by Dave Williams | Aug 16, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Private contractors working for government agencies are subject to Georgia’s Open Records Act, the state Supreme Court ruled this week.
The high court’s unanimous decision overturned a lower court’s dismissal last August of an open records lawsuit filed against a Georgia Tech professor for failing to respond to an open-records request for information concerning his service to the university as a private contractor.
The professor had argued that the legal obligation to produce public records lies solely with a public agency, not with an individual employee or private contractor.
The Georgia First Amendment Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to overturn rulings of both the Georgia Court of Appeals and, before that, a Fulton County trial court.
“The Georgia Supreme Court is a welcome confirmation of Georgia’s commitment to open access to public records,” said Sarah Brewerton-Palmer, vice president of the foundation’s board of directors.
“Government contractors are often the only ones who have copies of the records they create during their work. Forcing the public to go through a government agency to get those records would in many cases mean that the records are never actually provided.”
The Georgia Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings.
by Dave Williams | Aug 16, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp has extended the state of emergency in parts of Georgia in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Debby until Tuesday, Aug. 20.
The lingering effects of last week’s storm were still being felt Friday in southeastern Georgia in the form of floodwaters after Debby dropped more than 10 inches of rain in already saturated areas. The Ogeechee and Canoochee rivers overflowed their banks.
Several provisions in Kemp’s original emergency declaration have not been extended and were allowed to expire at midnight Thursday. The governor lifted a temporary suspension of federal rules and regulations that allowed commercial truckers to drive unlimited hours and increased weight, height and length restrictions on vehicles involved in relief efforts.
Kemp also rescinded his call for up to 2,000 Georgia National Guard troops to assist in response and recovery efforts. Several hundred troopers participated in the response at the height of the storm.
Debby made landfall Aug. 5 in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, then cut a swath across Georgia and into the Carolinas during the next several days as a tropical storm. It was then downgraded again to a tropical depression as it moved up the East Coast.
by Dave Williams | Aug 15, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Lawyers for environmental groups made a final plea to Georgia energy regulators Thursday to delay Georgia Power’s plan to build three new “dual-fuel” turbines at Plant Yates near Newnan.
The Atlanta-based utility is seeking certification from the state Public Service Commission to build the new turbines, which would run mostly on natural gas but switch to ultra low-sulfur diesel fuel when and if gas is unavailable, typically on cold winter mornings.
While environmental advocates oppose expanding the use of fossil fuels in power generation in principle, Thursday’s discussion before the commission’s Energy Committee focused on the potential costs of the fuel to customers.
Georgia Power received bids last month in an all-source procurement request for proposals (RFP) to expand its electrical generating capacity to meet the Peach State’s rapidly growing needs for power.
The PSC should hold off on certifying the Plant Yates project until the company can evaluate those bids to determine if other less costly options might be available, Curt Thompson, a lawyer representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told commissioners Thursday.
“Certifying the Yates (combustion turbines) now would only short-circuit the RFP process and deprive the commission of valuable information that could determine the best path forward for customers,” Thompson said.
But Steve Hewitson, a lawyer representing Georgia Power, said the need for additional electrical generation capacity in Georgia is urgent.
“These units are needed to meet the capacity needs of customers beginning in the winter of 2026 going into 2027,” Hewitson said. “There is not sufficient existing capacity available to meet customers’ needs in that time frame.”
The commission will conduct a final vote on the Yates project next week.
by Dave Williams | Aug 15, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The State Transportation Board Thursday approved bids for two major projects in metro Atlanta representing almost $6 billion in investment between them.
Board members voted unanimously to greenlight the addition of toll lanes along Georgia 400 in Fulton and Forsyth counties and an overhaul of the heavily congested Interstate 285/I-20 West interchange in Cobb and Fulton counties.
SR400 Peach Partners, a consortium of several road-building and engineering companies, won the bid for the Georgia 400 project at $4.6 billion. A second consortium, Legacy Infrastructure Contractors, won “best value” approval for the I-285/I-20 project with a bid of nearly $1.25 billion.
“This is a major milestone,” Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry said following the two votes. “We look forward to completing the journey.”
The Georgia 400 project will add two toll lanes in each direction along the north-south highway from the North Springs MARTA station north to McGinnis Ferry Road and one toll lane in each direction from there north to McFarland Parkway.
