ATLANTA – Georgia tax collections rebounded somewhat last month from a dismal showing in April but still were down significantly compared to May of last year.
With the economic lockdown forced by the coronavirus pandemic remaining partly in effect, the state Department of Revenue brought in $1.58 billion in May, down 10.1% from the same month a year ago.
In contrast, Georgia tax revenues dropped by nearly 36% in April, a huge drop revenue officials attributed to a decision to postpone tax payment deadlines from April 15 until July 15.
Individual income tax receipts fell by 3.4% last month, largely driven by a large decrease in tax payments – which declined by 38% compared to May 2019 – due to the extended payment deadline.
Net sales taxes showed a much steeper decline, falling by 11.5% in May, while typically more volatile corporate income tax collections were down 40.8%, primarily due to a huge drop-off in corporate income tax return payments of 90.4%.
Monday’s report from the revenue agency was the last state tax receipts information Georgia lawmakers will get before the General Assembly resumes the 2020 legislative session next week. The session was suspended in mid-March due to the pandemic with 11 legislative days remaining on the calendar.
The top order of business will be cutting spending by state agencies by 11% across the board, only a slightly less daunting challenge than the 14% reductions Gov. Brian Kemp had ordered before receiving a more positive revenue forecast last week.
The legislature faces a tight deadline, with fiscal 2021 set to begin July 1.
The Capitol building in Atlanta looms on “crossover” eve on March 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Budget cuts proposed for doctor-training programs at several universities in Georgia amid the coronavirus pandemic drew pushback Monday from some state lawmakers worried maternal care and rural hospitals would suffer with less funding.
Lawmakers homed in on proposed cuts to grant funds totaling roughly $4.5 million for Morehouse School of Medicine and $3.7 million for Mercer University’s School of Medicine to run health-care workforce training programs.
Less spending particularly for Morehouse could hit programs to curb maternal mortality in Georgia especially hard, warned Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Community Health Subcommittee at a hearing Monday.
Those cuts would combine chronic underfunding for maternal care in Georgia with the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on black residents, who also experience high rates of maternal mortality, said Sen. Valencia Seay, D-Riverdale.
“At the end of the day, childbirth should not be where black women are dying,” Seay said Monday. “And to get the proper care, we can’t keep cutting the funds that are helping us to turn out those that are willing and capable of doing what everybody deserves – and that’s access to health care.”
State agencies were asked last month to hand in proposals for cutting their budgets by 14% totaling about $3.5 billion due to the coronavirus-prompted economic slowdown. Gov. Brian Kemp signaled last week agencies may only need to cut their budgets by 11% starting July 1 as state tax revenues are not declining as much as expected.
Funding for maternal care was a sticking point for many lawmakers during earlier budget negotiations, as Kemp called for 4% and 6% cuts to most state spending. Morehouse’s maternal mortality program was spared $500,000 in cuts originally proposed in the 2020 fiscal year budget that lawmakers declined to implement.
On Monday, Seay highlighted how the virus-inspired spending cuts have once again put funding for the Morehouse maternal mortality program in doubt. She and others who spoke at the hearing cited data indicating black women in Georgia are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues than white women, according to a legislative study committee report released earlier this year.
Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, agreed the cuts would hurt Morehouse as well as Mercer’s doctor-training program, both of which help boost physician employment at hospitals in rural parts of the state that tend to go underserved.
Orrock also singled out Morehouse as a historically black institution that plays a critical role in increasing the number of black and other persons of color trained in the health-care field.
“There’s a huge need for it,” Orrock said Monday. “I think it’s an important way for us to demonstrate as a legislature that we understand the need to do everything we can to resource that effort.”
Maternal care advocates also voiced opposition Monday to the proposed cuts in grant funding, which is administered by the state Board of Health Care Workforce. Breana Lipscomb, the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights’ maternal health campaign manager, urged lawmakers to restore $500,000 in funding for Morehouse as well as separate funding on the chopping block for certain maternal mental health programs in the state.
“We are very deeply concerned that the currently proposed cuts will reverse the progress we’ve been making in this state related to maternal mortality,” Lipscomb said Monday.
Sen. Dean Burke, R-Bainbridge, who chairs the subcommittee, stressed none of the proposed budget cuts for state agencies have been settled yet but that lawmakers are “not going to be able to do everything we may like to do.”
