Georgia House Republican leaders released a proposed state House map late Tuesday.
ATLANTA – Georgia House Republican leaders released a proposed map of state House districts late Tuesday less than 12 hours before the General Assembly kicks off its once-a-decade redrawing of legislative and congressional districts.
The map meets many of the criteria set down in guidelines adopted by the state House and Senate committees in charge of redistricting.
It has a population deviation of less than plus-or-minus 1.5%, meaning the 180 House districts vary by fewer than 1,800 people. By law, legislative district may vary in population by up to plus-or-minus 5%.
The Republican map also reduces the number of counties split between House districts from 73 to 68, preserving more “communities of interest,” another goal of the redistricting guidelines.
And it creates a number of new “minority opportunity” districts to let minority voters elect candidates of their choice, according to a news release put out by House Republican leaders.
“We have produced a fair and equitable map representative of Georgia’s changing demographics and shifting population centers that is in full compliance with the spirit and letter of the law,” said House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.
Indeed, minority population growth in North Georgia and metro Atlanta could play to Democrats’ advantage.
A preliminary look at the proposed House map shows Democrats may have a chance to pick up seats now held by Republicans in Gwinnett, Cobb and Forsyth counties. Hispanic growth in the Gainesville and Dalton areas also could result in Democratic gains.
Democrats also could threaten a couple of GOP-held seats in Southwest Georgia, where House districts will have to become larger because of population losses in the region during the last decade.
Ralston also praised the map as the result of an inclusive process that featured 11 joint House-Senate committee hearings held last summer both online and in cities around the state with 22 hours of public testimony.
Lawmakers also received more than 700 written comments from interested citizens through an online portal.
The General Assembly redraws Georgia’s congressional and legislative district maps every 10 years to account for population shifts reflected in the U.S. Census.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The 2020 U.S. Census undercounted Georgia’s population by an estimated 124,438, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank Urban Institute reported Tuesday.
Only four more populous states – Texas, California, New York and Florida – experienced higher undercounts than Georgia.
While census figures compiled every 10 years are never completely accurate, the Urban Institute found the 2020 Census likely was less accurate than the 2010 population count for a variety of reasons.
The report cited the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on getting accurate counts as well as the politicization of the process.
Then-President Donald Trump attempted to add a citizenship question to the census long sought by opponents of illegal immigration. Although the effort failed, the proposal likely acted as a disincentive for some immigrants to fill out census forms.
As has occurred in the past, minorities including Blacks and Hispanics were disproportionately undercounted, the report found. What was different in 2020 was the growth in those minority populations since 2010.
“Traditionally hard-to-count groups increased as a share of the population,” the report stated. “Pre-census funding shortfalls at key times limited the testing of new census procedures, and late disputes over census content exacerbated uncertainty.
“Then the pandemic affected living arrangements, complicated in-person follow-up counts, and delayed post-enumeration data cleaning and other processes.”
Overall, the U.S. population of 331.4 million reported in the 2020 Census was undercounted by nearly 1.7 million, or 0.51%, the Urban Institute found.
The 10.7 million Georgians listed in the census represented an undercount of 1.15%, according to the report.
Of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, only 14 states were overcounted. The largest overcounts occurred in three states in the upper Midwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The census is used not only to apportion congressional representation among the 50 states and to redraw the boundaries of state legislative districts, a process Georgia’s General Assembly will begin during a special session starting Wednesday.
Census numbers also affect the allocation of federal funding across the states.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s utility-regulating agency voted unanimously Tuesday to let Georgia Power pass on to customers $2.1 billion of the costs of completing the first of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle.
That figure, which will boost average residential customer bills by $3.78 a month, was set in an agreement the Atlanta-based utility and the state Public Service Commission’s (PSC) Public Interest Advocacy Staff reached last month.
Under the agreement, Georgia Power will not be allowed to start recovering the $2.1 billion until one month after the reactor unit goes into commercial operation. The latest delay in the project Georgia Power announced late last month means that first reactor won’t be ready until the third quarter of next year.
The PSC voted in August to stop approving incremental cost increases incurred at the long-delayed, over-budget nuclear expansion at the plant south of Augusta. Instead, the commission postponed deciding how much of the cost overruns Georgia Power customers will ultimately have to bear until after Unit 3, the first of the two new reactors, is completed.
The Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion, originally projected to cost about $14 billion when the PSC approved the project a dozen years ago, has soared to at least $26 billion.
The cost overruns are the result of numerous delays in the project schedule, from an original completion timetable of 2016 for the first reactor and 2017 for the second to the latest estimate of 2022 and 2023.
In their defense, Georgia Power officials have argued they are building the first new nuclear reactors in the United States in 30 years. The project has been beset by the bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric, the original prime contractor, and by delays associated with the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the construction workforce.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia lawmakers will converge at the state Capitol Nov. 3 to begin redrawing Georgia’s political maps, a once-a-decade exercise to accommodate population shifts reflected in the U.S. Census.
