Rep. Bee Nguyen (photo credit: Georgia House of Representatives)
ATLANTA – Bee Nguyen won the Georgia primary runoff for the Democratic Party’s nomination for secretary of state on Tuesday night.
Nguyen won 77% of the runoff votes, while her opponent, Dee Dawkins-Haigler, won 23%.
Nguyen currently represents Atlanta in the Georgia House of Representatives. She will now face incumbent Republican Brad Raffensperger in the general election in November.
Lawyer Charlie Bailey defeated Kwanza Hall in the race for the Democratic nod for lieutenant governor. Bailey earned 63% of the vote and Hall 37%.
Bailey will face incumbent Republican Burt Jones in November.
Janice Laws Robinson beat Raphael Baker in the Democratic runoff for insurance commissioner. Robinson earned 64% of the vote and Baker earned 37%.
Robinson will face incumbent Republican John King in November. King was appointed to the position in July 2019 by Gov. Brian Kemp after the prior commissioner, Jim Beck, resigned due to corruption charges.
Robinson, a longtime insurance professional, ran for the commissioner position against Beck in 2018 and lost by about three percentage points.
William Boddie, Jr., a lawyer and state representative from East Point, defeated Nicole Horn in the race for the Democrats’ labor commissioner nomination.
Boddie earned 62% of the votes.
Boddie will face Republican nominee Bruce Thompson in the labor commissioner race November. Current incumbent Republican Mark Butler chose not to run for re-election.
Democratic turnout for the runoffs was low. Only about 250,000 voters cast votes in the races.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearings D.C. focused on how then-President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to get election workers in Georgia to illegally change the state’s 2020 election results.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling spoke before Congress about the personal and professional pressures they faced to show that Trump won Georgia.
Raffensperger’s team oversaw three separate counts of the state’s 2020 presidential votes. Each count confirmed that Joe Biden won Georgia’s popular vote, Raffensperger told the U.S. House committee.
“Three counts, all remarkably close… showed that President Trump did come up short,” Raffensperger said of the November 2020 election results.
But Trump spent an hour in a recorded phone conversation on Jan. 2, 2021 telling fellow Republican Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the Georgia results. Democrat Joe Biden had won in Georgia in by 11,779 votes.
“There were no votes to find,” Raffensperger said. “The numbers were the numbers and we could not recalculate because we made sure that we had checked every single allegation.”
Sterling, the chief operating officer, described how a video of Fulton County election workers counting votes became the center of what he called a “conspiracy theory that took on a life of its own.”
Trump alleged that extra Biden ballots had been dropped off at the county’s vote counting center at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
“What [the video] actually showed was Fulton County workers engaged in normal ballot processing,” Sterling said. “What happens [in the video] is a standard operating procedure.”
The misinformation around the video frustrated Sterling.
“I felt our information was getting out, but that there was a reticence of people…to believe it because the President of the United States… was telling them it wasn’t true,” Sterling said.
“The President’s lawyers…saw the exact same things the rest of us could see. And they chose to mislead state senators and the public,” Sterling said. “They knew it was untrue.”
Prominent elected officials like Raffensperger and ordinary election workers alike faced harassment as a result of the misinformation.
Trump supporters targeted Fulton County election workers Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, who are shown at work counting ballots in the video.
“A lot of [the threats] were racist, a lot of them were just hateful,” Moss said.
“This turned my life upside down,” Moss said. She left her job as a Fulton County election worker, as did many of her colleagues, she said.
Her mother, Ruby Freeman, used to wear a t-shirt that “proudly proclaimed,” her nickname, “Lady Ruby.”
In videotaped testimony shown on Tuesday, Freeman said she hasn’t worn the shirt since election day and won’t ever again.
Freeman had to leave her home for over two months starting in January 2021 because the Federal Bureau of Investigation deemed it unsafe to remain there.
“I won’t even introduce myself by my name anymore…..I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman said.
