by Dave Williams | Jun 28, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – With housing – particularly affordable housing – in short supply across Georgia, two new state laws about to take effect are aimed at an especially challenging group affected by the shortage: the homeless.
The two bills, which the General Assembly passed overwhelmingly this year, are among a host of new laws covering a wide range of policy areas that take effect July 1.
On the housing front, lawmakers passed the Safe at Home Act offering new rights to tenants of rental properties designed to curb a high eviction rate in Georgia that drives up homelessness. The second housing bill brings an accountability component to the State Housing Trust Fund intended to help Georgians overcome the root causes that lead to homelessness.
House Bill 404, the Safe at Home Act, provides renters in Georgia new rights by requiring rental properties to be “fit for human habitation” upon signing a lease. Landlords also will be required to maintain their properties throughout the lease.
“It’s pretty common-sense stuff,” said state Rep. Kasey Carpenter, R-Dalton, the bill’s chief sponsor. “We shouldn’t have people living in third-world conditions in a first-world country.”
Elizabeth Appley, a lawyer and public policy advocate in Georgia, said the bill is long overdue.
“We’ve been working on it for a number of years,” she said. “Georgia is an outlier in providing even basic protections (for tenants).”
House Bill 1410 amends the State Housing Trust Fund for the Homeless by requiring program participants for the first time to meet certain accountability requirements to qualify. Those eligible to enroll in the new program can receive funding for transitional housing for up to 18 months.
“This is really the Georgia way to address homelessness,” said House Majority Leader Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, the bill’s chief sponsor. “Right now, federal funds prohibit testing participants for sobriety. By prohibiting testing for sobriety, participants face the same challenges they did while homeless. … This is to put them on the path to sobriety.”
Unlike the federal program, Georgia’s approach will require participants to maintain sobriety from drug or alcohol use, participate in job training while pursuing an active search for employment, take part in mental health-care and substance-abuse counseling if necessary, and submit to drug and alcohol testing.
Efstration said House Bill 1410 moves Georgia away from the Housing First approach, which asserts that anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove requirements for sobriety or absence of a criminal record.
“The federal restrictions, I believe, are a barrier to fixing the problem,” he said. “This comes from my experience as an accountability court prosecutor.”
But Appley said forcing homeless applicants to comply with a series of requirements before they can qualify for housing and get a roof over their heads is the wrong approach.
“Housing First is a model that works to help homeless people leave homelessness,” she said. “Without that, it’s hard if not impossible to meet these requirements.”
Whatever qualms some lawmakers might have had about imposing accountability requirements on the homeless evidently were overcome by a dire need for housing in Georgia. House Bill 1410 cleared the General Assembly with only one “no” vote in the House and one in the Senate.
“What we need is more funding for housing in Georgia,” Appley said. “It’s desperately underfunded.”
Other bills that will take effect on Monday include:
- House Bill 1010 – doubles paid parental leave for state workers following the birth, adoption, or foster care placement of a child in their home, providing a total leave of up to 240 hours. The General Assembly passed legislation three years ago authorizing 120 hours of paid parental leave for state employees.
- House Bill 1332 – The No Patient Left Alone Act ensures visitation rights for patients in hospitals or nursing homes. The bill was championed by Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, whose mother died alone of COVID in a hospital.
- Senate Bill 420 – prohibits foreign nationals or agents of foreign nationals from countries designated as adversaries by the U.S. Commerce Department from buying agricultural land in Georgia.
- Senate Bill 494 – establishes regulations for the licensing and production of hemp products and prohibits their sale to anyone under age 21.
- House Bill 1341 – declares the white shrimp Georgia’s official crustacean, a move designed to promote the product in restaurants and grocery stores.
by Dave Williams | Jun 28, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The statewide Gang Prosecution Unit Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr created in 2022 is about to expand its operations.
Starting Monday, a newly hired prosecutor and a new investigator will oversee the unit’s regional efforts in Macon-Bibb County. Currently, the unit is based in Atlanta, Albany, and Augusta.
