ATLANTA – State and local elected officials from Houston County dedicated one of the most visible solar energy projects in Georgia Wednesday.
The new 68-megawatt Houston Solar project off Interstate 75 near Perry was built by Green Power EMC, the renewable energy supplier for 38 Georgia electric membership corporations and Silicon Ranch, one of the nation’s largest independent solar power producers.
The seventh utility-scale solar facility brought online by Green Power EMC and Silicon Ranch, the project will provide enough power to serve 11,000 EMC customers.
“The Houston Solar project further demonstrates the commitment of Georgia’s EMCs to providing their consumers with cost-effective renewable energy that strives to meet the needs of a cleaner energy future,” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said during the dedication ceremony.
“This site uses advanced technology to maximize its clean energy production, and the benefits are multiplied by creating jobs, driving economic development and delivering significant tax revenue to the local government and school system for decades to come.”
The project was announced in late 2020. Under the terms of a 30-year agreement with Silicon Ranch, Green Power EMC will purchase all the energy generated at the site on behalf of its member EMCs, while Silicon Ranch owns and operates the facility.
Matt Kisber, Silcon Ranch’s cofounder and chairman, said Silicon Ranch has partnered with Green Power EMC to build about $1.5 billion in solar projects across Georgia, employing more than 5,000 workers.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Under the prior law, any person living with HIV who did not disclose positive HIV status prior to a sexual act could face a felony charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to Georgia Equality, an LGBT advocacy group.
The revised law is narrower in scope. Now, Georgia law penalizes only those sexual acts performed by a person living with HIV “with the intent to transmit HIV” when the act “has a significant risk of transmission based on current scientifically supported levels of risk transmission.”
Such incidents could still be punished as felonies, but the maximum punishment has been reduced to five years.
The bill also excludes punishment when a person living with HIV is forced to perform a sexual act against his or her will, as in cases of sexual assault or rape.
State Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, initially sponsored the bill in the Senate. It was strongly supported by Georgia Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, the chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee.
The bill passed the Senate with just two “no” votes before clearing the House unanimously.
“The current HIV laws were written in the 1980s,” Hufstetler said Wednesday. “They really didn’t distinguish between HIV and AIDS [and] criminalized hypodermic needles and syringes.
“I’m hoping that laws that align with public health best practices will contribute to better control of individuals that have obtained [HIV] and also a reduced infection rate. As an anesthesia provider in the medical community, I believe it’s my responsibility to correct these things in laws when I become aware of them,” Hufstetler said.
“As a person living with HIV, I’m encouraged that the [Georgia] legislature understands the advances in HIV science,” added Malcolm Reid, coalition co-chair and federal policy chair for People Living with HIV Caucus, in a press release. “Ending the stigma around HIV is a necessity to ending the HIV epidemic.”
The new law will “hopefully will result in fewer convictions,” said Catherine Hanssens, the executive director for the Center for HIV Law and Policy in New York.
“At the same time, the law is still HIV-specific, singling out people living with HIV for uniquely negative treatment in a way that other serious and incurable diseases are not…There is still work to be done,” Hanssens added.
The change to Georgia law reflects advances in HIV treatment, especially the development of drugs that can suppress the amount of virus in the blood, also called the “viral load.”
Drug regimens can effectively suppress the amount of virus in the blood to very low or even undetectable levels, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
“If you have an undetectable viral load, you have effectively no risk of transmitting HIV to an HIV-negative partner through sex,” according to the CDC website. Most people who follow the appropriate drug treatments can reach an undetectable viral load in just six months, the agency says.
There were 56,466 people living with HIV in Georgia in 2019, according to AIDSVu, an online tracking tool based at Emory University in Atlanta. Of those, about two-thirds, or 33,370, had achieved viral suppression, or very low levels of virus in the blood.
Most Georgia cases were transmitted by sexual contact, but around 7% of cases in Georgia are attributable to injecting drugs, according to AIDSVu data.
The bill also changes Georgia law so that distributing hypodermic needles or syringes is no longer punishable.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Early voting in Georgia ahead of the May 24 primaries is breaking records, defying the historical trend of lower turnouts in non-presidential election years.
