ATLANTA – Law enforcement officials have announced the largest indictment of a motorcycle gang in Georgia history with the arrests of 16 alleged members of the Southeast Georgia chapter of the Outcast Motorcycle Gang.
The arrests and indictment were announced Monday by state Attorney General Chris Carr, working with Atlantic Judicial Circuit District Attorney Billy J. Nelson Jr., Richmond Hill Police Chief Mitch Shores and other state and federal investigators.
The 13-month multi-agency investigation resulted in the recovery of about $180,000 in cash and the seizure of 71 guns.
“This historic indictment is a testament to the results we are able to achieve when all levels of law enforcement work together to do one thing – keep the people of our state safe,” Carr said. “By leveraging our resources, we can more effectively dismantle the growing gang networks that are terrorizing our communities and endangering the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.”
The gang members are accused of committing an armed robbery and shooting in June of last year at Flacos House Bar & Grill and the Red Roof Inn on U.S. 17 in Richmond Hill. The six victims were associated with a rival motorcycle club. The investigation turned up evidence of criminal activity by the Outcast gang not only in Bryan County but in seven other Georgia counties, Colleton County in South Carolina, and Fort Bragg in North Carollina.
The Outcast Motorcycle Gang has 67 chapters across the country, including four in Georgia. Those indicted included the gang’s president, Melaun Arturi Aiken 46; Vice President Eddie Latson, 43; Secretary Lee Alan Mole, 58; Michael Randolph, 43, the gang’s business manager; and Donovan Scott, 35, the chapter’s sergeant at arms.
Working with Gov. Brian Kemp, Carr created Georgia’s first statewide Gang Prosecution Unit last year. Since starting its work in July 2022, the unit has indicted 83 alleged gang members across Georgia.
Belkis Teran, mother of Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, describes the slain activist’s love for the environment at a February press conference. (Photo credit: Rebecca Grapevine)
ATLANTA – The Atlanta City Council has approved building a controversial public safety training center after hearing more than 14 hours of emotional testimony from opponents of “Cop City” laced with profanity but also with mood-lightening bursts of song.
The 11-4 vote supporting $31 million in initial funding for the project came shortly before dawn Tuesday, capping a meeting that had begun early Monday afternoon. More than 300 residents signed up to speak against the proposal, arguing it would be used to militarize city police to commit further acts of brutality against Atlanta citizens’ civil rights.
Speaker after speaker cited the arrests last week of three organizers who have bailed out protesters and the January shooting death of activist Manuel Esteban Paez Teran by police during a “clearing operation” at the wooded area that is the site of the proposed training center. A Georgia State Patrol officer was shot and seriously wounded in the same incident
A private autopsy commissioned by Paez Teran’s family indicated he was shot dozens of times.
“I am already tired of living in a police occupation,” Amy Taylor, who lives near the proposed site of the training center, told council members. “I have been harassed, intimidated, interrogated, and followed.”
Councilman Michael Julian Bond, who was interrupted repeatedly by members of the audience, defended the purchase as necessary.
“We’re fiduciaries of the city,” Bond said. “At some point, we have to build facilities. … If we don’t provide the employees with the equipment, the facilities, the salaries and benefits they deserve, we run afoul of federal labor law.”
Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King also endorsed the project.
“I served with honor and distinction in this great city as an Atlanta police officer, was actually shot in the line of duty protecting our community,” King said in a video released Monday. “And I’m urging the mayor and city council to support your police department by approving the training facility.”
Besides the initial $31 million in construction funding, the council also approved a lease-back agreement to pay $36 million over 30 years for the facility. The rest of the $90 million needed to complete the project will come from donations to the nonprofit Atlanta Police Foundation.
ATLANTA – Wellstar Health System officials came under fire Monday for committing to invest nearly $800 million late last year in a planned partnership with Augusta University Health System (AUHS) after closing two Atlanta-area hospitals.
Wellstar and AUHS signed off on a 40-year partnership in December that included, among other things, capital for a new hospital, medical office building and ambulatory surgery center in suburban Columbia County.
Just a month earlier, Wellstar closed the 460-bed Atlanta Medical Center (AMC). Combined with the closing of a smaller Wellstar hospital in East Point earlier in 2022, it left what critics of the moves called a “health-care desert” in central and southern Fulton County.
“There’s money,” state Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, told Wellstar executives Monday during a meeting of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. “It was just not spent here. You folded your tent and walked away.”
But Wellstar officials told committee members the decision to close the two hospitals was unavoidable. Wellstar CEO Candice Saunders blamed aging infrastructure, low patient volumes, skyrocketing labor costs and the loss of coronavirus relief funds that had been available earlier in the pandemic.
Efforts to find a partner willing to help shoulder the financial burden proved unsuccessful, Saunders said.
“We were unable to find a partner because each of them reached the same conclusion we did: AMC’s financial trajectory was unsustainable,” she said.
Jim Budzinski, Wellstar’s chief financial officer, said AMC’s financial situation deteriorated from a 5.2% operating margin in fiscal 2019, the year before the pandemic hit, to a $109 million operating loss during the last fiscal year, not counting the estimated 650 million cost of replacing the aging hospital.
Critics of closing Atlanta Medical Center have charged racism. In March, a group of local and state elected officials asked for a federal investigation of both hospital closings, noting that the areas they served are mostly Black. On the other hand, Columbia County, where the new hospital will go, is primarily white.
