two measures would force insurers and
doctors to work out how to pay the extra costs for out-of-network procedures
done at in-network hospitals.
Disputes over the final payment would be
settled by an arbitration process overseen by the state Department of
Insurance. In that scenario, the insurance company would propose one payment
amount for a procedure and the doctor would propose another. A contracted
arbitrator would pick one of those amounts.
That process would apply for emergency
hospital visits and non-emergency procedures that are “medically necessary,”
Hufstetler said. Patients could still choose to pay extra for non-elective
emergency procedures that are out of a hospital’s coverage network.
The identical measure to Hufstetler’s, House Bill 888, was scheduled for a second committee hearing Monday afternoon. It was sent back to the House Special Committee on Access to Quality Health Care after barely passing out of that committee by a 5-4 vote last week.
The two bills’ progress through the
General Assembly comes with high hopes from state lawmakers, doctors, insurers
and consumer advocates after years of legislative false starts.
Medical specialists have argued they are
underpaid for performing complex technical procedures under in-network
insurance arrangements, while insurers claim those specialists charge too much.
Some disagreement remains on both sides
over proposed baseline billing rates for specialty procedures and the details
of a new all-claims database where arbitration decisions would be logged. The
baseline rates and database would influence how the prices of medical
procedures would change over time.
But several representatives for insurance
groups and doctors said in committee meetings earlier this month that they
largely feel satisfied with the House and Senate bills.
