ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp has activated the State Operations Center ahead of the anticipated midweek landfall of Tropical Storm Idalia in southeastern Georgia.
The storm is expected to strengthen as it moves through the eastern Gulf of Mexico and make landfall in Florida’s Big Bend area as a Category 3 hurricane Wednesday morning. It then is expected to weaken to a Category 1 hurricane as its center moves into far southeastern Georgia later on Wednesday.
“Thanks to our response partners on both the state and local levels, Georgia will be prepared for whatever Idalia will bring,” Kemp said Monday. “Rest assured, though the system will likely weaken before crossing our border, we’re not taking anything for granted.
“As the week progresses, I will work closely with GEMA/HS (the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency), the weather service, public safety organizations, and others to ensure we leave nothing to chance.”
Tropical storm-force winds are expected to move into South Georgia around mid-morning Wednesday. High winds and heavy rainfall will increase throughout the morning and continue through Wednesday evening.
Hurricane-force wind gusts will be possible in extreme South Georgia as well as along the coastline from late Wednesday morning through the afternoon.
Georgians are encouraged to keep a close eye on weather forecasts and media reports on the storm system. Those in Idalia’s eventual path can click on https://gema.georgia.gov/hurricanes for tips on storm preparations before, during, and after a hurricane.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate is about to tackle a persistent shortage of workers in one of the state’s key industries: commercial trucking.
A Senate study committee formed to find solutions to an inadequate supply of truck drivers will hold its first meeting this coming Wednesday.
“It’s been an issue for awhile,” said Seth Millican, executive director of the Georgia Transportation Alliance, an affiliate of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. “The pandemic and supply chain crunch we saw directed a lot of attention to it.”
The shortage is being felt particularly in long-haul trucking. Millican said many drivers have been lured away from the long-haul segment of the industry by the growth in e-commerce that accompanied the pandemic and has continued as Georgians become accustomed to the convenience.
“People who had never been online shopping became one during the pandemic,” Millican said.
“A lot of drivers are working for Amazon,” added state Sen. Jason Anavitarte, R-Dallas, who will chair the study committee. “They still drive a truck, but they can go home at night.”
Like many other industries, commercial trucking is suffering from an aging workforce.
Ray Perren, the Technical College System of Georgia’s (TCSG) deputy commissioner for technical education, said more than half of the commercial trucking workforce is within five years of retirement.
The technical college system has been working for the past decade to train young Georgians to replace those retiring truckers. An initiative then-Gov. Nathan Deal launched in 2013 to offer full tuition coverage through the HOPE Grant program for technical college students pursuing certain high-demand careers includes commercial truck driving.
Enrollment in the TCSG’s commercial trucking program increased by 24% during the last school year to more than 2,600 students, Perren said.
“We took a dip during the pandemic, but it’s coming back strong,” he said.
The technical college system recently was awarded an $8.3 million state grant to expand the program, which already is offered at 19 of the system’s 22 technical colleges. West Georgia Technical College in LaGrange has just opened a new trucking range, and ranges are being built at technical colleges in Columbus and Augusta, Perren said.
Still, Perren said there are challenges to training enough students to meet the growing need for truck drivers. He said one obstacle is Georgians’ attitudes toward a technical college education.
“There’s so much emphasis on getting a four-year degree,” he said.
Perren said parents and students don’t realize there’s good money to be made in commercial truck driving. Graduates of the technical college system’s five-week commercial trucking program earn starting salaries of at least $42,000 a year, he said.
“That’s not a bad salary for a five-week training program,” he said. “There’s a lot of earning potential in this career.”
Perren said another obstacle to churning out more commercial truck drivers is that – unlike other TCSG high-demand career programs – high school students can’t earn dual enrollment credits because Georgians must be 18 to get a learner’s permit to drive commercial trucks.
Millican said the General Assembly could help address the shortage of truckers through tort reform, a cause the Georgia Chamber has embraced for years.
“In Georgia, it’s often exorbitantly expensive or impossible to insure a driver with less than two years of experience,” he said.
Millican said other steps lawmakers could take to make trucking a more attractive career choice would be to support initiatives aimed at reducing chronic traffic congestion – particularly in the Atlanta region – and identifying and securing more parking options for big rigs.
Anavitarte said the committee likely will hold two or three meetings around the state before a final meeting in Atlanta in November to finalize recommendations for the full Senate to consider during the 2024 legislative session.
ATLANTA – Four new ship-to-shore cranes capable of servicing the largest containerized-cargo ships have arrived at the Port of Savannah, the Georgia Ports Authority announced Friday.
