An aerial view of Plant Scherer in Juliette. (File photo)
ATLANTA – Legislation increasing groundwater monitoring requirements for closed coal ash ponds drew support in the General Assembly Tuesday from Democrats and environmental advocates.
But both groups argued it wouldn’t go far enough to protect the drinking water of Georgians who live near the ponds from toxic contamination.
“Even though this is a good bill, I still think we need the added protection of a clay base and liner … before we lose more people to illness,” Rep. Debbie Buckner, D-Junction City, said shortly before the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee approved the measure and sent it on to the full House.
Coal ash, generated by burning coal at power plants, 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.
Since 2015, Georgia Power has been working 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 Atlanta-based utility plans to excavate and remove the ash from 19 of those ponds, the other 10 are to be closed in place.
A substitute version of House Bill 647 the committee passed Tuesday would require groundwater monitoring at those closed ash ponds to be conducted for 50 years after closure is completed, up from 30 years under the original bill.
“I have a seven-month-old grandson,” Rep. Vance Smith, R-Pine Mountain, the bill’s chief sponsor, explained when asked why he decided to increase the monitoring period.
Permits the state Environmental Protection Division issues to close ash ponds require not only groundwater monitoring but proper drainage and a cap on the pond, said Chuck Mueller, chief of the EPD’s Land Protection Branch.
But April Lipscomb, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said a cap is not protective enough. She said some of the ash ponds Georgia Power plans to close in place are “sitting in groundwater” despite the presence of a cap.
“We’re really concerned with what is going to happen 30 years from now when these coal ash ponds really start causing problems,” Lipscomb said.
Tuesday’s hearing on Smith’s bill included testimony from residents of Juliette, where Georgia Power faces a lawsuit claiming coal ash stored in an unlined pond at nearby Plant Scherer has contaminated groundwater around the site.
Michael Pless of Juliette called the bill “a starting place” but not strong enough.
“Putting a cap in is better than doing nothing,” he said. “But it falls far short of the safest option: to remove the coal ash and cap it in a lined facility.”
Michael Petelle, a retired science teacher from Marietta, expressed similar concerns about the area surrounding Georgia Power’s Plant McDonough in Cobb County, where contamination from coal ash has turned up offsite from the property.
“Testing alone is not the only solution,” he said. “This contamination would not occur if the ash was fully contained within a lined landfill.”
Chris Manganiello, water policy director for the environmental advocacy group Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, urged members of the legislature’s Republican majority to give a hearing to a bill sponsored by Buckner that would require storing coal ash in lined landfills.
But Smith said even lined landfills are not a guarantee.
“Liners are good if they never, ever have a default or deterioration,” he said. “But one small pinhole or a crack and you lose what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Gov. Brian Kemp speaks with reporters outside Amazon’s new warehouse in Gwinnett County on Sept. 1, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – A $1.9 trillion federal COVID-19 relief package moving in Congress that would send aid directly to cities and counties has drawn backlash from Gov. Brian Kemp, who says its funding formula shortchanges Georgia.
Dubbed the “American Rescue Plan,” the latest relief package would divvy up $195 billion to state governments based on how many people are unemployed in each state, departing from the formula in previous COVID-19 packages that distributed relief based on population.
Kemp slammed the funding formula on Tuesday, arguing it would send less money to states like Georgia that have kept businesses open through most of the pandemic’s tenure, while benefitting states like California and New York that have locked down more often.
But backers of the plan point out an additional $130 billion would be sent directly to city and county governments based on their populations and poverty levels, marking a new payment round that skirts state oversight unlike previous packages passed since March of 2020.
They argue Georgia’s share of the new relief funds should 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.
Kemp, a Republican eying reelection in 2022, estimated that tying funding amounts to unemployment would leave Georgia with $1.3 billion less in relief than if allocations were based on a state’s population – an amount other analysts in Georgia have not yet verified.
“The COVID-19 relief package, as currently written, is a slap in the face to hardworking Georgians, small businesses and countless families who struggled to make ends meet throughout the pandemic,” Kemp said in an editorial published Monday on Fox News.