Georgia 400 carries a traffic load of about 278,000 vehicles per day, which is projected to increase to 348,000 daily by 2046, Meg Pirkle, chief engineer for the state Department of Transportation, told board members Thursday.
As with other toll-lane projects the DOT has built, the new lanes will be optional for drivers willing to pay a toll to speed up their trip. Tolls will vary according to the level of traffic.
The State Road and Tollway Authority has issued 1.3 million Peach Passes to Georgia drivers since the first toll lanes were built more than a decade ago. Drivers use their Peach Passes for more than 2.4 million trips each month.
“I think it’s safe to say that metro Atlanta has embraced Express Lanes,” Pirkle said.
The Georgia 400 project also includes a transit component. MARTA plans to run a bus-rapid transit line using the insides of the toll lanes from the North Springs station north to a park-and-ride lot on Windward Parkway. Transit stations are planned for Holcomb Bridge Road and the North Point Mall.
The consortium that won the bid for the project has agreed to contribute up to $26 million to MARTA for the transit agency’s portion of the project, Pirkle said.
The toll lanes project is expected to begin construction during the third quarter of next year, with the new lanes due to open to traffic in 2031.
The I-285/I-20 overhaul is aimed at improving traffic flow at an interchange the American Transportation Research Institute has ranked the fifth-worst truck bottleneck in the nation, said Tim Matthews, assistant director of the DOT division in charge of projects built through public-private partnerships.
The work will involve removing the left-hand entrance and exit ramps and building a westbound collector-distributor system from the interchange to Fulton Industrial Boulevard. Several flyover ramps will be added, and several bridges will be replaced.
Construction is due to begin late next year, with the revamped interchange expected to open to traffic in 2030.
by Dave Williams | Aug 15, 2024 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – State agency regulations may be a better way of settling the legally complex issue of public fishing rights in Georgia than new legislation, a former director of the state Environmental Protection Division said Thursday.
“If rulemaking is done well, people have a chance to be heard,” Jud Turner, the only non-legislator appointed to a Georgia House study committee on fishing rights, said during the panel’s first meeting. “It’s a forum with public notice and public comment. … This is what the regulatory process is designed to do.”
House lawmakers formed the study committee this year as the next step in a process aimed at guaranteeing Georgians the right to hunt and fish in the state’s navigable rivers and streams without violating private property rights.
Fishing rights Georgians have enjoyed for generations came into question last year when a property owner on the Yellow Jacket Shoals portion of the Flint River banned fishing there and sued the state to enforce it. When the state Department of Natural Resources entered into a consent decree promising to enforce the ban, Gov. Brian Kemp and lawmakers moved quickly to pass a bill codifying public fishing rights into state law.
Some waterfront property owners complained that a provision in the 2023 legislation containing a legal concept known as the “public trust doctrine” could take away their private property rights, preventing them from kicking trespassers who leave trash and other debris behind off of their land.
As a result, the legislature passed a second bill this year removing the public trust doctrine from the law.
Still unresolved at this point is the sticky question of how to define which rivers and streams in Georgia are navigable and, thus, open to fishing, and which are off limits.
“There’s a lot of passion on both sides of this question,” Rep. Al Williams, D-Midway, said Thursday.
“Any way we look at this, there’s going to be litigation,” added Rep. Stan Gunter, R-Blairsville.
Turner said establishing navigability is a challenging task. While Georgia’s larger rivers – including the Altamaha, the Chattahoochee, and the Savannah – are clearly navigable, other rivers aren’t as simple to classify.
Even some of those larger rivers have upstream stretches that are not navigable, Turner said. He cited as an example the Chattahoochee, which he said is not navigable in the upstream portion that flows through Helen, yet gets heavy use by tubers. Theoretically, a riverfront property owner there could shut down a lucrative recreational industry, he said.
Turner said the state could settle the question by including a map in the rulemaking process specifying which streams and which portions of streams are navigable and which are not. Rulemaking would avoid the need to keep changing the definition of navigability in state law.
“Rulemaking could clarify the definition without changing it,” he said.
The resolution creating the study committee gave it until Dec. 1 to complete its work. But Rep. Lynn Smith, R-Newnan, the panel’s chairman, said it doesn’t necessarily have to make recommendations.
“We don’t have the historic knowledge we need to have as we make our way through complex issues,” Smith said Thursday. “(But) we have the right people on this committee to enter this debate.”
