ATLANTA – Georgia utility regulators Tuesday approved an offer by electric membership cooperatives (EMCs) to provide steep discounts to telecom providers that expand broadband service into rural areas of the state unserved by broadband.
But a resolution the state Public Service Commission (PSC) adopted unanimously also will increase fees the EMCs are allowed to charge providers for attaching broadband technology to utility poles in areas already served by broadband.
Tuesday’s unanimous vote follows through on legislation the General Assembly passed last June assigning the PSC to set pole attachment rates for the EMCs. The purpose of House Bill 244 is to encourage the extension of broadband into parts of rural Georgia on the wrong side of the “digital divide,” making it difficult to attract jobs and – in the coronavirus era – offer online classes to students stuck at home.
Under the resolution, EMCs will charge telecom providers just $1 per year for new pole attachments in areas without broadband service for the next six years, effective July 1. The EMCs proposed the “One Buck Deal” in October.
“With today’s vote, the Georgia PSC is giving broadband providers access to utility infrastructure at a cost of next-to-nothing in the locations where Georgia needs broadband the most,” said Dennis Chastain, president and CEO of Georgia EMC, the trade association that represents the state’s 41 EMCs. “With today’s decision, EMCs are poised and ready to partner with broadband providers across the state to help them expand into our rural service territories.”
But telecom providers cried foul at another provision in the resolution that will force them to pay $27.71 per pole per year for broadband attachments in areas already served by broadband. That’s less than a fee of $34.72 proposed at the beginning of Tuesday’s PSC meeting by Commissioner Tim Echols but more than the $20 per pole providers now pay on average.
In a written statement, the Georgia Cable Association argued that raising the rates for pole attachments in served areas of Georgia would go against the intent of House Bill 244 to expand broadband availability in rural communities.
“Failing to set reasonable pole attachment rates, terms and conditions will increase the overall cost of broadband deployment, and discourage tens of millions of dollars in private investment,” the statement read. “That’s a disappointment for every Georgia community that needs access to broadband.”
The cable association went on to raise the possibility that telecom providers will react to the PSC vote by taking their broadband investments to other Southern states with “more attractive pole attachment policies.”
Commissioner Tricia Pridemore, who amended Echols’ original motion to propose the $27.71 rate, said it is based on the cost to the EMCs of attaching and maintaining broadband attachments to their poles.
Commission Chairman Chuck Eaton also amended Echols’ original motion to require the PSC to review the rates every two years to determine whether they’re accomplishing the goal of expanding broadband service in rural Georgia.
“The General Assembly did charge us with this,” Eaton said. “I need to be able to look them in the eye and tell them what we’ve done will expand rural broadband.”
Commissioner Jason Shaw, who represents largely rural South Georgia on the PSC, said the issue is personal for him.
“As someone who lives in unserved rural Georgia … I see, first hand, children who must travel long distances to find sufficient WiFi just to finish their homework,” he said. “I hope providers will take advantage of this $1 deal to push broadband into rural areas.”
Chris Clark, president and CEO, Georgia Chamber of Commerce
ATLANTA – Congress should not adjourn for the holidays without passing a new economic stimulus package to help businesses and their employees affected by the coronavirus pandemic, top state and national business leaders said Monday night.
Tom Sullivan, vice president of small business policy with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, took phone calls during an hour-long tele-town hall from small business owners in Georgia worried they could be forced to close permanently unless the federal government steps up soon.
Congressional negotiators currently are working on a smaller COVID-19 relief package than the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act Congress passed last March.
The latest proposal on the table is $748 billion that would among other things renew the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses and continue the flow of federal unemployment benefits due to expire the day after Christmas.
“We want to reopen the PPP to small businesses that didn’t have a chance to apply during the first round and a second round targeted for businesses that need it most,” Sullivan said.
Clark said minority-owned businesses should be among the targets of the new stimulus package. He said a disproportionate percentage of minority-owned companies in Georgia were forced to close during the statewide lockdown that occurred during the pandemic’s early days, and many still haven’t reopened.
“It’s obvious that minority-owned businesses need help the most,” Sullivan said.
Clark said essential workers should be next in line after health-care workers and nursing home patients for the new COVID-19 vaccines, the first of which began arriving in Georgia and across the nation on Monday.
“We’ve got front-line workers producing PPE (personal protective equipment) in our manufacturing facilities,” Clark said. “If we expect them to keep performing, they need to be in that [vaccine] queue.”
In response to a call from a business owner who has had a hard time keeping employees on the job, Sullivan said members of Congress discovered with the CARES Act that offering $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits serves as a disincentive for employees to return to work during a pandemic.