Monday’s hearing figured as one of several that budget-writing lawmakers in the Georgia Senate have held in recent weeks to hasten drafting of the 2021 fiscal year budget. The General Assembly is poised to reconvene next week to close out the 2020 legislative session over a hectic two-and-a-half weeks during which the budget will take center stage.
This story has been corrected to reflect that the name of the school is in fact “Morehouse School of Medicine.”
Voters wait in line at a precinct in Cobb County on May 18, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Voters headed to the polls Tuesday for Georgia’s primary elections should expect long lines and wait times at local precincts due to safety measures prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday.
The warning comes after voters at several polling places in the Atlanta area stood in line for hours late into the night on the final day of early voting last Friday, sparking concern from elections officials and voting rights advocates that wait times on Election Day could be worse.
More than 1.2 million Georgians have cast ballots so far by mail and during the early voting period, a record turnout for a primary election that should help curb the amount of in-person voting on Tuesday, Raffensperger said.
But he still expects upwards of 250,000 to 400,000 voters may turn out across the state, spurring long lines as polling places space people six feet apart, take time to clean voting areas and use fewer voting machines to limit capacity.
“Things would be better if we weren’t in this pandemic,” Raffensperger said at a news conference Monday. “But it is what it is.”
Raffensperger also noted voters may take a little longer to cast ballots Tuesday while adapting to the state’s new voting machines, which involve touchscreens and scanners that record a paper print-out of a voter’s completed ballot. The primary marks the first statewide Election Day use of the new machines.
Polls open at 7 a.m. across the state Tuesday.
Health and elections experts are urging voters to make sure they stay separated from others while in line to vote, wear a face mask that covers both the mouth and nose areas, use hand sanitizer and avoid touching surfaces unnecessarily while at a voting site.
Dr. Marybeth Sexton, an assistant professor of medicine at Emory University’s Division of Infectious Diseases, said voters who follow those distancing and sanitizing practices should be able to vote in person Tuesday without the risk of being exposed to the virus. But if some voters at polling places are not spaced out in line or are not wearing masks, it would be wise to get tested for COVID-19 four to five days after voting, Sexton said.
“People can get out and vote safely,” Sexton said Monday. “It’s just important that the message gets out about how to best do that.”
Long waits are anticipated even as mail-in voting has surged in Georgia amid the coronavirus pandemic. As of Monday, roughly 950,000 voters had cast absentee ballots, though many still had not received ballots weeks after requesting them.
The surge in vote-by-mail comes as state and local elections officials face a daunting challenge to keep polling places sanitized and safe for voters and poll workers, particularly with polling places in some counties like Fulton closed or consolidated amid the virus.
Voters should check ahead of time whether their usual voting location will be open Tuesday and, if not, where they will be able to cast their ballot instead, said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory. Sexton likewise urged voters to choose odd-hour times if possible when heading to the polls.
“You do want to try to pick a time when it’s a little less crowded so that it is possible to keep that distance both in any line outside and then certainly once you’re inside the building,” Sexton said.
Raffensperger urged voters who have requested absentee ballots but not yet received one to show up in person to vote Tuesday. He laid blame for delays on Fulton County elections officials, who now face a state probe into their handling of mail-in ballots.
“We’re not pleased with the performance of Fulton County,” Raffensperger said Monday. “In so many areas, they just made poor decisions.”
He also advised people who have received absentee ballots but not put them in the mail yet to either place them in a drop-off box that counties have set up to collect mail-in ballots or to just vote in person Tuesday.
Additionally, Raffensperger cautioned Georgians not to expect a quick turnaround in results due to the large number of absentee ballots and short-handed staff at some polling places. He said no election results will be announced “until every precinct is closed,” which could mean a few days pass before results for some contests are announced.
Meanwhile, Georgia Democratic leaders have chastised the performance by Raffensperger and some county elections offices over the long lines and unreturned absentee ballots.
“The secretary of state and counties have had months to prepare for this election, but they have squandered valuable time that could have been used to prevent the democratic crisis we are seeing today,” said Sen. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia.
Chris Clark, president and CEO, Georgia Chamber of Commerce
ATLANTA – For the second time in the last two weeks, Georgia’s two largest business organizations are asking the General Assembly to pass a hate-crimes bill when the 2020 legislative session resumes next week.
Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, and Hala Moddelmog, Clark’s counterpart at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, have joined executives from more than 60 companies in supporting the legislation.
The Georgia House of Representatives passed the bill last year in a bipartisan vote, and legislative leaders have vowed to push it through the state Senate and on to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk this year.
