A plan to create legal homeless camps on public and private properties in Georgia by redirecting some funds from existing local outreach and shelter groups drew debate in a General Assembly committee on Monday.
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Katie Dempsey, R-Rome, would send state dollars currently earmarked for building shelters and short-term housing to be used instead on so-called “structured camping facilities” for a city or county’s homeless population.
The camps would have to provide water, electrical outlets and bathrooms and could only be used for up to six months by a homeless person, effectively reserving the facilities for Georgians who are motivated to find work and secure permanent housing.
“There is no doubt this is a little out-of-the-box,” Dempsey told the state House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee. “It’s creative [and] it’s a different way than we’ve done it.”
Dempsey’s bill, which faces long odds of advancing in the last days of the 2021 legislative session, was hailed Monday by some advocates as an innovative way to address certain kinds of homelessness and slammed by others concerned about money being stripped from shelter-based programs.
Backers of Dempsey’s bill point to a legal camp that local officials set up in Douglas County three years ago to curb the area’s rising homeless population, called Shinnah Haven.
Located on county-owned property, the camp requires residents to keep out of fights, clean their appointed spots and provide official identification in return for a stable place to pitch a tent, access to social workers and electricity from a solar panel, said Douglas County Judge William “Beau” McClain.
“We need to start this in the state of Georgia before [unsheltered homelessness] gets out of hand,” McClain said. “It’s practical to not bring these people to the [emergency room and] to not house them in jail. It’s a practical solution to the problem.”
On top of the camps, Dempsey’s bill also proposes requiring cities with homeless populations larger than the state average to spend a chunk of state and federal grants to create outreach teams made up of police, social services workers and mental health professionals tasked with moving people from illegal street camps to sanctioned homelessness services.
That provision, as well as the proposal to redirect funds for new shelters and short-term housing, sparked backlash from local groups that work to secure permanent housing for Georgia’s homeless populations – particularly since they said Dempsey had not consulted them on the bill before Monday.
Legal homeless camps in places like San Francisco that are much larger than the one in Douglas County have led to sanitation problems and made little headway in reducing the number of people living in tents on the street or in the woods, said Cathryn Marchman, chief executive officer for the group Partners for HOME, who leads Atlanta’s homelessness efforts.
Marchman also questioned whether homeless persons might be forced to live in government-sanctioned camps, potentially triggering an illegal living situation “like a homeless internment camp.”
“If we’re talking about being innovative and actually ending this problem instead of perpetuating it, we should be talking about how we as a state fund and create sustainable revenue streams for permanent housing solutions,” she said. “And we also need to look at the unintended consequences of what sanctioned encampments have done and created around the country.”
No votes were taken on Dempsey’s bill Monday, which fell one week after the Crossover Day deadline for legislation to pass out of one chamber or the other to remain in contention for final passage.
Dempsey, who oversees state mental-health funding as chairwoman of the House Appropriations’ Human Resources Subcommittee, said her bill aims to “begin the conversation” for bringing new ideas to addressing homelessness in Georgia.
“The bottom line is that the effective reduction in street homelessness will help communities be safe,” Dempsey said.
ATLANTA – Legislation adding new protections for patients being sedated for certain medical and dental procedures in outpatient settings cleared the Georgia House of Representatives Monday.
The bill, which passed the House 160-5, requires the Georgia Composite Medical Board to establish regulations for administering sedation to patients by the end of this year. The regulations would cover such subjects as proper equipment and training, separation of surgical and sedation monitoring functions during procedures and care and transfer protocols in case of an emergency.
The legislation excludes licensed dentists, registered nurse anesthetists and physician assistants who have completed an anesthesiologist assistant program.
One section of the bill adds new language in state law defining “medispas,” facilities that offer outpatient cosmetic surgery including liposuction, laser procedures and injection of cosmetic-filling agents.
The bill originated in the state Senate, where it passed unanimously last month. It was introduced by Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, R-Marietta.