“Congress should take action immediately by changing the bill to level the playing field for all states.”
The nonprofit Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI) disputed Kemp’s characterization of the Biden-backed package’s potential impact, though the group has not yet done a full analysis of the $1.9 trillion plan’s many funding branches, said GBPI Senior Policy Analyst Danny Kanso.
He highlighted previous aid packages, including last year’s $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which pumped funding through state officials to apportion to local governments. The current package under consideration is both larger for local governments and partly cuts out the state as broker, Kanso said.
“The CARES Act sent $150 billion out of the $2.2 trillion plan, so Georgia is currently getting both more raw dollars, and a higher share of the funding is directed specifically to state and local governments,” Kanso said, noting the latest funding round will send $350 billion to state and local officials.
The nonprofit Georgia Public Policy Foundation, meanwhile, sided with Kemp in questioning the unemployment-focused funding formula, agreeing that Georgia’s aid share would be higher with a more population-centric calculation.
Kyle Wingfield, the foundation’s president and CEO, also noted many state and local governments have not spent all their funds from previous rounds of COVID-19 aid, even as revenues have rebounded in states like Georgia that have kept businesses more open than elsewhere.
“To throw the unemployment rate in there as a new thing is certainly going to distort this allocation in favor of states that have kept their economies closed versus those that have tried to strike a balance between public health and keeping their economies from going into a free-fall,” Wingfield said.
Kemp, who has long touted Georgia’s economic recovery by keeping businesses open during the pandemic, called on recently seated U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to “use their considerable influence” in the Democrat-controlled Congress to revise the relief package.
Both Ossoff and Warnock – the first Democrats to capture Georgia’s two Senate seats in 15 years – plan to vote in favor of the new relief package that has backing from President Joe Biden’s administration, their offices confirmed Tuesday.
In a statement, Ossoff said the relief package would help bolster “smaller cities, counties, towns and rural communities have not received the federal support they need and deserve.”
Separately, Warnock called the package “robust relief” that can now clear the Democrat-controlled Congress “so we can finally get these federal investments out the door and into the hands of Georgians who’ve waited too long for help.”
Beyond state and local government funding, the relief package contains dozens of aid measures including billions of dollars to fund COVID-19 testing and vaccine production, emergency rental assistance, extended higher unemployment benefits and $1,400 stimulus checks for most Americans.
The Biden administration confirmed Tuesday that $350 billion of the relief package would go toward state, local and tribal governments, plus another nearly $130 billion dedicated for reopening schools across the country.
Of that amount, Georgia’s state and local share would be $8.3 billion, plus another $4.5 billion for K-12 schools, an administration spokesman confirmed. That’s on top of a $1,600 tax credit for more than 1 million low-income Georgia families, a $27 bump in supplemental nutrition benefits per person and a roughly $1,000 earned-income tax credit for adults.
“We can disagree on the precise way this money is allocated to state and local governments, but President Biden’s plan put forward $350 billion to keep cops, firefighters and teachers on the job, and the Republican proposal was for $0,” said White House spokesperson Mike Gwin.
“And when Republicans had a chance to support this funding in the House, they voted against it unanimously.”
The package gained House passage on Feb. 27 with Georgia’s six Democratic members voting in favor and eight Republican members voting against.
This story has been updated to include additional input from the Biden administration.
Then-U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff (left) and Rev. Raphael Warnock (right) of Georgia bump elbows on the campaign trail in Atlanta during their runoff races. Ossoff and Warnock took office in the Senate on Jan. 20, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
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)
Wide-ranging legislation aimed at cracking down on rioting protesters in Georgia that criminal-justice advocates say could trample on free-speech rights faced debate in the General Assembly Tuesday.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, contains several proposals to punish vandalism and violence during protests such as those seen last summer in response to high-profile fatal shootings by police.
It seeks to “look at and redefine what peaceful assemblies were,” Robertson said, by making it a felony with fines and prison time to commit violent acts in gatherings of seven people or more, block a highway or road and deface public structures like monuments and cemeteries.
