ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed a $26.5 billion mid-year budget Monday that restores $2.2 billion in spending cuts the General Assembly imposed on state agencies last June due to the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
During a brief signing ceremony, Kemp noted the early reopening of Georgia businesses forced to shut down by the virus allowed the legislature to adopt the fiscal 2021 mid-year spending plan last week with no new cuts and no furloughs or layoffs of state employees.
“Thanks to our measured reopening and strong fiscal management, Georgia weathered the storm,” he said. “This balanced budget sets our state on a clear path to recovery in the coming months.”
The governor’s original mid-year budget plan called for $1,000 bonuses to Georgia teachers and other school workers saddled with the responsibilities of delivering online instruction to students stuck at home during the pandemic.
Later, as the spending plan went through the General Assembly, lawmakers ordered up the same bonuses for about 57,000 state workers earning less than $80,000 per year, and the University System of Georgia extended the bonuses to income-eligible employees of the state’s public colleges and universities.
The mid-year budget also includes $20 million to extend broadband connectivity in rural Georgia, $1 million in marketing funds to help bring back a state tourism industry rocked by COVID-19 and $289,000 to help the Grady Regional Coordinating Center continue its vital mission of coordinating emergency room use during the pandemic.
The General Assembly moved quickly to complete work on the mid-year budget in order to have state spending commitments through June 30 in place in case the virus forced a temporary shutdown in the legislative session, as happened for three months last year.
With the mid-year budget delivered and signed, lawmakers will focus next on the $27.2 billion fiscal 2022 state budget, now before the Georgia House of Representatives.
Thousands gathered outside the State Capitol to protest police brutality and racial injustice as lawmakers met for the 2020 legislative session on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
State lawmakers are working this year on legislation to change Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, ban no-knock arrest warrants and lower employment barriers for residents on probation.
But five weeks into the 2021 legislative session, reforming the citizen’s arrest statute appears the most likely criminal justice reform to gain passage.
Their bills range from straight-forward changes such as more training for officers in de-escalation techniques and a ban on using choke holds during arrests, to more complicated overhauls including a citizen-led review board for officer-involved shootings and outlawing private prisons.
Democrats are aiming to build on momentum after state lawmakers passed a bill last summer to boost penalties for hate crimes in Georgia. That bill was nearly tripped up as Republicans sought specific protections for police officers against hate crimes that ended up passing in separate legislation.
With chances slim the bulk of this year’s bills can move in the Republican-controlled state legislature, House Minority Leader James Beverly, D-Macon, said Democrats’ package at least keeps the focus on criminal-justice issues after last summer’s protests over police violence and racial injustice.
“We need to look at criminal justice as a whole and not just one or two things,” Beverly said. “It seems to me that there’s an appetite in Georgia to ask, ‘Are we really doing the right thing?’”
Revisions to the state’s citizen’s arrest law look most likely to gain passage in the General Assembly, Beverly said. The measure stems from the shooting death last year of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man killed near Brunswick in a confrontation with two white men who tried to detain him while he was jogging.
Proposals for changing the citizen’s arrest law have drawn “potential bipartisan support” so far, Beverly said. Whether Democrats back a bill soon to be sponsored by state Rep. Bert Reeves, R-Marietta, will depend on what degree Georgia citizens could still detain criminal suspects in certain situations.
Reeves, who is one of Gov. Brian Kemp’s floor leaders in the House, declined to comment on his upcoming bill but said details would be announced Feb. 16.
Democrats are also pushing Kemp and Republican lawmakers to join them in backing legislation to ban no-knock warrants, a controversial police tactic that was involved in the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman from Louisville, Ky., who was killed in an apartment raid last year.
Passing a ban on no-knock warrants would mark a win for criminal-justice reform advocates, Beverly said. It would also help bolster relations between both parties in the General Assembly as tensions rise over Republican efforts to overhaul Georgia’s absentee voting system that Democrats oppose.
“If you want to do something where you can really get buy-in from my caucus, it would be the no-knock warrant [ban],” Beverly said. “We have members on both sides who agree that those two issues [no-knock warrants and citizen’s arrests] are bad.”
But scrapping no-knock warrants may be a step too far for public safety-minded Republicans concerned about changing laws based on passionate reaction to high-profile deaths like those of Arbery, Taylor and George Floyd in Minnesota last year.
State Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, a retired major with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, said he was not involved in any no-knock warrants while serving four years on a multi-agency drug task force. Lawmakers should instead continue evaluating the tactic in the recently created Senate Study Committee on Law Enforcement Reform, he said.
“Jumping to conclusions is the worst thing that anybody can do when they feel a crime is committed,” Robertson said Friday. “We are either choosing to ignore logic … or we’re just doing things to say we’re doing them.”
Rather than outlawing certain individual actions, state lawmakers should place more focus on measures to improve de-escalation and other training standards for Georgia police officers that would include routine mental and physical health evaluations, Robertson said.
He noted officers currently receive just 20 hours of touch-up training each year after graduating from the police academy, falling short of the safeguards local agencies need to keep close tabs on officers before crisis situations like improper use-of-force ever happen.