“Because we have the benefit of that hindsight, Congress is looking at a much more targeted unemployment measure that would be less than $600,” he said.
With so many businesses struggling and so many of their employees having a hard time paying their bills, Clark said any new stimulus package Congress adopts should offer the PPP loan program and additional unemployment benefits at least through the first quarter of 2021.
Georgia officials will conduct a signature-match audit of absentee ballot envelopes in Cobb County to promote faith in the election system ahead of next month’s U.S. Senate runoff elections, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced on Monday.
The audit comes in response to a “specific allegation” the mail-in signature verification process was not followed properly in Cobb for the Nov. 3 general election, Raffensperger said at a news conference. He did not give details on the allegation.
Re-checking the envelope signatures in Cobb also aims to boost confidence in the integrity of the high-stakes Senate runoffs on Jan. 5 amid fraud claims from President Donald Trump and his allies that have injected doubt into Georgia’s election system, Raffensperger said.
“We stand ready to answer each and every question out there,” Raffensperger said. “Every Georgian should have faith in our elections.”
The audit should take about two weeks to complete, Raffensperger said. Officials then plan to start work on a longer-range statewide study of mail-in signatures Raffensperger said will be done by independent auditors.
Absentee ballots in Georgia are verified once when a voter requests a ballot, then again on signature-bearing envelopes sent to county election boards. Those envelopes are separated from the absentee ballots to protect voters’ ballot selections and preserve voter privacy, according to state law.
Raffensperger and his deputies have faced intense criticism from Trump and many Republican leaders in Georgia for not re-verifying signatures on the record-breaking 1.3 million absentee ballots cast in the Nov. 3 presidential election, which President-elect Joe Biden won by 12,779 votes.
The secretary of state’s office has almost daily sought to dispute fraud claims lobbed by Trump and his allies, noting two statewide recounts of the results found no evidence of any widespread fraud. Courts have also tossed out several lawsuits seeking to overturn the results.
Gabriel Sterling, the state’s election system manager, stressed a main goal of the Cobb audit is to restore faith in Georgia’s elections due to “the pure volume of disinformation and lies” promoted by Trump and his supporters.
Raffensperger in recent weeks has called on state lawmakers to change Georgia’s election laws to add stricter voter ID requirements, eliminate mail-in voting without cause and give state officials power to remove poor-performing county election managers.
Those calls for law changes have not satisfied one of the state’s most powerful Republicans, House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, who last week urged state lawmakers to bring legislation aimed at giving the General Assembly authority to pick the secretary of state, not Georgia voters.
Raffensperger’s announcement also comes as Georgia’s Democratic slate of electors to the Electoral College cast the state’s 16 votes on Monday for Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, formally declaring them winners of last month’s presidential contest.
The Electoral College vote came on the first day of the three-week early voting period ahead of Georgia’s U.S. high-stakes runoff elections on Jan. 5. Democrats will gain control of the White House and Congress if challengers Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both beat Republican incumbent U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Stacey Abrams (at podium) presides over Georgia’s Democratic slate of electors as they cast votes for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Dec. 14, 2020. (Democratic Party of Georgia photo)
Georgia’s members to the Electoral College have cast their 16 votes for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years.
President-elect Joe Biden was formally declared winner of Georgia’s general election during a ceremony Tuesday at the state Capitol attended by many of the state’s most prominent Democratic leaders.
The electors, who were twice certified by Gov. Brian Kemp following two recounts, also handed their 16 votes to Biden’s running mate, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Biden defeated President Donald Trump last month in Georgia by 12,779 votes, marking the first Democratic presidential victor in the state since former President Bill Clinton won in 1992.
Biden’s win in Georgia came after gains for Democrats in the state’s suburban areas in recent elections, particularly in longstanding Republican strongholds like Cobb and Gwinnett counties.
Democratic voters also took advantage of record-breaking mail-in voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.3 million Georgians casting absentee ballots in the Nov. 3 election.
Much of the momentum has been credited to former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who led efforts to register new voters and energize Democratic turnout in the two years after losing to Kemp by a narrow margin in the 2018 gubernatorial election.
“This is a moment for me that I have dreamed about,” said Abrams, who served as the presiding officer for Monday’s Electoral College meeting.
“We stand not for ourselves or for our party, but for the people of Georgia. It is on their behalf that we took up this charge to be electors. It is on their behalf that we are ensuring that the nation is led by a good man who believes in the soul of the nation and all its people.”