The next hearing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – A minority utility partner in the nuclear expansion at Plant Vogtle is freezing its capital costs on the long-delayed, overbudget project.
Oglethorpe Power is one of three minority partners on the construction of two additional nuclear reactors at the plant south of Augusta, along with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) and Dalton Utilities. Georgia Power, which owns the largest share, is overseeing the project.
In freezing its costs, Oglethorpe is exercising an option agreed to by all four project co-owners in 2018. Under the agreement, Oglethorpe will reduce its share of ownership of the project from 30% to 28% in exchange for Georgia Power paying 100% of Oglethorpe’s remaining share of construction costs.
Freezing its share of the project will cap Oglethorpe’s costs at $8.1 billion.
“Oglethorpe Power and our member cooperatives are deeply invested in the success of these nuclear units that will provide emission-free energy for Georgians for the next 60 to 80 years,” said Michael L. Smith, Oglethorpe Power’s president and chief executive officer.
“At the same time, we feel responsible for protecting our not-for-profit member cooperatives and their consumers. … Our decision to freeze protects EMC (electric membership cooperative) energy consumers who can least afford increases in their electricity rates, especially in today’s economy.”
Plant Vogtle has suffered multiple delays and cost overruns since the Georgia Public Service Commission approved the expansion in 2009. Originally expected to be completed in 2016 and 2017 at a cost of $14 billion, the project’s price tag has more than doubled.
Since September 2018, the project budget has increased five times, totaling an increase of $3.4 billion since the co-owners jointly negotiated the new cost-sharing agreement.
Under the latest projected schedule, the first of the two reactors is due to go into service by the first quarter of next year. The second reactor is scheduled to follow by the fourth quarter of 2023.
Georgia Power spokesman Jacob Hawkins said the Atlanta-based utility doesn’t believe Oglethorpe has the legal right to freeze its capital costs for the Plant Vogtle expansion.
“Georgia Power and Oglethorpe have a difference of opinion over the dollar amount at which this tender option is triggered,” Hawkins said.
“Our focus continues to be bringing the Vogtle units online safely. We will continue to engage with our co-owners productively as we achieve that goal.”
Oglethorpe Power’s decision to freeze its capital costs does not stop the project. According to Georgia Power, as of the end of March, the total project was 96.3% complete.
“Oglethorpe Power is committed to ensuring our member cooperatives’ power supply needs are met with affordable, reliable, safe and environmentally responsible generation,” Smith said. “By exercising the freeze option, we are ensuring that the 4.4 million Georgians served by our member cooperatives will not absorb future capital cost increases, if they occur.”
The Plant Vogtle expansion is the first advanced nuclear project in the United States in three decades. The two new units are the only nuclear reactors currently under construction in America.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia is home to three of the nation’s 100 dirtiest power plants, the Atlanta-based Environment Georgia Research & Policy Center reported Monday.
Georgia Power’s Plant Bowen near Cartersville topped the Georgia list for carbon emissions and is ranked 23rd in the country.
Two of Plant Bowen’s four coal-burning units were due to be retired by 2028 under a proposal the Atlanta-based utility filed with the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) last January.
But a 14-page agreement Georgia Power and the PSC’s Public Interest Advocacy Staff reached last week would leave that decision up to the commission, contingent upon the “completion of necessary transmission system improvements.”
Environment Georgia’s new report ranks power plants across the U.S. by their contribution to climate change based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) latest eGRID data.
The dirtiest power plants have an outsized impact: In 2020, the 10 most climate-polluting plants in Georgia were responsible for 91.5% of global warming emissions from the power sector despite only generating 56.5% of total electricity, according to the report.
“Our changing climate affects every aspect of our lives, from the air we breathe in our neighborhoods to the food we grow in Georgia,” said Jennette Gayer, Environment Georgia’s state director.
“Dirty power plants threaten our health and the climate, yet these super-polluters have filled the skies with pollution for decades without consequence. We need to hold the worst power plants accountable for damaging our climate.”