“Momentum is growing for Georgia to join the other 45 states that already have these laws on the books,” Clark and Moddelmog wrote in a joint statement issued Monday. “When the Georgia General Assembly reconvenes in June, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Georgia Chamber urge swift passage of hate-crimes legislation that aligns our state’s laws with our values.”
The two chamber leaders endorsed the hate crimes bill late last month after the arrests of three white men in Glynn County in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, but before the death of another black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis touched off a wave of protests across the country.
High-profile Georgia-based businesses joining the two chambers in Monday’s letter include Delta Air Lines Inc., The Home Depot Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Georgia Power Co. and UPS Inc.
This isn’t the first time the state’s business community has gotten involved in civil rights legislation percolating under the Gold Dome. Business groups have fought for years against the passage of religious liberty legislation pushed by social conservatives opponents have argued would let companies discriminate against gays and lesbians, including a 2016 bill that was vetoed by then-Gov. Nathan Deal.
The hate-crimes bill, sponsored by Rep. Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, would impose additional penalties on criminal defendants if it determined their victim was chosen based on his or her “race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability or physical disability.”
Lawmakers will return to the Capitol next Monday, three months after the coronavirus pandemic forced a suspension of this year’s session.
ATLANTA – Three Georgia Democrats with vastly different professional and political backgrounds are competing for their party’s nomination to challenge incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s bid for a second term.
Democratic voters will choose in Tuesday’s Senate primary between businesswoman Sarah Riggs Amico, investigative journalist Jon Ossoff and former Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson. The winner will take on Perdue in November.
Tomlinson is the only one of the three who has held elective office, serving two terms as mayor of Columbus from 2011 until the beginning of last year. In that role, she doubled as the city’s public safety director.
After entering office saddled with double-digit unemployment and depleted reserves brought on by the Great Recession, Tomlinson overhauled the city’s budget, including its employee pension system, which was 96% funded by the time her second term ended.
“When you haven’t been in government, you can have all sorts of ideas,” she said. “When you have been in government, you understand how to actually get things done. That’s the real-world experience I bring to the table.”
Both Amico and Ossoff have run for public office but come up short. Amico won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor two years ago but lost to Republican Geoff Duncan.
Ossoff ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat in a special election in 2017.
Amico has spent her career in the business world. The graduate of Harvard University’s MBA program has served as the owner of Jack Cooper Transport & Logistics, an auto hauling company, for the last decade and its executive chair since 2014.
After the company filed for bankruptcy protection last summer, she said she restructured its operations without cutting employees’ pay or health benefits by building a coalition of Teamsters, customers and lenders.
“In politics, a lot of folks don’t work with people who disagree with them,” Amico said. “In business, you can’t do that. … There’s a tremendous pragmatic streak about having to deliver results and being able to bring folks together to do a job people are counting on you to do.”
Ossoff is the CEO of Insight TWI, a media company that produces investigative documentaries. It’s a skill he said the U.S. Senate could use.
“I expose corruption for a living. We’ve exposed sexual slavery, high-level political corruption and corporate corruption,” he said. “Our political system is corrupt. This is a time to elect people whose experience and careers demonstrate rooting out and destroying corruption.”
As is typical in party primaries, the candidates generally agree on the key issues, from the coronavirus pandemic and the push for policing reform to their approaches on health care, immigration and climate change.
All three roundly criticize President Donald Trump’s handling of the U.S. response to COVID-19.
Amico characterized the president as “slow, sluggish and ineffective” in handling the coronavirus outbreak.
“This is what happens when you fire your pandemic response team and systemically undermine science,” she said.
Tomlinson said Trump’s failure goes beyond politics and is rooted in his philosophy.
“He doesn’t have a full and robust understanding of a centralized federal government and his role in running it,” Tomlinson said. “He turned it over to the states, sometimes to the mayors.”
Vying with COVID-19 for the nation’s attention is the death of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis at the hands of a white police officer charged with murder and the subsequent mass protests in cities across the country.
Ossoff is running campaign ads denouncing Trump’s threatening response to the demonstrators and calling for federal criminal justice reform. He and Amico have commended the peaceful protesters and urged Americans to stand with their calls for racial justice.
“The pervasive, systematic racism in our criminal justice system must end,” Ossoff said. “We cannot move on once the cameras move on.”
With the country’s attention riveted on coronavirus and the nationwide wave of protests of police brutality during the last two weeks, health care, immigration and climate change have been pushed to the back burner. But all three issues were front and center during the state-by-state Democratic presidential primary contests waged last winter and will be on voters’ minds going forward.
