Col. Chris Wright, commissioner, Georgia Department of Public Safety
ATLANTA – Representatives of state and local law enforcement agencies urged Georgia lawmakers Thursday to raise salaries and benefits to help them surmount the difficulties of recruiting and retaining officers and investigators.
“Ask yourself this question: What if there were no police officers?” Col. Chris Wright, commissioner of the state Department of Public Safety, asked members of a Georgia House study committee meeting in Americus. “When law enforcement stops, civilized society stops.”
Maj. Josh Lamb, Wright’s chief of staff, said the demonizing of police officers and defunding of local police agencies that occurred across the nation amid street protests two years ago following the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer is hurting recruitment efforts.
Lamb also cited the bail-reform movement and a push to end “qualified immunity” shielding police from prosecution as trends that are discouraging law enforcement officers.
“It’s very difficult to convince people to choose to remain in this profession,” he said.
Wright said the $5,000 pay raises the General Assembly has adopted for state employees including troopers haven’t increased the number of applicants, while the number of employees leaving the agency is on the rise.
The state patrol lost 42 troopers to retirement between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022, while 180 took disability and 145 resigned or were terminated, he said. Those losses cost the state $43.1 million, he said.
Georgia ranks 32nd in the country in starting trooper salaries, Wright said.
Joe Chesnut, special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Americus field office, said Georgia is 28th among 33 states the GBI surveyed in starting pay for investigators.
Georgia Corrections Commissioner Timothy Ward said the state’s prison system is in the middle of the pack among surrounding states when it comes to correctional officer salaries. However, most of Georgia’s neighbors are offering signing bonuses to new recruits, he said.
Ward said a significant drop in the system’s inmate population during the coronavirus pandemic – from 53,000 to 46,368 – has helped alleviate some of the hiring challenges.
But the hiring process for CO’s is especially rigorous considering they must deal with a huge number of inmates with mental health diagnoses, gang members and elderly inmates with health issues serving long sentences, he said.
“Criminal justice reform did a great job,” Ward said. “But we didn’t do a lot on the back end.”
Bret Murray, director of the law enforcement academy at South Georgia Technical College in Americus, said the same trends are depleting the ranks of local law enforcement agencies.
Starting police officers in the local agencies in the rural counties surrounding Americus are only being paid about $15 an hour in many cases and $20.60 at the most, Murray said.
Even officers moving up the seniority ladder aren’t getting much more due to compression, he said.
“We’re losing the five-to-15-year officers,” he said. “They’re moving on to bigger agencies.”
Wright said the legislature should not only increase law enforcement salaries but replace the 401(K) plans retirees currently are receiving with defined-benefit plans.
He also suggested the state establish parity in pay among troopers, GBI investigators and law enforcement officers with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to discourage employees from hopping from one state agency to another.
“Our employees are our most valuable resource,” Wright said. “We need to invest in them.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday the award of $30 million in COVID relief funds to organizations working to address housing insecurity in Georgia.
The funds will be distributed among eight organizations.
Atlanta’s BeltLine Partnership and Westside Future Fund will receive $3 million and $2 million, respectively.
Westside Future Fund plans to use the funding to build two three-story walk-up apartment buildings in Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood. Of the 26 units planned, half will be reserved for people earning below 60% of the area median income.
Quest Community Development Organization also works on Atlanta’s West Side and will receive close to $5 million to create a 40-unit community for people 55 and older who are homeless or at risk of losing their housing. Eight of the units will be reserved for veterans.
The Housing Resource Group, headquartered in Atlanta, will receive $5 million to build a 60-unit affordable rental community. Almost all of the units are reserved for those with low incomes and at risk of homelessness.
And DreamKey Partners plans to finance 70 affordable housing units for elderly people living in Riverdale, south of Atlanta.
DASH for LaGrange, a group that builds affordable housing, will receive $4 million in funding to develop and lease 16 affordable rental units.
In Macon, River Edge Foundation will use the funds to develop 26 affordable, one-bedroom apartments for low-income elderly people with disabilities. The group also plans to provide additional supportive services to residents, according to information provided by the governor’s office.
Wealth Watchers will build a 20-unit affordable housing development for farm laborers in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture.
“When I first took office, I promised to make Georgia a state where all people can succeed, no matter their background,” Kemp said. “The funds we’re awarding today will further help those still struggling in the aftermath of COVID-19 regain stability and housing security.”
Last month, Kemp announced a first round of awards to address housing insecurity totaling $62 million to 20 organizations.
The grants come from federal COVID-19 relief funds allocated to Georgia under the American Rescue Plan Act Congress passed last year.
A spokesperson for Democrat Stacey Abrams – who is challenging Kemp for the governorship in November – criticized the awards, calling them an “election-year gimmick.”
“Georgia is facing a housing affordability crisis under Brian Kemp — but all the governor can do is try to desperately take credit for spending federal funds he opposed in the first place,” said Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the campaign. “Georgians deserve real solutions that will bring down the cost of housing.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The main post office in Atlanta is being named after the late Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis under legislation that gained final passage in the U.S. Senate this week.
The bill originated in the House of Representatives, which passed it last February.
As a young man in 1965, Lewis was beaten severely by Alabama state police while on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., an incident that came to be known as Bloody Sunday and was instrumental in congressional passage of the federal Voting Rights Act later that year.