Through Tuesday, 254,556 Georgians had taken advantage of the early voting period that began May 2 to cast their primary ballots, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported Wednesday. The vast majority – 234,893 – voted in person, while the rest submitted absentee ballots.
Early voting is running 239% ahead of the same point in the early voting period leading up to the 2018 primaries and 160% above the same point prior to the 2020 primaries.
“The record early voting turnout is a testament to the security of the voting system and the hard work of our county election officials,” said Raffensperger, who was the target of unsubstantiated charges of lax ballot security leveled by then-President Donald Trump after Democrat Joe Biden carried Georgia in 2020.
“As secretary of state, I promised to strike a strong balance between access and security in our elections, and these numbers demonstrate that I kept that promise and that voters have confidence in Georgia’s elections.”
Raffensperger supported election law changes the Republican-controlled General Assembly enacted last year that replaced the signature-match verification process for absentee ballots with an ID requirement and restricted the location of ballot drop boxes.
Through Tuesday, 146,425 voters had cast Republican primary ballots, compared to 106,188 cast by Democrats.
The top of the Republican ballot includes a hotly contested race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination between incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp and former U.S. Sen. David Perdue.
University of Georgia football great Herschel Walker is on the GOP ballot for the right to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, a nomination Walker is a strong favorite to win.
On the Democratic side, Stacey Abrams is unopposed in the gubernatorial primary, while Warnock drew only token opposition for the Democratic nomination to seek reelection to the Senate.
Primary voters have until this Friday to request an absentee ballot. Early voting will continue through Friday, May 20.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Plans call for nine bus-rapid transit stations along the Top End of Interstate 285.
ATLANTA – The elected heads of Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett and DeKalb counties signed an agreement Wednesday aimed at piggybacking mass transit on toll lanes to be added to the Top End of Interstate 285.
The four counties will work with MARTA, the Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority (ATL), the Georgia Department of Transportation and the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) on a $16.2 million study to incorporate bus-rapid transit (BRT) service on I-285 from its interchange with I-20 west of Atlanta all the way around to the I-285/I-20 interchange east of the city.
Plans call for up to nine BRT stations to line the route, some of which could be co-located with an existing MARTA station.
“This is an idea, a concept, for what transit can look like,” Chris Tomlinson, executive director of the ATL, said shortly before he, the county leaders and representatives of MARTA, the State Transportation Board and the ARC signed an agreement known as a memorandum of understanding.
The agreement calls for a consortium made up of the four counties, seven cities along I-285 and four self-taxing community improvement districts to develop plans for a multi-jurisdictional, multi-operator transit system along the Top End. The consortium will work with the state and regional transportation agencies to put together preliminary cost estimates.
Brookhaven Mayor John Ernst said the state DOT’s original plan for improving traffic flow along the heavily congested Top End didn’t include transit. It was limited to adding two barrier-separated toll lanes in each direction along the interstate.
It was the mayors of the cities who lobbied the state to include transit, a transportation option that is decades overdue, Ernst said.
“The best time to do transit was 50 years ago,” he said. “Now, the best time to do transit is today.”
Cobb County Commission Chairman Lisa Cupid said adding a transit option along I-285 will further connect the Cumberland business district with MARTA, making it easier for Cobb residents to get to jobs, schools and medical appointments.
“We’re not just speaking about transit,” she said. “This is economic development.”
While the Top End does not extend into Gwinnett County, improving traffic flow through the corridor is critical to Georgia’s second largest county, Gwinnett County Commission Chairman Nicole Hendrickson said.
“Congestion on the Perimeter directly affects congestion on I-85,” she said. “It has a significant impact on our residents and businesses.”
Tomlinson said BRT stations are being proposed at or near the I-285 interchanges with Donald E. Hollowell Parkway, Cumberland Parkway, Cumberland Boulevard, Roswell Road, Perimeter Center Parkway, Shallowford Road, LaVista Road, Lawrenceville Highway and Memorial Drive.
BRT stations could be co-located with the existing Hamilton E. Holmes, Doraville and Indian Creek MARTA stations.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA — The Georgia Department of Public Health discussed increasing fentanyl overdose deaths, COVID rates, and a mysterious hepatitis outbreak among children at its monthly meeting Tuesday.