It would also hold city and county governments liable in civil court for interfering in a police agency’s protest enforcement, require permits for protests and rallies, block local officials from reducing police budgets by 30% or more in a year and provide protections for volunteer groups like “neighborhood watches” to assist police in protest enforcement.
“This is actually a good piece of legislation,” said Robertson, a retired major with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office. “All we have to do is look at today and look at the past and the future we’re moving into, and I think everybody understands the necessity of this.”
Representatives from several different groups focused on civil liberties, free speech, criminal defense and county finances strongly opposed Robertson’s bill during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
The Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued the bill could give legal cover to vigilante and militia groups like the Proud Boys to intervene in protests with weapons, threats and violence, such as has been seen in recent protests including the fatal “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“This portion of the bill seems to goad that appalling behavior with the promise of immunity,” said Mazie Lynn Causey, policy advocate for the defense lawyers’ association. “It is unnecessary.”
Representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association County Commissioners of Georgia and the Southern Poverty Law Center all noted passing the bill could spur a flood of costly lawsuits challenging the measure on constitutional grounds – likewise for local governments suddenly on the hook for violent acts committed at gatherings as small as two people.
“This seems to make county governments and other local governments a guarantor for the public for the safety and property damage protection, which is a dramatic change from the way the law currently stands,” said Larry Ramsey, deputy counsel with the county commissioners’ association. “And obviously, to open up those floodgates, there are costs associated with that.”
Robertson dismissed concerns by those groups, calling their agendas antithetical to the duties of law enforcement officers to ensure public safety and peace.
“With the ACLU coming in with their new mission of cherry-picking when free speech is free speech and when free speech is not, I would not have expected any less of them,” Robertson said. “And to have the criminal defense attorneys come in and do theirs, it was no surprise either.”
Robertson’s bill comes after protests against police brutality and racial injustice rocked many U.S. cities in the summer of 2020, sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes during an arrest.
Scores of largely peaceful protests in Atlanta were also peppered with high-profile acts of vandalism that saw some demonstrators set fires, destroy cars and spur police to deploy tear gas and other counter-protest measures. One Atlanta police officer was injured by a four-wheeler during a protest.
Recent protests also brought backlash from conservative leaders who focused on the violent elements in some protests, citing property destruction and police defiance as motivation to staunchly back law enforcement officials – particularly by resisting calls by some criminal justice advocates to reduce funding for local police agencies.
The Georgia House of Representatives last week passed a measure by state Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, that would limit most local governments from reducing funds for police by more than 5% over a 10-year span. It now awaits consideration in the Georgia Senate.
ATLANTA – With legislation aimed at legalizing pari-mutuel betting on horse racing stuck in a Georgia Senate committee, a House panel aired a new version of the measure Tuesday.
Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, pitched a constitutional amendment asking voters to decide whether to legalize the sport as a way to reenergize rural Georgia’s struggling economy.
“It will create a new industry in Georgia of horse breeders and horse sales that could have over $1 billion [a year] in economic impact in our state,” Stephens told members of the House Economic Development and Tourism Committee, which he chairs.
Stephens held out Ocala, Fla., as an example, home to 37,000 racehorses, by far the largest breeding and training ground for horseracing in the nation. The industry generates an annual economic impact of $1.5 billion in Marion County, where Ocala is located, he said.
Stephens said horse breeding could become a safety net for tree farmers who lost their pecan crops to Hurricane Michael in 2018. It will take 20 years to grow new pecan trees to replace those lost to the storm, he said.
“This would allow those farmers to get into another industry,” he said.
To broaden support for the constitutional amendment in the General Assembly, the measure would dedicate 10% of the net proceeds from pari-mutuel betting on horse racing to health care. Most previous horse racing legislation has proposed putting the proceeds exclusively toward Georgia’s lottery-funded HOPE Scholarships and pre-kindergarten programs.
Stephens said the portion of the proceeds going to health care could be steered to rural communities, where some cash-strapped hospitals have been forced to close in recent years.
But Rep. Winfred Dukes, D-Albany, complained that the language in the measure isn’t specific enough.
“If it’s not specifically outlined, my concern is that the money would go everywhere,” he said.