The legislation was carried in the House by Rep. Lee Hawkins, R-Gainesville. Because of changes the House Health and Human Services Committee made to the bill, it must return to the Senate to gain final passage.
Voting-rights advocates protest inside the state Capitol against Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan’s (R-Carrollton) elections bill before its passage in the Georgia Senate on March 8, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Controversial legislation to overhaul voting by mail in Georgia and how voters can cast early ballots is racing toward the finish line in the General Assembly amid a sharp outcry from local voting-rights and church groups.
Two bills, both proposing dozens of changes to Georgia’s election system, recently cleared major hurdles in the current legislative session and are on a collision course to final passage as top lawmakers in the state Senate and House of Representatives decide which measures to keep and which to scrap.
Most likely on the chopping block is a proposal to end Georgians’ ability to vote by mail without giving a reason that has drawn a loud outcry. Democratic leaders call the move an attempt by state Republicans to gut mail-in voting after absentee ballots drove historic wins in the 2020 election cycle.
Separately, church leaders and Democratic backers of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams are building up grassroots efforts to combat proposals to clamp down on line warming and weekend voting, portraying those Republican-brought measures as rooted in voter suppression.
Critics have also condemned the GOP-led election bills as attempts to curb voter turnout in Black and other minority communities that tend to lean Democratic, particularly after Black voters and mail-in ballots helped flip the presidency and both of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats in the 2020 elections.
“These bills are directly evil,” said Rev. Ferrell Malone Sr., the senior pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church in Waycross. “They are literally evil, and they’re coming from men and women who say they are Christians.”
Republican leaders in the House and Senate have held firm in their argument that the legislative proposals are needed to protect voter integrity in Georgia after the 2020 elections sparked doubts over the security of mail-in voting and identity verification.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan, R-Carrollton, has dismissed attacks on an omnibus elections bill he is sponsoring in the Senate that includes repealing no-excuse absentee voting, as well as a new rule requiring Georgians to provide a driver’s license or state ID card number in order to request an absentee ballot.
Dugan and supporters of those measures in the Republican-controlled General Assembly also highlight the strain that processing millions of absentee ballots put on local election workers tasked with running three weeks of early voting and managing Election Day for several elections in the 2020 cycle.
“If we keep using more and more of the absentee [ballots], you’re going to overwhelm the counties multiple different ways, in the workload and the cost,” Dugan said. “The highest number of rejected ballots are mail-in absentee ballots, even with the curing process.”
“This is about [how] the method of voting in Georgia has significantly changed over the last 10 years.”
The proposal in Dugan’s bill that has come under the most criticism would limit absentee voting only to those who physically cannot go to the polls on Election Day or for early voting, ending the no-excuse absentee voting option that Republicans passed into state law in 2005.
The measure has also drawn pushback from top state Republicans including House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who refused to preside over the Senate vote on Dugan’s bill last week in protest of the no-excuse absentee voting repeal.
Dugan has since backed off that proposal, noting that lawmakers will likely move to strip out the no-excuse absentee ban as his bill moves in the House.
“I want a good reform bill to go through,” Dugan said. “And if I’m going to get everything killed because of something that I feel is important that a majority of both chambers don’t necessarily agree with, then I’m not going to die on that hill for ego.”
It has not been settled among Republican leaders yet whether to push Dugan’s bill or a separate 66-page omnibus measure sponsored by Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, as the final set of proposals that lawmakers are expected to negotiate before passing onto Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk.
Fleming, whose office did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, has pitched several contentious changes that include requiring counties to pick either a Saturday or a Sunday for early voting and forbidding people from giving food or drinks to voters waiting in line outside polling places.
Those two proposals have prompted some of the fiercest backlash against the GOP-led elections bills by voting-rights advocates who blast them as blatant attempts to depress voter turnout in Democratic-leaning minority neighborhoods that often face long lines at polling places.