Democrats and Republicans are offering vastly different visions for how Georgia should be represented in Congress, with Republicans seeking to maintain their majority in the Peach State’s 14-member U.S. House delegation and Democrats looking to even things up.
“Expect a lot of rhetoric,” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan told Capitol Beat. “I expect both good and bad ideas to echo throughout the halls. There will obviously be disagreements from people all across the state, but we will follow the letter of the law.”
This is Duncan’s first reapportionment session as the state Senate’s presiding officer.
“I was a product of reapportionment when I was elected to a newly drawn [Georgia House] district,” said Duncan, a former state representative who is not running for a second term as lieutenant governor. “I’ve told my staff to become experts on the rules and the law so we execute the process properly.”
Georgia House and Senate Democrats released a proposed congressional map last month. Democrats said their map would provide a fair opportunity for voters of color in Georgia to elect representatives of their choice, as minorities would make up a majority of the residents in six of the 14 districts (Districts 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 13).
But with Republicans in control of the General Assembly, any map Democrats suggest – whether a congressional map or proposed boundaries for state House and Senate districts – promises to be dead on arrival.
For the GOP, the key question will be whether to try to regain one of the two congressional seats in Atlanta’s northern suburbs lost to the Democrats during the last two election cycles or go for broke and try to take back both seats.
A congressional map Georgia Senate Republicans released in late September appears to take the more cautious approach. It goes after the 6th Congressional District seat Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Marietta, won in 2018 by moving heavily Republican Forsyth County into the district and removing more Democrat-friendly North DeKalb County.
Earlier this month, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, along with RepresentUs, a nonpartisan anti-corruption organization, gave the GOP map a “C” on its Redistricting Report Card, based on partisan fairness, competitiveness and geographic features. The organization said its “C” grade means the proposed map is average, and could be better but also worse.
The same report card gave the Democrats’ map a “B” for partisan fairness and said the map would give a slight partisan advantage to Democrats. It also gave the Democratic map two “C’s” for competitiveness and geographic features.
RepresentUS recently ranked Georgia as one of 35 states that are most at-risk for partisan gerrymandering. The organization said risks are high because new election maps can be controlled and drawn by politicians in secret and rigged for partisan gain. It also said so-called “rigged” election maps are hard to challenge in court.
Democrats say their map is likely to lead to a 7-7 split in Georgia’s congressional delegation. Currently, there are eight Republicans in Congress representing Georgia and six Democrats.
The GOP map was overseen by Duncan and state Sen. John Kennedy, R-Macon, who chairs the Senate Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee.
At the state legislative level, Democrats on Friday released their own map that redraws the state’s 180 House districts. Submitted by House Minority Leader James Beverly, D-Macon, Democrats said the map would improve representation of urban and suburban residents and non-white Georgia voters.
The proposal contains 22 districts in which minorities are a majority of residents and a majority of the voting age population, an increase from the 20 such districts currently.
In a statement, Democrats said the new map more fairly represents the partisan makeup of Georgia’s electorate by establishing 25 districts that likely would elect Democrats, 27 that probably would elect Republicans, and four competitive districts. Currently, Republicans hold 34 of the state Senate’s 56 seats.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The University System of Georgia (USG) experienced a slight decline in enrollment this fall after seven straight years of growth.
Total enrollment at the university system’s 26 colleges and universities stands at 340,638 students, system officials reported Monday.
The enrollment decline resulted from a 3.7% decrease in students at the system’s state universities and a 6.7% drop-off at state colleges.
The number of students at the system’s research and comprehensive universities actually grew, helping offset the losses at the state colleges and universities. At the four research universities, enrollment increased by a healthy 2.6%, while the comprehensive universities saw a slight increase of 0.5%.
Overall, the enrollment decline was just 0.2% – or 851 students – which system officials blamed on the disruptions brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I appreciate all the challenges our students have overcome as they have persisted on their journey toward their degree from a USG institution,” said Teresa MacCartney, the system’s acting chancellor.
Undergraduate enrollment at the system’s four-year institutions fell by 2.1%, while graduate student enrollment grew by 7.9%. In both cases, the USG numbers were stronger than the national average for four-year institutions.
Enrollment increased at five system institutions: the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State University, Augusta University and Georgia Southern University. Georgia Tech posted the largest jump at 10.3%.
Twenty institutions experienced declines in enrollment. The largest drop came at East Georgia State College, where enrollment fell by 16.2%.
Enrollment at Georgia Southwestern State University was flat.
The demographic numbers showed growth among Hispanic and Asian students, which increased their enrollments by 3.4% and 10.3%, respectively. Enrollment by Black students was down 2.4%, while white student enrollment dropped 2.2%.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