Orrock and Sen. David Lucas, D-Macon, complained Monday that they weren’t told of the financial crisis Wellstar was facing until after the announcement of the AMC closing.
“These are my constituents. I represent that area,” Orrock said. “I never heard a word about this crisis.”
Saunders said she and other Wellstar officials asked state and local elected officials for help. While the state allocated $130 million in federal pandemic relief funds to Grady Memorial Hospital to help offset the closing of Atlanta Medical Center, nothing was forthcoming for AMC.
“We did our best,” Saunders said. “We exhausted all options we were aware of.”
ATLANTA – Three Georgia counties will benefit from $3.2 million in federal grant funding to ease traffic flow by eliminating at-grade railroad crossings and studying construction alternatives.
The grants, announced Monday, will help fund projects in Chatham, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. The money will come from the bipartisan infrastructure spending bill Congress passed two years ago.
“Our communities thrive when we are better connected, which is why I have been working to strengthen rail safety and tackle the dangerous conditions posed by stalled trains in Georgia,” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
“These latest grants will help alleviate stalled trains that hinder mobility and allow communities to pursue alternatives that help our children get to school safely and promote greater accessibility for all.”
In Chatham County, grant money will help the Chatham Multimodal Community Improvement Project eliminate 11 at-grade crossings and improve access to the Port of Savannah. The project also will improve mobility for local residents by removing rail lines that bisect neighborhoods.
In DeKalb, a railroad crossing near Norfolk Southern’s Atlanta facility that is blocked 45 times a day on average will be grade separated.
The money also will fund a study of potential construction alternatives to three railroad crossings in Gwinnett County plagued by a combination of curved approaches and heavy traffic.
Last month, Warnock helped secure the passage of two provisions in the Railway Safety Act of 2023 to address stalled trains trapping Atlanta residents in their neighborhood.
Last year, Georgia’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Jon Ossoff, launched an inquiry with the Federal Railroad Administration into trains causing traffic delays. He submitted testimony from elected officials in cities and counties across the state and their constituents of blocked railroad crossings hampering residents’ abilities to get to work, school, doctors’ appointments, and shopping errands.
ATLANTA – The state Senate was where the action was in the General Assembly this year either to reform or repeal Georgia’s decades-old certificate of need law (CON) governing hospitals and health-care services.
Heading into the summer, there’s every indication Republican senators will continue aggressively pursuing their push to overhaul CON or scrap it entirely. A newly created Senate study committee of senators, health-care executives and an insurance industry representative will begin meeting June 13 to look for ways to at least reform the law.
The Senate Study Committee on Certificate of Need Reform is poised to start its work earlier than most legislative study committees, which typically don’t start meeting until well into the summer.
“It definitely shows the importance of the issue, especially to the Senate,” said Chris Denson, director of policy and research for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a think tank that advocates free-market approaches to public-policy issues.
Georgia’s CON law requires applicants wishing to build a new medical facility or provide a new health-care service to demonstrate to the state Department of Community Health that the facility or service is needed in that community.
The General Assembly passed the law in 1979 to comply with a federal mandate aimed at reducing health-care costs by avoiding duplication, only to see Congress repeal the federal statute in 1986. By 1990, 11 states – including California and Texas – had done away with their state CON laws.
This year’s push to reform or abolish CON in Georgia came primarily through two bills introduced by Senate Republicans. Senate Bill 99 called for exempting most rural hospitals from the law, while Senate Bill 162 would have repealed CON entirely except for long-term care facilities.
South Carolina lawmakers abolished the Palmetto State’s CON law this year, also with the exception of long-term care facilities.
Senate Bill 99 passed the Senate 42-13, including the votes of nine Democrats, but died in the Georgia House of Representatives. The repeal bill cleared the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee but failed to reach the Senate floor for a vote.
Denson’s group favors repealing CON. He and Matthew Mitchell, a researcher at West Virginia University, released a report in April that points to barriers to health-care access CON laws impose and questions the argument that getting rid of the law would result in a wave of hospital closures.
“The fears of the widespread closure of safety net hospitals is overblown,” Denson said. “There’s no correlation between CON laws and rural hospital closures.”
Monty Veazey, president and CEO of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals, said making it easier to build new hospitals and ambulatory-surgery centers by abolishing the CON law would not improve access to health care in rural communities as supporters of repeal argue.
“These hospitals are not going to be built in rural areas,” Veazey said. “They’re going to be built in zip codes where the money is. … It’s all about the money.”
The Senate study committee is dominated by Republicans – including Sens. Greg Dolezal of Cumming, who will chair the panel; Kay Kirkpatrick of Marietta; Matt Brass of Newnan; Bill Cowsert of Athens; and Ben Watson of Savannah. Democrats on the committee includes Sens. Freddie Powell Sims of Dawson and Ed Harbison of Columbus.
Non-legislators on the panel include Jack Hughston Memorial Hospital CEO Mark Baker to represent for-profit health systems, Memorial Health Meadows Hospital CEO Matt Hasbrouck to represent rural hospitals, Christine Macewen of Piedmont Health Care to represent nonprofit health systems, Georgia Association of Health Plans CEO Jesse Weathington to represent the insurance industry, and independent physician Dr. Stephen Wertheim.
Meanwhile, the House also is expected to weigh in on CON this summer and fall.
House lawmakers voted on the last day of this year’s legislative session to create a study committee on CON. Its members have yet to be appointed.