“It’s just a very cruel thing to do to people who are good Samaritans and have their faith move them to help people exercise their right to vote,” said Hillary Holley, organizing director for the group Fair Fight Action that Abrams founded following her loss to Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial election.
“Seeing the state try to punish volunteers for helping people who are on the brink of passing out in line to vote is just horrifying.”
Abrams’ Fair Fight group, as well as local churches and other grassroots organizations, are now mobilizing to drum up widespread public opposition to state Republicans’ elections bills, including by pressuring large Georgia-based companies including Coca-Cola, Delta and Southern Company to take a stand against the bills.
Already, pressure by protesters in Southeast Georgia has spurred Hancock County officials to formally request that Fleming resign from his post as the county’s attorney on grounds that his measure is at odds with the county’s majority-Black population.
“We stand on the cusp of something great in history,” said Rev. Willie Wiley, presiding elder of the Augusta-Sparta district of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. “Don’t allow ambitious people who have not the interests of Georgians at heart to rob us of this unique opportunity.”
Meanwhile, Dugan says he’s weathering the storm of criticism and personal attacks his bill has inspired, while focusing on helping steer whichever set of proposals most lawmakers in the General Assembly want to see cross the finish line later this month, whether they come from Fleming’s bill or his own.
“My concern is really not the politics of it,” Dugan said. “My concern is actually having something that is beneficial for the state moving forward.”
ATLANTA – Georgia House Speaker David Ralston is continuing to lobby the federal government not to attach strings on the $350 billion in the American Rescue Plan earmarked for state and local governments.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dated Thursday, Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, cited language in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill Congress passed this week that prohibits states from using any of the aid money to “either directly or indirectly” offset reductions in net tax revenue.
Thursday’s letter followed similarly worded missives the speaker sent on Wednesday to President Joe Biden and members of Georgia’s congressional delegation.
The American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law on Thursday, threatens two bills now before the General Assembly, Ralston wrote.
One of the measures would give Georgians a tax cut of $140 million by raising the standard deduction on state income taxes. The other would extend a tax credit for families who adopt a child out of foster care.
“As secretary of the treasury, it will fall to your department to interpret this act and promulgate rules and regulations,” the speaker wrote. “I pray you will protect the states by ameliorating the impact of this flawed law and respect our right to budget responsibly.”
In the letter, Ralston cited an editorial in The Wall Street Journal criticizing the provision as potentially a violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “anti-commandeering” doctrine, which prohibits Congress from using federal funds to coerce states.
“Even if the tax cut ban doesn’t meet the court’s legal test of coercion, it’s still an egregious affront to constitutional federalism,” the paper’s editorial board wrote.
The relief bill includes $8.1 billion for Georgia. The state will receive $4.6 billion of that directly, while the rest is earmarked for local governments.
Georgia’s two Democratic U.S. senators voted for the legislation, as did all six Democrats in the state’s U.S. House delegation. All eight of the delegation’s Republicans opposed it.
Rev. Raphael Warnock (front) campaigns with Stacey Abrams (back) on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – The 2022 election cycle has come early.
National Republican groups are already targeting Georgia Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s seat, less than two months after he took office following a historic win in January.
On Thursday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) — a premier fundraising arm backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — launched an ad campaign condemning Warnock’s support for the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan Congress passed this week.
Warnock, who is Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, declined to respond to the GOP-led ad on Thursday. He has framed the latest aid package as a boon for Georgians across the state who have struggled for a year to cope with the tough economic and social troubles wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Help is on the way,” Warnock said on Twitter Thursday shortly after President Joe Biden signed the relief package. “I’ll say it again: ‘Thank God for Georgia.’ ”
Warnock also noted the federal package includes aid for Black farmers in Georgia, following up on a pledge he made to minority agriculture workers during his 2020 campaign for Senate.
The ad marks a gearing-up for Republican operatives aiming to seize back the Senate seat held by Warnock, who must seek reelection in 2022 to a full six-year term.