“Since creating our Gang Prosecution Unit nearly two years ago, we have seen unprecedented success in putting away some of Georgia’s most dangerous criminals,” state Attorney General Chris Carr said Thursday.
“Now, we’re expanding our efforts to include a new regional team in Macon-Bibb County so we can work more closely with and effectively with all levels of law enforcement to combat violent crime and keep Georgians safe.”
The new prosecutor, Ashton Jordan, joins the state unit after serving as a senior district attorney in the Griffin Judicial Circuit since 2015. Criminal investigator Nathan Shoate comes to the state after serving with the Fulton County District Attorney’s office since last year.
In its two years in operation, the state unit has won more than 40 convictions and indicted nearly 140 criminal suspects in 13 counties from Athens-Clarke County to Dougherty County in Southwest Georgia, including all five of metro Atlanta’s core counties.
“Macon’s Gang Prosecution Unit will follow the examples set by others in cities across the state to take the fight to criminal street gangs,” Gov. Brian Kemp said. “We know these units are an important part of our work to keep all our communities safe.”
In addition to Macon, the unit also plans to expand its footprint with new prosecutors and investigators in Columbus and Southeast Georgia.
by Dave Williams | Jun 27, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Rules aimed at making Thursday night’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump more civil than their debates four years ago didn’t stop the two combatants from mixing it up.
No audience was present to rile up the candidates during the 90-minute debate hosted by CNN. When the moderator asked a question of Biden or Trump, the other candidate’s microphone was turned off to keep them from interrupting each other.
But the two still managed to fire a barrage of accusations, blaming each other for the rise in inflation and calling each other the worst president in U.S. history.
The debate was held in Atlanta, where Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted last summer on charges of participating in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
The Fulton County case is just one of four criminal indictments of Trump, including his conviction in New York City last month on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to an ex-porn star to cover up a sexual relationship.
Trump blamed his legal woes on Biden.
“He goes after his political opponent because he can’t beat him fair and square,” he said.
Trump also noted that the conviction boosted his standing with voters.
“My poll numbers went up and we took in more money in the last two weeks than we’ve ever taken in in the history of my campaign because the public knows it’s a scam,” he said.
Biden called out Trump for his response to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by Trump supporters – the subject of one of the indictments facing the former president.
“There was no effort on his part to stop what was going on on Capitol Hill,” Biden said. “He sat there for three hours watching (television), being begged by his vice president and a number of his colleagues to do something.”
The president also brought up the civil lawsuits Trump has lost in addition to the criminal prosecutions.
“How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, for having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant?” Biden asked Trump. “You have the morals of an alley cat.”
Each said the other should be in jail, Trump for the crimes he has been charged with in the various indictments, and Biden for allowing an influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border.
While the personal acrimony took up much of the middle portion of the debate, the two candidates also discussed the issues.
Trump said the nation’s economy was humming along nicely on his watch until the COVID pandemic struck early in 2020. He blamed Biden for the inflation that followed.
“I gave him a country with essentially no inflation,” Trump said.
Biden said the economic downturn that accompanied COVID was Trump’s fault for mishandling the pandemic.
“By the time he left, things were in chaos,” Biden said. “We put things back together.”
Trump said America’s border was secure on his watch, but a crisis erupted along the southern border when Biden became president.
“We had the safest border in the history of our country,” Trump said. “(Biden) decided to open up our borders … to people from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists. … We’re living in a rat’s nest. They’re killing our people in New York, California, and every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore.”
Biden said a bipartisan agreement he worked out with members of Congress would have fixed the problem, but Trump killed it for his own political gain because he wanted to run on the issue.
Trump defended the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, arguing it leaves the issue up to the states.
“They’re all making their own decisions,” he said. “The states control it. That’s the vote of the people.”
Biden supported codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law so women and their doctors rather than politicians could make decisions on abortion.
“The idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying, ‘We’re going to turn civil rights back to the states and let each state have a different rule,’ ” he said.