All three Democratic Senate candidates support expanding Medicaid coverage to more uninsured Georgians, ending coverage denials based on pre-existing conditions and adding a public option to the private coverages offered through the Affordable Care Act.
“Health care is a human right,” Amico said. “People shouldn’t be sick because they’re poor or poor because they’re sick.”
Amico said immigration is personal to her because she is married to a naturalized American citizen. All three Democratic Senate candidates have criticized Perdue for introducing legislation into the Senate that would base immigration decisions more on an applicant’s education and skills and less on family ties.
“Our policies need to reflect our country’s values,” she said. “Pulling apart families fleeing violent poverty is as un-American and I can imagine.”
The Democrats do differ on another issue: support for the Green New Deal, a legislative package that aims to address climate change with job-creating clean energy investments.
Tomlinson and Amico are all-in on the Green New Deal, Amico calling it one of her top priorities.
But Ossoff said he’s not ready to sign up until the initiative is fully fleshed out.
“I support an ambitious infrastructure program that will create jobs,” he said. “[But] I’m not going to endorse a two-page resolution proposing a sweeping overhaul of our entire economy and society until I understand the impact on Georgia. … The details matter.”
Tomlinson said skeptics of the Green New Deal don’t understand what it’s about.
“It’s nothing more than a set of principles,” she said. “We have an opportunity to create millions of new jobs. … I don’t know who would be opposed to that.”
Ossoff has been the leading campaign fund-raiser in the race, and a poll released last week showed him with a huge lead. But he has taken heat on the campaign trail for losing to Republican Karen Handel by a narrow margin three years ago in a special election for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District seat in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
Held in a non-election year that made it essentially the only game in town, the contest drew a huge field of candidates and attracted so much money from across the country that it became the most expensive House race in history.
Ossoff dismisses the criticism as ignoring the odds stacked against him.
“I ran against 17 opponents when no one knew my name, and they had to send the president, vice president and speaker of the House to stop me,” he said.
Amico has been characterized by opponents as a “recovering Republican” and concedes she is not a lifelong Democrat. But she offset that questioning of her loyalty by pointing to her showing in 2018, when she rolled up more than 1.8 million votes in a close race against Duncan, a record for a Georgia Democrat running for lieutenant governor.
“There’s only one party fighting for working families, economic justice, to protect our right to vote and secure our election … and that is the Democratic Party,” she said.
Tomlinson’s candidacy might appear to be at a disadvantage because – unlike Amico and Ossoff – she does not live in metro Atlanta, the core of Democratic voting strength in Georgia. But she said gains Democrats have posted in the metro region in recent elections haven’t been enough to put the party over the top.
“Democrats aren’t going to win statewide depending on Atlanta alone,” she said. “There are large populations of Democrats who feel disenfranchised because the party only runs metro-Atlanta candidates for statewide seats.”
Tomlinson, who lived in DeKalb County for 28 years and practiced law in Atlanta before moving to Columbus, said she can attract a blend of support from both Atlanta and from outside of the metro region.
Four other candidates in the race have neither raised much campaign money or gained meaningful traction in the polls. But their presence on the ballot likely will make it difficult for any of the three major hopefuls to capture the 50%-plus-one-vote winning margin needed to avoid a runoff.
If no one captures a majority on Tuesday, the top two vote-getters would face off in a runoff Aug. 11 for the right to face Perdue.
AT A GLANCE
SARAH RIGGS AMICO
Age: 40
Lives: Marietta
Experience: Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2018; Owner, Jack Cooper Transport & Logistics (2010-present); executive chair at Jack Cooper (2014-2020)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Washington and Lee University; MBA, Harvard University
Family: Husband, Andrea; two daughters
JON OSSOFF
Age: 33
Lives: Atlanta
Experience: CEO, Insight TWI, media company that produces investigative documentaries (2013-present); national security aide to U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Stone Mountain (2007-2012)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Georgetown University; Master’s degree, London School of Economics
Family: Wife, Alisha
TERESA TOMLINSON
Age: 55
Lives: Columbus
Experience: Partner, Hall Booth Smith, P.C.; mayor of Columbus (2011-2019), executive director, MidTown Inc., (2006-2010); partner, Pope, McGlamry, Kilpatrick, Morrison and Norwood, P.C. (16 years)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Sweet Briar College; Law degree, Emory University