“De-escalation is not a class: It is a thread that runs through every aspect of training,” Robertson said. “Every agency should have a fit-for-duty policy that covers mental and physical fitness.”
Robertson is among several Republican lawmakers to introduce criminal justice-focused legislation this year, though none is as expansive as Democrats’ legislative package. His measure would bar licensing boards from denying business licenses to Georgians on parole or probation for most felony convictions.
Robertson’s bill and another by state Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, aimed at tightening rules to end or shorten probation terms mark legislation that could help cut down Georgia’s status as the state with the highest rate of residents on probation, said Lisa McGahan, policy director for the nonprofit Georgia Justice Project.
“We have too many people serving under community supervision,” McGahan said. “You can’t access economic opportunity with that handicap.”
Other Republican-sponsored bills McGahan singled out include a measure by state Rep. Mandi Ballinger, R-Canton, to raise the age for youth offenders to be tried in adult court from 17 to 18, as well as two bills protecting human-trafficking victims that passed the state Senate on Thursday.
ATLANTA – Georgia Chief Justice Harold Melton will step down from the state Supreme Court effective July 1, Melton announced Friday.
In a statement to court staff and the Georgia Judicial Council, Melton said he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.
“July 31 will mark my 30th year working in state government, 16 years with the Court,” Melton said. “This fall, all of our three children will be attending college at the same time. Now is the best time for me to explore opportunities for the next season of life that will allow me to best serve our legal community and my extended family.
“I do not now know what my next move will be. With this announcement, I can begin the search process in earnest.”
Melton will be leaving one year and two months before his four-year term as chief justice comes to an end. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2005 by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, who he had served as executive counsel, and became chief justice in 2018.
“It has not been easy to decide the best time to leave a job with a mission that I believe in and people I love working with,” Melton said to court staff.
“We have done great work together for the benefit of the citizens of this great state, and this Court is well-positioned to continue the high calling that has clearly been set before us.”
ATLANTA – Legislation that would tap into a new source of funding to expand broadband service in Georgia got some pushback this week from the telecom industry.
Senate Bill 65 would convert a portion of a state fund that now subsidizes land-line service provided by rural telephone companies into a pot of money to be used for broadband projects. That portion of the Universal Access Fund (UAF) is due to expire later this year, a decade after the fund was created.
Funds from the UAF would supplement the $20 million Gov. Brian Kemp set aside for broadband in the $26.5 billion mid-year budget the General Assembly passed on Thursday, said Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, the bill’s chief sponsor.
“Twenty million dollars … is a good start,” Gooch told members of the Senate Regulated Industries Committee Thursday. “But we need to put more money into this year after year until the problem is fixed.”
Lobbyists representing telecom giants including AT&T and small rural telephone companies agreed that expanding broadband into the many unserved areas of rural Georgia is critical to the state’s economy. But they said raiding the UAF is unnecessary.
“There are many federal government programs doling out substantial amounts of funding to spread broadband,” said Kevin Curtin, assistant vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T Georgia.
One such federal program was launched by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in December. The FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is allocating $9.2 billion during the next 10 years to broadband deployment in 49 states, including $326.5 million headed to Georgia.
Others argued lawmakers should look to the state’s general fund budget to support broadband projects, as Kemp just did with the $20 million allocation.
“We want to continue to try to bring broadband to every Georgia citizen,” said Hunter Hopkins, interim executive director of the Georgia Cable Association. “Let’s just put more money in the general fund versus tinkering with the UAF.”
Some members of the committee also were skeptical of the bill.
Committee Chairman Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, wondered whether the rural phone companies would raise their rates after the UAF expires and they’re no longer receiving subsidies from it.
“[Are] poor people in rural areas who already don’t have broadband going to get their phone rates jacked up?” Cowsert asked.
Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, said converting a portion of the UAF to a broadband fund might not raise much money because many Georgians are getting rid of their land-lines telephones in favor of cellphones.
“You’re talking about a decreasing pool of revenue,” Tippins said.
Gooch’s bill has 20 Republican cosponsors, including Cowsert, Tippins and Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville.
But since Thursday’s debate was limited to a hearing on the measure, its fate remains uncertain.
ATLANTA – First-time unemployment claims in Georgia rose slightly last week, even as claims nationwide declined, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
Jobless Georgians filed 32,386 initial claims last week, up 5,171 from the week before.
Since the coronavirus pandemic struck Georgia 11 months ago, the state has paid out more than $18 billion to nearly 4.4 million Georgians, more than the last nine years prior to the pandemic.
The labor department paid out more than $400 million last week as the agency continued to implement the latest COVID-19 economic stimulus package Congress passed at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Georgia finished out 2020 with a workforce of more than 4.5 million jobs, more than doubling the monthly jobs number from November to December.
“Georgia is one of the leading states in the country in job creation,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said. “We created 44,700 jobs in December 2020, only being outdone by Texas.”
The job sector accounting for the most first-time unemployment claims last week in Georgia was accommodation and food services with 7,095 claims. The administrative and support services job sector was next with 3,617 claims, followed by health care and social assistance with 3,581.
More than 183,000 jobs are listed online at https://bit.ly/36EA2vk for Georgians to access. The labor department offers online resources for finding a job, building a resume, and assisting with other reemployment needs.