While Plant Bowen burns coal, eight of Georgia’s 10 dirtiest power plants are fired by methane gas. New research on methane leaks finds that the emissions associated with extracting and transporting methane are a serious climate problem.
Although burning methane gas releases less carbon dioxide than burning coal, the report ranked Plant McDonough, a gas-fired plant near Smryna, as the state’s second dirtiest.
Coal-burning Plant Scherer, near Macon, was third on Georgia’s dirtiest-plants list.
To get power plant pollution under control, the report recommends limiting emissions from power plants and accelerating Georgia’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Georgia Power is proposing to expand its renewable energy portfolio by 2,300 megawatts by 2029.
Environmental advocates are worried a U.S. Supreme Court ruling expected this month in a West Virginia case could hamstring the EPA’s ability to set limits on carbon emissions from power plants.
“We can repower our state more cleanly and safely with renewable energy,” Gayer said. “We hope the Public Service Commission will take steps to shut down Plant Bowen, our state’s dirtiest power plant.”
Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft responded to the Environment Georgia report by noting the utility has reduced its carbon emissions by 60% since 2007 and now relies on coal for only 15% of its energy generating capacity.
“We are committed to making smart investments today so that our customers can continue to have clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy for decades to come,” he said.
“Our long-term planning process, the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), has allowed us to work with the Georgia Public Service Commission to make significant, cost-effective and reliable resource planning decisions that have resulted in a mix of lower-carbon energy resources that benefit all customers.”
Top 10 dirtiest power plants in Georgia, 2020
Plant County Fuel Carbon dioxide equivalent emissions*
Bowen Bartow Coal 7.93
McDonough Cobb Gas 6.89
Scherer Monroe Coal 6.86
McIntosh Effingham Gas 3.28
Wansley (55965) Heard Gas 3.14
Smith Energy Facility Murray Gas 2.84
Yates Coweta Gas 1.35
Chattahoochee Energy Facility Heard Gas 1.28
Wansley (7946) Heard Gas 1.21
Effingham Energy Facility Gas 1.12
*million metric tons
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
The monkeypox virus (photo credit: CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith)
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) confirmed a third case of monkeypox in the state Friday.
An Atlanta man who recently traveled to Chicago for a convention has been diagnosed with the disease, DPH spokeswoman Nancy Nydam said. The man’s case is unrelated to the previous two cases identified in the state.
The man is isolating and contact tracing has started, Nydam added.
The first suspected monkeypox case in Georgia was identified on June 1. The DPH noted a second case earlier this week at its monthly board meeting.
Monkeypox is a viral disease that causes the skin to break out in pustules. It was first detected in laboratory monkeys and then discovered in humans in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The disease is usually mild but can be life threatening in some cases.
The current outbreak is unusual because 1,285 cases have confirmed in 28 countries where the disease is not typically found. The disease is considered endemic to certain central and western African areas.
Most of the cases in the current outbreak have been identified in the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal.
The cases in the current outbreak appear to have been transmitted through very close personal contact with someone else who had the lesions, state epidemiologist Cherie Drenzek said at a Board of Public Health meeting this week.
Often, the monkeypox infections have been found in people also infected with chlamydia, HPV, or syphilis, and many of the people with the disease identify themselves as men who have sex with men, Drenzek said.
People diagnosed with monkeypox in the current outbreak are not reporting the initial fever and gland swelling usually experienced at the start of the infection.
The rash also differs from that seen in typical monkeypox cases, with fewer lesions that are less pronounced than those usually seen. In the current outbreak, the rash often begins in the genital and perianal region and tends to progress more rapidly than in usual cases, Drenzek said.
There are currently no monkeypox-specific treatments, but medicines developed to treat smallpox can be helpful. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved two vaccines for monkeypox, according to the CDC.
“Anyone with a rash that looks like monkeypox should talk to their health-care provider, even if they don’t think they had contact with someone who has monkeypox,” the CDC advises. “The threat of monkeypox to the general U.S. population remains low.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