On foreign policy, Trump blamed the messy U.S. exit from Afghanistan on Biden’s watch for encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Trump also criticized Biden for approving at least $200 billion in U.S. aid to help Ukraine defend itself.
Biden warned that Putin will invade nearby NATO counties and expand the European war if he wins in Ukraine.
“All that money we give Ukraine is for weapons made in the United States,” Biden said.
Biden said his administration is continuing to push the terrorist organization Hamas to accept his three-part plan to end the war with Israel in Gaza. Trump accused Biden of taking a pro-Palestinian position on the conflict.
by Dave Williams | Jun 27, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Newton County Commission Chairman Marcello Banes and a local real estate broker have been indicted on federal charges of laundering money obtained through a fraud scheme.
Banes, 48, and Stephanie Lindsey, 52, both of Covington, are charged with conspiracy to launder money and with money laundering. A federal grand jury also indicted Lindsey for income tax fraud and charged Banes with lying to FBI special agents.
According to the indictment, Banes and Lindsey misled a company interested in purchasing about 40 acres of land from the Joint Development Authority of Jasper County, Morgan County, Newton County and Walton County in 2018 about the terms of a brokerage agreement.
The company was led to believe that a commission resulting from the agreement would be paid only to Lindsey. In reality, Lindsey was planning to pay most of the commission to Banes. Had the company’s owners known Banes would receive any of the commission, they would not have entered into the brokerage agreement, according to the indictment.
As chairman of the Newton County Commission, Banes represented Newton County on the development authority. At an authority board meeting in 2019, Banes voted to allow the purchase without disclosing that he was going to receive $100,000 of the $150,000 commission through a newly formed business entity he and Lindsey created.
Banes subsequently used a substantial amount of that money to pay for a new house he was building in Newton County,
“By allegedly laundering proceeds obtained from a fraud conspiracy, these defendants violated the trust placed in them by their client, their constituents, and their fellow commissioners,” said Ryan Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
“Public officials who undermine the public’s faith in our institutions by abusing their power for personal gain must be held accountable.”
Besides the money laundering offense, Lindsey is also charged with two federal tax violations for allegedly claiming false business deductions to reduce her tax liability for the $150,000 payment.
Banes is also charged with lying to FBI special agents by falsely telling them he was unaware that Lindsey was involved as a broker in the land deal.
by Dave Williams | Jun 27, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia’s two U.S. senators launched an inquiry Thursday aimed at strengthening tracking and data collection about deaths of inmates in federal, state, and local custody.
Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, are asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to improve reporting practices under a law that requires the Justice Department to collect data from states and localities about the deaths of inmates in their custody to help identify potential violations of civil or human rights.
Ossoff, chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led a 10-month investigation in 2022 that found the Justice Department failed to count nearly 1,000 deaths of inmates in state or local custody in 2021, despite those deaths being publicly reported elsewhere.
“In prior outreach, we have urged the Department of Justice to investigate ongoing disturbing reports of deaths in custody in Georgia’s Clayton County and Fulton County jails,” the senators wrote in a letter to Merrick.
“Tragically, deaths have continued. In just the first six months of 2024, at least six individuals have died in custody in Clayton County Jail. Another three have died in Fulton County Jail this year, following the deaths of 10 individuals in custody in Fulton County in 2023. These alarming numbers underscore the necessity of stronger reporting … to help identify the causes of these deaths and possible interventions to prevent future tragedies.”
Earlier this year, a report from National Public Radio (NPR) found some deaths classified as “natural” may trace back to factors such as inadequate medical treatment, neglect, or poor living conditions.
However, according to Justice Department documents, reporting forms do not call for information about medical treatment or other factors that could shed more light on the causes of “natural” deaths, making it harder to determine the scope of the problem.
In 2022, Congress passed bipartisan legislation Ossoff introduced requiring the Federal Bureau of Prisons to upgrade prison camera systems to provide secure storage, logging, preservation, and accessibility of recordings for future investigators pursuing allegations of misconduct, abuse, or other criminal activity in prisons.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill last month providing independent oversight of the prison agency.
