ATLANTA – Owners of convenience stores and restaurants featuring coin-operated amusement machines (COAMs) would be able to sell gift cards to players under legislation the Georgia House of Representatives passed Monday.
The use of gift cards would go a long way toward cleaning up the industry by discouraging the illegal cash payouts that have long plagued COAMs, said Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, chairman of the House Regulated Industries Committee and House Bill 544’s chief sponsor.
Powell’s bill, which the House passed 110-54, also includes regulations aimed at ensuring fair competition among the companies that own the machines and the retail businesses that house them, prohibiting machine owners from offering inducements to retailers to house their machines and imposing late fees when license holders fail to renew their licenses.
“This tightens up all controls,” Powell said. “Anybody would have to be dumb as mud to do [cash] payouts.”
The Georgia Lottery Corp., which has overseen the COAM industry since 2013, is currently conducting a pilot project selling gift cards at 198 locations. Powell’s bill would expand the gift card program statewide.
Under existing law governing the industry, the companies that own the machines receive 45% of the proceeds, and the retailers where the machines are located get 45%. The lottery gets the remaining 10% and dedicates it to the HOPE Scholarships program.
COAMs are a big business in Georgia. Players of the games spent more than $3 billion in the Peach State during the last fiscal year. After players redeemed prizes valued at $2.1 billion, that left $900 million in net revenue for COAM license holders, the retailers and the state to divide.
Some House Democrats argued Monday the state’s 10% share of that pie – $90 million – isn’t enough to justify permitting COAMs in Georgia.
“Ten percent is grossly too low,” said Rep. Winfred Dukes, D-Albany. “If we’re going to give [COAM companies] an opportunity to come into this state, you’ve got to give me more money. … The children of our state are being short-changed.”
Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta, expressed hope the state’s share of COAM proceeds would be raised when the bill moves over to the state Senate.
“This industry … attracts things we don’t want in our community. It’s a very addictive form of gambling,” she said. “[But] we’re willing to accept the ills if we get a benefit for our citizens. … Let’s make sure we’re not giving away something for nothing.”
ATLANTA – The Georgia House of Representatives and state Senate are at loggerheads over how Georgians should tell time.
The House passed legislation last Friday calling for the Peach State to observe daylight saving time all year.
That followed action the Senate took the week before to put Georgia on standard time permanently.
The one thing both chambers agree on is that the state should stop switching from standard time to daylight every March and back again to standard each November.
“There are some really serious health and safety reasons for eliminating time change,” Rep. Wes Cantrell, R-Woodstock, told his House colleagues shortly before they voted 112-48 to put Georgia on daylight time all year. “Our bodies are meant to adjust slowly to differences in the amount of daylight as the Earth rotates.”
Cantrell cited studies showing an increase in pedestrians being hit by cars during the two weeks after standard time kicks in during the fall because it suddenly gets dark an hour earlier.
Immediately following “spring-forward” in March, heart attacks go up, medical errors increase and even prison sentences handed out by judges increase, all tied to sleep deprivation, he said.
“ ’Spring forward’ sounds a lot nicer than it is,” he said.
Cantrell argued that going on daylight time all year would be better than switching to standard time permanently.
“More sunlight in the evening is good for our health,” he said. “It’s good for the economy. People prefer to shop in the daylight.”
But Sen. Ben Watson, R-Savannah, sponsor of the Senate bill to switch to standard time, said observing daylight time during the winter would lead to dark mornings. The sun wouldn’t come up until almost 8:30 a.m. in December, prompting concerns for the safety of children going to school, he said.
The other advantage to Watson’s bill is that, if it passes and is signed into law by the governor, it could take effect with the next switch to standard time this November.
The House bill, on the other hand, could only move Georgia to daylight time permanently if Congress passes legislation giving states that option.
Watson’s bill includes a provision to make the switch from standard to daylight if and when federal lawmakers allow it.
ATLANTA – The Georgia House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation Friday tightening monitoring requirements for ash generated by coal-burning power plants.
But the 161-2 vote came despite concerns some House Democrats expressed over the way the state regulates coal ash ponds.
House Bill 647, which now moves to the state Senate, would require groundwater monitoring at ash ponds that have been closed to continue for 50 years after the closure is completed. A bill the House passed last year that didn’t make it through the Senate would have limited the monitoring to 30 years.
Coal ash contains contaminants including mercury, cadmium and arsenic that can pollute groundwater and drinking water. Long-term exposure has been linked to a variety of cancers.
Atlanta-based Georgia Power has been working since 2015 on a multi-year plan to close all 29 of its coal ash ponds at 11 power plants across Georgia to meet both state and federal regulations for handling coal ash. While the utility plans to excavate and remove the ash from 19 of those ponds, the other 10 are to be closed in place.
For the most part, minority Democrats voted for the bill Friday in the Republican-controlled House. But several complained that Georgia Power is not being required to liners for the 10 ponds that are being closed in place to prevent contamination of drinking water supplies serving communities near the plants.
The utility is being sued by residents of Juliette who claim coal ash stored in an unlined pond at nearby Plant Scherer has contaminated groundwater around the site.
Contamination from coal ash also has turned up on property offsite from Georgia Power’s Plant McDonough in Cobb County.
Rep. Debbie Buckner, D-Junction City, said the state’s disposal requirements for coal ash are less stringent than for disposal of household garbage, which must be stored in lined landfills.