Warnock ousted Republican former Sen. Kelly Loeffler in January to serve out the remaining two years of retired Sen. Johnny Isakson’s six-year term. Isakson stepped down at the end of 2019 as he battled cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
Electoral wins on Jan. 5, 2020 by Warnock and his Democratic co-campaigner, Sen. Jon Ossoff, flipped both of Georgia’s Senate seats to the Democrats for the first time in nearly two decades.
Their upset wins also handed Democrats control of both chambers in Congress and the White House, paving the way for another round of COVID-19 relief pushed by the Biden administration to gain final passage.
Biden, a Democrat who defeated former Republican President Donald Trump by 11,779 votes in Georgia during the 2020 general election, is scheduled to visit Atlanta next Friday (March 19) for a so-called “Help Is Here” tour to promote the newly enacted COVID-19 relief package he signed shortly after it passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Before I took office, I promised you that help was on the way,” Biden said on Twitter after the signing. “Today, I signed the American Rescue Plan into law, and can officially say: help is here.”
Republican lawmakers say the bill is bloated with a Democratic wish-list of financial relief benefiting undocumented persons, an abortion-rights agenda and aid to state governments run by Democratic governors.
“The people of Georgia did not expect the Democrats to respond to COVID by shipping billions of dollars to illegal immigrants, violent criminals and [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo,” said the NRSC’s chairman, GOP Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. “Sadly, that’s exactly what Senator Warnock did.”
Democratic backers of the plan point out $300 billion will be sent directly to city and county governments, including public schools, marking a new payment round that skirts state oversight, unlike previous packages passed since March of 2020.
They highlight Georgia’s share of the new relief funds will hand the state more than $8 billion in COVID-19 aid, of which a large chunk would go straight to struggling city and county governments and give them more flexibility to shore up their pandemic-struck budgets.
“With the final passage of the American Rescue Plan in the House of Representatives today, Georgians are one step closer to getting the help they need to overcome the unprecedented public health and economic crises we face,” said Scott Hogan, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia.
“Georgia’s Democratic congressional delegation has been at the forefront of the fight to deliver big, bold relief to Americans, and with this bill’s passage, Democrats are fulfilling the promises made to Georgians to send direct payments, aid small businesses, ramp up vaccinations, and help schools reopen.”
The national criticism of Warnock’s vote in favor of the COVID-19 relief comes as Georgia’s top Republican leadership also slammed the aid plan’s details, even as they eye bids to shore up state political power in 2022.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who is seeking re-election in 2022, has called Georgia’s share of the latest relief round too paltry compared to the money pots for New York and California.
House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, has also savaged the relief package, on grounds that it would restrict state and local governments from cutting taxes and backfilling funding gaps with federal dollars.
Meanwhile, the field is wide open in 2022 for Georgia Republican candidates to challenge Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Already, his opponent in the last election, Loeffler, has announced plans to run a grassroots group meant to motivate conservative Georgians, akin to successful Democratic mobilization efforts overseen by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who will likely wage a second campaign fight for governor against Kemp in 2022.
Former Sen. David Perdue, who lost to Ossoff in the Jan. 5 runoff, toyed with the idea of running for his old seat but declared last month he would not do so.
The federal “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021” gained final passage in Congress on Wednesday by a vote of 220-211, with all but one Democrat supporting it and all of the Republicans voting “no.”
The relief plan includes $1,400 economic stimulus checks for Americans earning up to $75,000 a year and couples earning up to $150,000 annually, an extension of $300-per-week in unemployment benefits, aid to state and local governments, funds to help schools reopen safely and an expanded federal child tax credit.
It also provides new funding for small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program and additional funding to administer COVID-19 vaccines and expand testing and contact tracing.
Georgia’s six U.S. House Democrats voted in favor of the legislation. The state’s eight House Republicans opposed it.
