The Mason Mega Rail Terminal will ship freight by rail to the planned Gainesville Inland Port.
ATLANTA – A planned “inland port” in Gainesville designed to reduce traffic congestion on Georgia highways has gotten a green light from the feds.
The Georgia Ports Authority (GPA) has received National Environmental Policy Act approval to move forward with plans to build a rail hub along the Interstate 85/I-985 corridor that will take in containerized cargo shipped by freight rail from the Port of Savannah and transfer the containers to trucks.
The GPA has received a $46.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to build the project.
The Gainesville inland port will join the authority’s Appalachian Regional Port in Northwest Georgia, which has been operating for the last five years. A 200-acre site in LaGrange has been acquired for a third inland port.
“Our expanding network is increasing rail capacity and connectivity between the port and major manufacturing sites around the state,” said Griff Lynch, the authority’s executive director. “Moving more cargo by rail eases interstate traffic and reduces the carbon footprint of the state’s logistics industry.”
At the other end of the system, construction of the Port of Savannah’s Mason Mega Rail terminal has increased rail capacity at the port to 1 million containers per year.
The GPA estimates the Gainesville inland port will open with an initial annual volume of 60,000 containers. With a roundtrip truck route of 602 miles, this opening volume will avoid 36 million truck miles during the project’s first year of operation.
Construction of the Gainesville inland port is due to start early next year, with completion expected in July 2026.
ATLANTA – Fort Benning officially became Fort Moore Thursday during a dedication ceremony at “the home of the infantry” south of Columbus.
Political and business leaders from the Chattahoochee Valley joined current base officials and Army veterans for a “closing of the colors” ceremony, furling Fort Benning’s flag to mark its formal retirement and unfurling the new Fort Moore colors.
Fort Moore is named in honor of the late Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife Julia, who is also deceased. Moore’s 32 years of service in the Army included commanding combat troops in Vietnam. He received several medals for bravery under fire in both Korea and Vietnam and was well known for enforcing equal rights and fair treatment during his commands.
Julia “Julie” Moore, a champion for military spouses, was instrumental in convincing the Army to begin requiring uniformed service personnel to deliver death notifications to spouses when she saw a TV interview of a widow who found out about her husband’s death from a telegram delivered by a cab driver.
“Today, we are honoring two of our nation’s very best,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, commander of the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at the fort. “Hal and Julie were dedicated servant leaders and people of extraordinary character. … The impact they had on families still resonates.”
Fort Benning and Fort Gordon near Augusta are among nine military bases being renamed in a move to do away with ties to Confederate leaders. Henry Benning was a general in the Confederate army.
The Moores’ five children attended Thursday’s ceremony.
ATLANTA – A large daily operation in Sumter County has entered into a consent decree with several surrounding row crop and orchard farmers resolving a federal lawsuit over pollution of creeks in the Flint River basin.
The lawsuit, filed in 2019 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, accused Leatherbrook Holsteins LLC of violating the federal Clean Water Act by discharging manure and wastewater from a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO).
The complaint also alleged pollution from the CAFO was entering creeks from various sources, including center-pivot spraying partially treated wastewater onto crop fields, leachate from bunkers used to store silage – fodder that has been preserved by fermentation – and erosion from lots holding thousands of cattle.
In the consent decree, which the court entered Tuesday, Leatherbrook agreed to undertake a number of steps, including removing thousands of heifers from certain fields, fencing off and grassing gullies to protect the fields, and installing clay-lined catch basins to collect stormwater and silage leachate. The company also will install groundwater monitoring wells on certain fields for sampling and conduct remedial activities if the wells exceed specified levels of nitrate concentration.
The Flint Riverkeeper joined the lawsuit, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Atlanta-based Stack & Associates.
“Flint Riverkeeper applauds the owners and operators of Leatherbrook for agreeing to some truly meaningful means of monitoring the cleanup, including transformative changes to their operations and other creative actions that will achieve both,” said Gordon Rogers, executive director of Flint Riverkeeper.
“We look forward to a productive relationship as the quality of the water in Bear Branch, Muckaloochee Creek, and Muckalee Creek is improved over the next several years and are then maintained at a higher level of cleanliness.”
“This consent decree is the result of years of hard work by Flint Riverkeeper to improve the water quality in its basin,” added Hutton Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We appreciate the collaborative effort to achieve this outcome, and we hope that this will be an example for other efforts to improve water quality throughout Georgia.”
ATLANTA – A New York-based long-term care advocacy group is criticizing Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to remove a pay raise for direct care workers serving Georgians with intellectual and developmental disabilities from the fiscal 2024 state budget.
A federally funded study the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities conducted recommended a wage increase of $6 an hour for direct care workers, the group Caring Across Generations reported this week in a news release. The General Assembly approved the proposal and added it to next year’s budget, pending approval from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
But Kemp removed that line item from the budget last Friday, arguing the legislature failed to provide the estimated $105 million that would be required to pay for the raises.
“[That] would require the department to redirect 25% of existing program funding for other services to meet the additional cost,” the governor wrote in his message removing the item. “This unfunded mandate would have devastating impacts on the department’s ability to maintain existing levels of service to the adult developmentally disabled community.”
Vanessa Faraj, senior campaigns manager in Georgia for Caring Across Generations, said forcing direct care workers to go without the proposed pay raise will only worsen a workforce shortage.
“It’s disappointing the recommendation to increase pay from $10.63 to $16.70 per hour was disregarded because Georgia’s direct care worker shortage, caused by the lack of family-sustaining wages and benefits, harms everyone in the state — especially disabled people and older adults seeking to live and age in own homes and communities and family caregivers taking time out of the paid workforce to support the health and well-being of their family members,” Faraj said.
In his message, Kemp instructed the department not to provide the raises until the funds to pay for them have been appropriated.
Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium hosted a mass COVID-19 vaccine site at the height of the pandemic. (Mercedes-Benz Stadium photo)
ATLANTA – COVID-19 tests and vaccines will continue to be offered for free in Georgia despite the ending of the federal public health emergency later this week, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, said Tuesday.
The public health emergency that took first effect in early 2020 will end on Thursday. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is ending the emergency based on declining COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, Dr. Chris Rustin, the state agency’s deputy commissioner, told members of the Georgia Board of Public Health.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over,” he said. “While cases are down sharply, we still see … 10 to 30 deaths per week in Georgia, mostly in the elderly and immunocompromised.”
Rustin said the end of the emergency will not affect either vaccines or testing, at least in the short run while supplies last. The public health department has enough test kits on hand to continue providing them free over the counter, he said.
There is still a network of testing kiosks around the state as well as several drive-through test sites, Rustin said.
Paxlovid, an antiviral pill used to treat COVID-19, will continue to be offered free in the immediate future, he said.
Rustin said the biggest impact the ending of the public health emergency will have is in data collection. As of Thursday, national reporting of COVID-19 deaths will cease, which will make it impossible to track deaths in Georgia, he said.
In other business at Tuesday’s Board of Public Health meeting, board members approved a resolution to sell $975,000 in general obligation bonds to finance maintenance, repairs, and renovations at public health labs in Decatur and Waycross.