Fentanyl-involved overdose deaths in Georgia increased 218% from 2019 to 2021, said epidemiologist Dr. Laura Edison. That drastic increase represents 1,248 deaths in a two-year-period.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is particularly dangerous because it is 100 times more potent than morphine and because it is often mixed with non-opioid street drugs, said Edison.
Drug users may not know that their drugs are laced with fentanyl and just “one pill is enough to kill,” Edison emphasized.
Fentanyl has flooded American streets in the past few years. The Atlanta-Carolina High Intensity Drug Taskforce Agency seized a staggering 70,843 doses of fentanyl in 2021, compared to just 3,415 doses seized by the same agency in 2020, said Edison.
That’s about a twenty-fold increase. Such seizures are “just the tip of the iceberg” of the amount of the drug actually on Georgia streets, Edison said.
Almost all fentanyl-involved deaths in Georgia involve another drug as well. These include fentanyl-laced cocaine, amphetamines, and benzodiazepines like Xanax.
“No part of the state is being spared from this,” Edison said. “While we’re seeing the highest counts of overdoses in urban areas, the rates of opioid overdoses tend to be higher in non-urban areas.”
Along with public education efforts, “we need to get naloxone into more hands,” Edison said. Naloxone (brand name Narcan) is an easy-to-administer drug that can rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, preventing deaths.
Naloxone is available to anyone in Georgia without a prescription under a standing order from 2019, Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey pointed out.
However, “angry consumers” have recently called the agency complaining about the high cost of the drug, said Toomey.
Toomey said some of the $636 million coming to the state from an opioid lawsuit settlement with large pharmaceutical companies could help fund getting Naloxone “into the hands of individuals.”
Fentanyl test strips are another harm reduction measure that “have been shown to be effective in preventing overdoses and altering drug taking behaviors,” said Edison, the DPH epidemiologist. The test strips allow drug users and dealers to test their drugs for fentanyl.
A bill the General Assembly passed this year would remove Georgia’s legal prohibition on fentanyl test strips. That bill is awaiting Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature.
It’s not yet clear how the state will ensure the strips are widely distributed once the bill is signed. That could be another effort funded by the opioid lawsuit settlement funds, Edison said.
State Epidemiologist Dr. Cherie Drenzek updated the board about the mysterious cases of pediatric hepatitis first identified in previously healthy children in Alabama last fall and now being found across the country and the world.
Drenzek emphasized that though the cases of pediatric hepatitis are serious, they are also very rare.
So far, 109 children with the previously unknown form of hepatitis have been identified in the United States, including “several” in Georgia.
None of the children had been vaccinated for COVID, so the outbreak is not driven by the vaccine, as some have speculated. Nor are the cases related to COVID, according to a statement from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Drenzek said one hypothesis scientists are exploring is whether the hepatitis is caused by the common – and usually mild – adenovirus type 41. About half of the children with hepatitis tested positive for the adenovirus, said Drenzek.
“The CDC is casting a very wide net to try identify affected patients and ask very detailed questions about a number of potential exposures,” Drenzek said.
COVID numbers are also on the rise in Georgia, with about a 65% increase in reported cases over the last two weeks, Drenzek said. This is in line with national trends.
A new subvariant (BA.2.12.1) is “highly transmissible” and makes up around 40% of all circulating COVID-19 virus in the United States, Drenzek explained.
She emphasized that COVID numbers are “still at relatively low levels” compared to prior surges and described the current increase as “a slow, steady wave.”
Drenzek said vaccinations and boosters continue to prevent severe cases. About 56% of the Georgia population has been fully vaccinated and 24% of the population has received a booster, she said.
“We’re again very grateful for the protective ability of our boosters,” Drenzek said.
The Department of Public Health has recently distributed more than 58,000 home testing kits to county health departments and health districts across the state, said Dr. David Newton, the agency’s Director of Health Protection.
Though the results of most home tests are not reported, the home tests are helpful for people who cannot or do not want to go to the 132 public testing sites currently sponsored by the department, Newton said.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