Also playing key roles in the meeting were U.S. Rep.-elect Nikema Williams, who last month won the seat held by the late Congressman John Lewis, and state Rep. Calvin Smyre, the longest-serving member of the Georgia House of Representatives.
“We’ve come a long, long way in Georgia, and we’ve got a lot to be proud of,” said Smyre, a Democrat who also voted for former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as an Electoral College member.
The Electoral College vote came on the first day of the three-week early voting period ahead of Georgia’s U.S. high-stakes runoff elections on Jan. 5.
Democrats will gain control of the White House and Congress if challengers Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both beat Republican incumbent U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, called Monday a “defining moment in American history” as he cast his ballot at an early-voting precinct in Atlanta.
“Georgia is at the center of it,” Warnock said. “Let’s show up the way Georgia does.”
Amid Monday’s festivities for Georgia Democrats, Trump has still refused to concede defeat as he continues lobbing claims of ballot-casting and voting machine fraud.
Courts in Georgia and across the country have shot down lawsuits filed by Trump’s allies and his campaign due to procedural issues and lack of evidence, though some suits are still pending.
Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday refused to take up a Texas case challenging Georgia’s election results that many local Republican lawmakers supported.
Republican Party electors met at the Capitol Monday to cast their votes for Trump even though Kemp certified Democrats’ slate of electors. Georgia law requires the governor to certify Electoral College members from only the party that won the state’s popular vote.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer said Republicans picked their own Electoral College members because “[Trump’s] lawsuit contesting the Georgia election is still pending.”
With Trump pressing to overturn the election’s outcome, Georgia Republicans are framing Senate runoff wins for Warnock and Ossoff as a doomsday scenario for conservatives as they seek to turn out voters for Loeffler and Perdue.
“We need you to make a plan, find your polling place and get out and vote,” said Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman. “Save the American Dream.”
ATLANTA – Georgia health-care workers and nursing home residents will start receiving immunizations against COVID-19 this week as the state Department of Public Health gets its first shipments of a vaccine produced by Pfizer.
The first shipment of 5,850 doses arrived Monday at two locations in Coastal Georgia equipped with ultracold freezers required for storage and temperature control of the vaccine. Additional shipments are expected later this week at facilities in other parts of the state.
“Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of this pandemic,” Christy Norman, vice president of pharmacy services at Emory Healthcare, said Monday during a news briefing.
The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control during the weekend issued an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine, the first to emerge from the U.S. pipeline targeting coronavirus. A second vaccine produced by Moderna is expected to receive federal approval for distribution this week.
“This is really exciting for us,” said Dr. Marybeth Sexton, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Emory. “We’re going to have access to a vaccine that looks in initial clinical studies to be highly effective.”
Approval of vaccines to combat COVID-19 is being sped through what usually is a lengthy process by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed because of the pressing nature of the pandemic, as cases of COVID-19 diagnoses, hospitalizations and deaths continue surging across the country.
As of Sunday, 476,044 had been diagnosed with coronavirus, and 9,205 had died from the virus.
But Sexton said the rush to get the vaccines into American arms did not compromise safety. The technology behind the vaccines was thoroughly tested in clinical trials before the pandemic began, she said.
“The researchers were able to use lessons learned,” she said.
Sexton said Americans should not be concerned about the side effects accompanying the vaccines, including soreness in the arm, fatigue or a slight fever.
“These are not serious, life-threatening or dangerous,” she said.
Sexton said health-care workers will be in the first group to get the shots because of concerns that the surge in coronavirus hospitalizations is straining the health-care workforce.
“Even if they have a mild case [of COVID-19], they’re out of work 10 days,” she said. “We’ve got a real concern for staff to take care of patients.”
Sexton said the prioritizing of health-care workers for vaccinations includes not just doctors and nurses but custodians, transporters and other hospital workers.
“All of these people are considered health-care workers and are prioritized,” she said.
The other group getting top priority to receive the vaccines – residents of nursing homes and other elderly-care facilities – will be served through a partnership the CDC has set up with CVS and Walgreens.
Sexton said the next group to receive vaccinations after health-care workers and residents of elderly-care facilities probably will be essential workers who must leave their homes despite the pandemic, such as grocery store employees and delivery truck drivers. Another group that will receive high priority are seniors and Georgians suffering from chronic illnesses that leave them vulnerable to the virus, she said.
While many Americans have expressed reservations about getting the shots out of safety concerns, Sexton said the number of willing participants is going up, probably due to the impact of the surge in cases.
Medical experts have said achieving “herd immunity” against COVID-19 – the threshold for making further spread of the virus unlikely – is getting 60% to 70% of the U.S. population vaccinated.