Lewis went on to win a seat in the House representing a district centered in Atlanta, serving for more than 30 years. He died in 2020 at the age of 80.
“Congressman Lewis was my friend, mentor, and predecessor, and every day in Congress I am building on his legacy,” said Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, who sponsored the legislation. “Renaming the Fifth Congressional District’s main United States Post Office facility after Congressman Lewis ensures that he will continue to serve the people in perpetuity.”
Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Savannah, helped steer the bill through the House on the Republican side.
“From his early days fighting segregation in Nashville to the Freedom Rides to his service in the halls of Congress, John Lewis dedicated his life to creating a more perfect union,” Carter said. “I cherish the talks we had walking to and from votes and will never forget John’s unyielding optimism and faith in the American Dream.”
The legislation now heads to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Belinda Maley describes her son’s death while he was in jail in Savannah.
ATLANTA – A new report a U.S. Senate subcommittee released Tuesday found that the Justice Department (DOJ) failed to properly count the deaths of close to 1,000 people in state and local prisons and jails last year.
The oversight committee, chaired by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a separate analysis of jail and prison deaths.
The GAO found that the DOJ had neglected to properly count 990 deaths in 2021.
Data on those deaths was available in public records, yet the information was missing from the DOJ data, the GAO’s Gretta Goodwin told the committee.
Many of the death records that DOJ did collect were missing key elements such as demographic data or information about the manner of the person’s death. And in 2019, the DOJ stopped releasing the data publicly.
Congress has required DOJ to collect and analyze data on the deaths of people in custody since it enacted the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) in 2000.
“Despite a clear charge from Congress to determine who is dying in prisons and jails across the country, where they are dying, and why they are dying, the Department of Justice is failing to do so,” Ossoff said. “This failure undermines efforts to address the urgent humanitarian crisis ongoing behind bars across the country.”
Belinda Maley shared the story of the death of her son, Matthew Loflin, when he was detained in the Chatham County Detention Center in Savannah for a non-violent drug offense.
The committee listened to the painful recording of the last, brief phone call between the mother and her son.
“The pure horror of Matthew’s voice made me feel as though I was dying as well,” Maley said, noting she was only able to visit her son once. “Matthew died a slow, painful death over the course of weeks.”
Maley said the jail failed to give her son proper care for a heart condition. She attributed the lack of care to the private medical provider’s profit motive.
“Enforcement of the Death in Custody Reporting Act is so important and could be a tool to hold the for-profit, jail and prison medical providers accountable for unnecessary deaths like Matthew’s and others,” Maley told the committee.
Vanessa Fano also shared the story of the death of her brother, Jonathan Fano, when he was detained in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in Louisiana. Despite having diagnosed mental illnesses, Jonathan received no mental evaluation while imprisoned, she said.
He was even placed in isolation after slitting his wrists and eventually committed suicide by hanging himself.
Prior to this incident, Fano said, she and her family trusted government institutions.
“When we finally saw his lifeless body … it was only then we realized how wrong we were to place our trust in this system,” Fano said.
Both Ossoff and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the committee’s ranking Republican, criticized the DOJ.
“Over the course of 22 years, I would have thought this information-gathering process would have been pretty well-honed,” Johnson said.
“There’s no doubt this has been poorly managed,” Ossoff said.
Maureen Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general for operations and management at the DOJ, said her agency faced obstacles in collecting the data because of changes Congress made to the law requiring the reporting in 2013.
The DOJ recommends that Congress amend the legislation to fix those problems.
Henneberg said the move from one sub-agency to another within the DOJ in 2019 caused problems and that the agency has difficulty getting accurate data from states. DOJ is committed to improving the data collection, she said.
“Two Americans who were sitting in jail, pretrial detainees convicted of no crime, died in the custody of their own government, and there are thousands more,” Ossoff said as he concluded the hearing. “We have got to get this right.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The Federal Highway Administration has approved Georgia’s plan for rolling out a network of electric vehicle charging stations, the state Department of Transportation (DOT) announced Tuesday.
Approval of Georgia’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) plan will position the state to receive about $130 million in federal funds to build EV-charging stations.
“The approval of Georgia’s plan is another important step in the state’s work as a leader in electric mobility,” said Jannine Miller, the DOT’s director of planning.
“Complementing Georgia’s success in attracting significant automotive and manufacturing investments, this early approval lays the groundwork for the state to use NEVI program funds to help fill the gap in DC fast charging for the traveling public, primarily in rural and underserved areas.”
Georgia’s NEVI plan designates a series of alternative fuel corridors across the state that will be the first to deploy fast-charging stations that comply with federal guidelines. Currently, most EV owners in Georgia charge their vehicles at home, a slower process typically carried out overnight.
The corridors will be located along interstates 75, 85, 95, 20, 185, and 16; U.S. 82 and U.S. 441; Interstate 985/U.S. 23; and Interstate 575/Ga. 515.
Each charging station must have at least four ports that can simultaneously charge at 150 kilowatts. There must be one least one station every 50 miles along the corridors, less than one mile off the exit, and they must be accessible to the public 24 hours a day.
The NEVI program was created in 2021 as part of the infrastructure spending plan Congress passed last fall. The program is authorized at nearly $5 billion over the next five years.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