The new cranes, which arrived on Thursday, will increase the crane fleet at the port’s Garden City Terminal to 34 after four older cranes were retired and recycled.
“Along with the completion of our project to improve Berth 1, these cranes will help deliver faster turn times to our ocean carrier customers, including the largest vessels calling on the U.S. East Coast,” said Griff Lynch, the ports authority’s president and CEO.
“No other terminal in the nation can bring more cranes to bear or match the efficiency, productivity, and global connectivity of the Port of Savannah.”
Two of the cranes will be 295 feet tall when fully assembled, while the other two will be 306 feet tall. The taller cranes will be offloaded at Berth 1 of the Garden City Terminal, while the other two are headed up the Savannah River to Berth 9.
The new cranes coupled with improvements to Berth 1 will increase the Garden City Terminal’s annual capacity by 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containerized cargo.
The new equipment is part of the ports authority’s $1.9 billion infrastructure improvement plan aimed at keeping up with future supply chain needs.
Then-President Donald Trump slammed Georgia’s election system in a speech at the White House on Election Night, Nov. 5, 2020. (White House video)
ATLANTA – Former President Donald Trump turned himself in at the Fulton County Jail Thursday night to face charges that he and 18 co-defendants participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.
Trump – now the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – and the others were indicted last week by a Fulton grand jury on charges including violating Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law, submitting false documents and false statements, forgery, conspiracy to commit election fraud, and perjury. The RICO charge carries a mandatory minimum prison term of five years.
The former president traveled in a motorcade from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., to Newark Liberty International Airport, then flew to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for the trip via a second motorcade and motorcycle escort to the Fulton County Jail in northwest Atlanta.
The motorcade pulled into the jail’s sally port shortly after 7:30 p.m. Once there, Trump was fingerprinted and a mug shot was taken. The motorcade left the jail at 7:55 p.m.
The other defendants in the case – including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff – have been turning themselves in for booking all week to comply with a Friday deadline set by Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis.
The 97-page Georgia indictment is much broader than three other indictments handed down against Trump in recent months, both in the number of defendants and the scope of incidents it cites.
Trump is accused of asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a phone call at the beginning of January 2021 to “find” 11,780 votes, the margin Trump needed to overcome Democrat Joe Biden’s winning margin in Georgia in the November 2020 election.
The indictment also cited a meeting of “fake” Republican electors held inside the Georgia Capitol in December 2020 to certify Trump as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes rather than Biden. Other charges relate to presentations Giuliani made to state lawmakers – also in December 2020 – leveling false allegations of election fraud, a data breach at the elections office in Coffee County, and alleged harassment and intimidation of two Fulton elections workers.
Trump is due to return to Atlanta Sept. 5 to be arraigned on the charges.
A trial date remains uncertain, with lawyers on both sides filing motions requesting dates ranging from this October to April 2026.
ATLANTA – The state agency that runs Georgia’s Medicaid program is asking for $7.2 million for a new initiative aimed at improving oversight of the private sector companies that manage health care for the state’s Medicaid recipients.
The Georgia Board of Community Health voted unanimously Thursday to seek the funds as part of the Department of Community Health’s (DCH) fiscal 2024 mid-year budget request.
Most of the money would go toward adding 49 positions to give the department the ability to predict where the Medicaid program is headed rather than being forced to react to budget needs, DCH Chief Operating Officer Joe Hood told board members before Thursday’s vote.
“We’d like to be looking at trends in advance, not just on the back end,” he said.
With the state sitting on a massive budget surplus, Gov. Brian Kemp has given agencies across state government the leeway to propose spending increases of 3% in their fiscal 2024 midyear and fiscal 2025 budget requests.
“This is our first opportunity in some time to ask for new funds,” Hood said.
The new oversight initiative comes as the DCH prepares to issue a Request for Proposals to select private-sector care management organizations (CMOs) to run Georgia’s Medicaid program. The staffing increase is aimed at helping the agency make the right choices.
“We’re under-resourced for a state of our size in CMO management,” Hood said.
Meanwhile, the DCH also is seeking $1.3 million in its fiscal 2025 budget for 7% pay raises for employees in the agency’s Healthcare Facility Regulation Division, which oversees hospitals and nursing homes.
Hood said the raises would help reduce turnover.
“We need to be closer to the market rate,” he said. “This gives us some opportunity to do that.”
Finally, the board is proposing a $1.4 million reduction in next year’s DCH budget, which would come from savings in contractual services.
Besides allowing 3% spending hikes, Kemp’s budget instructions also asked state agencies to look for ways to cut their spending by 1%.
The governor will present his budget recommendations to the General Assembly in January.