“An estimated 92 million tons [of coal ash] are being stored in Georgia in unlined ponds,” she said. “These toxic substances can seep into groundwater or flow into streams and cause disastrous contamination.”
“Lengthening the monitoring period acknowledges there is a problem with capping storage [ponds] rather than removing and excavating the material,” added Rep. Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates.
But Rep. Timothy Barr, R-Lawrenceville, who chairs the House subcommittee that reviewed the bill this week, said both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division classify coal ash as a “non-toxic” waste.
“Emotionally, we don’t do what we feel is right but look to the science,” he said. “The EPA and EPD are the experts.”
The Georgia Senate shelved a bill Friday aimed at helping the state Department of Labor dole out long-delayed unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Marty Harbin, R-Tyrone, would create the position of chief labor officer in the state agency responsible for speeding up distribution of unemployment benefits.
Harbin scrapped his bill without a vote Friday after pushback from opponents worried an appointed labor chief might usurp power from the state’s labor commissioner, which is an elected position.
Harbin pledged to work on helping ease Georgia’s steep backlog of processing unemployment claims by “seeing if we could get that done without going through the process” of installing a new labor official.
Under the bill, the chief labor officer would have been appointed by the governor, pending approval from a Senate committee. The law creating the new position would be repealed in January 2023.
The labor chief also would have had to produce reports on the progress of fulfilling unemployment claims, as well provide Georgians with access to unemployment information.
Harbin said his bill aimed to give state labor employees a boost after months of trying to work through piles of unemployment claims during the pandemic.
“When you’ve got people who are calling you for months, that’s not good government,” Harbin said after withdrawing his bill.
Opponents warned installing a governor-appointed labor chief could allow partisan leaders to strip powers away from an elected official as well as open the door for workarounds to create administrators to handle other elected jobs in the executive and legislative branches.
“We have ways of changing how the Department of Labor is run, and we do that every four years in November with an election,” said Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula. “I feel that this is a dangerous precedent.”
The labor department has paid out more than $19 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits to nearly 4.5 million Georgians since last March, more than during the last nine years combined prior to the pandemic.
ATLANTA – Legislation moving through the General Assembly would let Georgia start drawing down up to $1.5 billion a year needed to move growing volumes of freight smoothly through the state.
The Georgia House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill Wednesday that would earmark the state’s 4% sales tax on diesel fuel used in locomotives to help fund freight rail improvements. The tax would raise an estimated $10 million per year, said House Transportation Committee Chairman Rick Jasperse, the measure’s chief sponsor.
That being nowhere near enough money, House Bill 588 also would authorize the state to go to the private sector to help finance freight rail projects through the same sorts of public-private partnerships the State Road and Tollway Authority has been using to build toll lanes on interstate highways across metro Atlanta.
“This is an opportunity to lead,” Jasperse, R-Jasper, said during a committee hearing on the bill late last month. “It helps us take the next steps to improve our freight and logistics infrastructure.”
The bill stems from two years of work by the Georgia Freight & Logistics Commission, a panel of lawmakers, local elected officials, business leaders and logistics industry executives created by the legislature.
The commission issued a report in December that suggested Georgia won’t be able to meet its goal of doubling the percentage of freight traveling by rail from 17% to 35% without public-private partnerships.
Brad Skinner, a board member at Denver-based freight railroad operator OmniTrax and a member of the commission, said public-private partnerships have paid off for his company and its government partners.
“I’ve seen what they do to help municipalities and states keep up with demand as their populations grow,” he said. “You’re looking at billions of dollars in investment that’s going to be required to maintain [Georgia] as a growth community and enhance quality of life.”
Seth Millican, executive director of the Georgia Transportation Alliance, an affiliate of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, said the huge increase in e-commerce brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has built support among legislative leaders for boosting investment in moving freight.
“Leadership is being responsive to things that have come out of the COVID pandemic,” he said. “Those trends toward more e-commerce were already there. But the COVID pandemic dramatically accelerated that.”
Millican said record growth at the Port of Savannah during the past year despite the pandemic has been another key contributor to momentum in the General Assembly behind improving freight rail capacity.
Increasing truck traffic into and out of the port has the Georgia Ports Authority building additional rail, notably the Mason Mega Rail Terminal, which will give the Port of Savannah enough additional capacity to ship goods to cities in the nation’s Mid-South and Midwest regions.
“In some respects, we’re a victim of our own success,” Millican said. “It’s putting pressure on the rest of the system to keep up.”
Jasperse’s bill isn’t the only freight rail measure before the General Assembly. The Senate Transportation Committee passed a similar measure sponsored by Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, on Wednesday.
Like Jasperse’s bill, Senate Bill 98 envisions the state entering into public-private partnerships to build freight rail projects. However, it doesn’t include the sales tax on diesel fuel.
“I would call this freight-and-logistics light,” Beach said during a hearing on the bill Feb. 23. “It doesn’t have a funding component.
A third piece of legislation, Beach’s Senate Resolution 102, would create the Georgia Commission on E-Commerce and Freight Infrastructure Funding as a follow-up to the Freight & Logistics Commission.
It essentially would add a third year to the ongoing discussion over how to pay for needed freight rail improvements. The Senate Transportation Committee approved the resolution late last month.