Stephens said another part of the proceeds would be used to create “an opportunity fund” that would provide need-based scholarships and pre-k assistance to Georgia families with annual incomes below $58,000. Currently, HOPE scholarships are based on merit rather than need.
If the constitutional amendment passes the committee, it would require two-thirds majorities of the House and Senate to get it through the General Assembly and onto next year’s statewide ballot.
That promises to be a difficult hill to climb considering many lawmakers oppose legalized gambling both on moral grounds and because of its tendency to enable addictive gamblers.
“We can put a lot of lipstick on this pig,” said Rep. Randy Nix, R-LaGrange, referring to the promises of rural economic development and funding for education and health care. “But at the end of the day, we’re going to expand gambling big time in the state of Georgia.”
After several committee members objected they hadn’t had a chance to review the new proposal, Stephens agreed to limit Tuesday’s meeting to a hearing only. The panel is expected to vote on it Thursday.
Legislation allowing visits from caregivers and legal representatives including family members of Georgians in hospitals or nursing homes during emergencies like COVID-19 advanced in the state House of Representatives on Monday.
The bill is a scaled-back version of a measure brought by Rep. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, that initially required hospitals and nursing homes to give broad in-person access for patients and residents to visit with family members.
After some pushback last month, Setzler tailored his bill to allow only legal representatives that can include next of kin who are designated to make decisions by long-term hospital patients to visit up to an hour a day during statewide emergencies.
It would also let caregivers – which could include a family member – to visit with loved ones in nursing homes for two hours a day during pandemic-scale emergencies. Caregivers and legal representatives would have to follow all safety protocols set by the hospital or nursing home.
Setzler’s bill originally proposed allowing visits from family members without the requirement for them to be designated caregivers or legal representatives, a broader rule for in-person visits than his overhauled measure now seeks.
“The core of this bill is about patient representation,” Setzler said at a House Human Relations and Aging Committee hearing on Monday.
The committee approved the measure and sent it to the full House.
Setzler’s bill has faced some opposition from hospital and nursing home industry representatives who worry an influx of visitors could weaken safety protocols and might run afoul of federal rules on allowing visitors during emergencies.
Currently, Georgia allows visitation at nursing homes and long-term care facilities based on levels of COVID-19 positivity rates in a given community.
Despite its good intentions to connect patients with loved ones during tough times, the bill could create legal turmoil over visitors defying safety protocols and potentially hand too much power to designated representatives, said Anna Adams, senior vice president of government relations for the Georgia Hospital Association.
“This bill allows the patient representative to choose the essential visitor without the patient’s consent,” Adams said. “That is incredibly concerning.”
Democrats on the committee also opposed the bill, calling it too vague to ensure confidence visitors could enter hospitals and nursing homes during emergency situations without causing major problems.
“The vagueness of ‘reasonable standard,’ that doesn’t work for me,” said Rep. Donna McCleod, D-Lawrenceville. “If it’s not clear, we are going to cause chaos.”
Republicans, who hold a majority on the committee, pressed for passage of Setzler’s bill to make sure ailing loved ones could spend perhaps their final days in contact with their families.
“I just want to know how long we can wait for loved ones to see their family members,” said Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock. “They have deteriorated, they have passed and I think we need to make the decision to get on with this. … This is seriously ridiculous for us not to pass this bill.”
Setzler said he agreed to the changes despite his wish and those of many supporters to broaden access to loved ones in hospitals or nursing-home care, with the aim of avoiding the grief of family members only being able to communicate by phone or live video.
“Is one hour a day for visiting adequate?” Setzler said last month during a hearing on the bill. “I struggle with that. It’s my personal opinion that it’s inadequate. But zero [hours] is unacceptable.”
Setzler has also said the bill would likely apply to future pandemics and emergencies rather than COVID-19, given it would not take effect until July, and the bulk of Georgians are predicted to have received vaccines by then.
Nearly 820,000 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in Georgia as of Thursday afternoon, with roughly 189,000 more reported positive antigen tests indicating likely positive results. The virus has killed 15,148 Georgians.
This story has been updated to clarify who can be designated as a legal representative.
