ATLANTA – A nonprofit that raises money to pay cash bail for criminal defendants held in pretrial detention is challenging a new state law that adds to the list of offenses that are ineligible for no-cash bail.
The Barred Business Foundation and two individual Georgians, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday. The suit is seeking a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against a provision in Senate Bill 63 that prohibits charitable organizations from posting more than three cash bonds per year.
The Republican-controlled General Assembly passed the legislation this year, voting along party lines.
Supporters said the bill would help enhance public safety at a time violent crime is on the rise.
Opponents said it punishes people who have not been convicted of a crime.
“SB63 is cruel and costly, forcing people to languish in jail because they can’t pay for their release and prohibiting others from being able to help them become free,” said Cory Isaacson, legal director of the ACLU’s Georgia chapter.
“It is mean, it is unconstitutional, and our hope is that the courts will step in to stop the state from doing more harm.”
The court has scheduled a hearing on the lawsuit for Friday, three days before the law is due to take effect.
ATLANTA – The General Assembly passed legislation this year guaranteeing Georgians the right to fish in the state’s navigable rivers and streams.
Now comes what promises to be the trickier question of deciding which rivers and streams are navigable and which are not.
“This is the harder one to figure out,” said Mike Worley, president and CEO of the Georgia Wildlife Federation.
A Georgia House study committee will begin tackling that task this summer and make recommendations to the full House – if any – by Dec. 1.
It will be chaired by Rep. Lynn Smith, R-Newnan, who also chairs the House Natural Resources & Environment Committee, and include Majority Whip James Burchett, R-Waycross, who chaired a study committee on the fishing rights issue last year and was chief sponsor of this year’s bill. Neither lawmaker could be reached this week to talk about the upcoming effort.
The study committee won’t be working from a blank slate. Burchett introduced legislation this year naming 64 rivers and creeks “presumed to be navigable.”
The list includes such no-brainers as the Altamaha, Chattahoochee, Flint, and Savannah rivers. But others that may or may not make the list aren’t so clear-cut.
“There are some well-known streams throughout the state that are going to be question marks,” Worley said.
Worley named the Toccoa River, Seventeen Mile Creek, and Ichawaynochaway Creek as examples. The Toccoa is on the list included in Burchett’s bill, but the other two are not.
“There is a lack of clarity over what’s navigable and what’s not,” said Gordon Rogers, executive director of the environmental advocacy organization Flint Riverkeeper. “We need to hash that out.”
Historically, Georgians have enjoyed the right to fish in the state’s navigable waters. But that right came into question early last year when a property owner along a portion of the Flint River asserted an exclusive right to control fishing from the bank on its side of the river to the center of the stream and banned fishing there.
Four Chimneys LLLP sued the state alleging failure to enforce the ban and won an agreement from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources in March of last year promising to enforce the ban. That agreement prompted the General Assembly to pass a bill on the final day of the 2023 legislative session codifying a public fishing rights guarantee into state law.
No sooner had the ink dried on that legislation when some waterfront property owners began objecting to language in the bill guaranteeing access to fishing on navigable waterways as a “public trust.”
After holding a series of hearings on the issue around the state last fall, Burchett introduced a fishing rights bill removing the public trust doctrine. The General Assembly passed House Bill 1172 in March primarily along party lines after minority Democrats complained it didn’t go far enough to protect fishing rights.
Although the bill won’t take effect until July 1, Worley said he’s already heard stories of people fishing being approached by property owners and told they can’t fish.
“I don’t think the language (in the bill) was clear enough,” he said. “There are going to be lawsuits.”
Rogers said he doesn’t fear the threat of litigation.
“I’m fishing where I’ve fished for decades and doing it the way I’ve been doing it for decades,” he said. “If a property owner wants to bring an action contrary to that, fine.”
Rogers praised Burchett’s efforts to get a bill that would satisfy both property owners and the state’s anglers.
But Rogers warned that the new study committee faces a difficult task when it comes to deciding which rivers and streams – or portions thereof – will be open to fishing and which won’t.
If it was easy, Burchett’s bill declaring dozens of waterways navigable would have passed this year. Instead, it died without even a committee vote.
“Whoever does that is going to run into a buzzsaw from both sides,” Rogers said. “There’s going to be people who say it’s not enough and people who say it’s too many.”
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) will host four open houses next month on a plan to add toll lanes along the top end of Interstate 285 and along Georgia 400 in Cobb, Fulton, and DeKalb counties.
The project will add two barrier-separated lanes in both directions of the so-called Perimeter Highway between South Atlanta Road and Henderson Road and on Georgia 400 from south of the Glenridge Connector north to the vicinity of the North Springs MARTA station.
I-285 perennially ranks among the most congested stretches of highway in the nation, averaging 250,000 to 300,000 vehicles per day. The toll lanes are aimed at reducing congestion to provide more reliable trip times.
The State Transportation Board voted last month to move forward with the project.
The open houses are part of a public comment period on the project that ends July 29. Here is the schedule for the four open houses:
July 8 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. – Spring Hall Event Center, Doraville
July 10 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. – Campbell Middle School, Smyrna
July 16 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. – Dunwoody City Hall
July 18 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. – City Springs, Sandy Springs
The DOT’s project team also will host two live virtual sessions on July 9 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., and on July 17 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Access details will be added on the day of the sessions at the project’s web page at https://i285topendexpresslanes-gdot.hub.arcgis.com.
The DOT also is working with MARTA to add a transit component to the project.
“These are two processes running commensurate with each other and integrated together,” Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry told members of the State Transportation Board Thursday.
MARTA is planning to run bus-rapid transit routes along I-285, with stops at a combination of new stations and existing MARTA stations.
ATLANTA – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Thursday announced new sanctions against a Mexican drug cartel that smuggles fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States.
Yellen’s announcement during a news conference in Atlanta coincided with the arrests of eight leaders of the cartel La Nueva Familia Michocana on 13 indictments.
More than 1 million Americans have died of drug overdoses since 2000, while fatal overdoses of fentanyl among Georgians rose by 200% between 2019 and 2021, Yellen said.
“Far too many families in communities across the United States are losing their loved ones to opioids,” she said. “That’s why President Biden has directed the entire U.S. government to use every tool at our disposal to combat the opioid epidemic.”
“Illicit drugs imported into the United States are killing our citizens at an unprecedented rate,” added Ryan Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
Yellen said the sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Assets Control are aimed at denying cartels the funds they need to carry out their illegal activities.
“Cartels that peddle fentanyl operate in many respects like other businesses,” she said. “They rely on access to banking systems … to make payroll and finance purchases.”
Yellen said the federal government needs help from the private sector to make the sanctions work. Toward that end, the Treasury Department also issued an advisory Thursday to help financial institutions detect and report flows of money fueling the fentanyl supply chain.
“One of the most powerful things we can do is deny (cartels) the fruits of their labor, the very essence of what these cartels need – their money,” said Robert Murphy, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta office. “We don’t want them to use that money to make them stronger and have a bigger impact in the United States.”
Yellen said La Nueva Familia Michocana not only ships fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamines into the U.S. but also smuggles illegal immigrants across the southern border and engages in arms trafficking.
Yellen said Chinese officials have agreed to cooperate with the American effort to combat fentanyl, and she is reaching out to Claudia Sheinbaum, recently elected president of Mexico, to work with the U.S. on choking off the flow of dangerous drugs across the border.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s unemployment rate rose slightly last month but remained well above the national rate, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
The Peach State’s jobless rate of 3.2% for May was eight-tenths lower than the national rate of 4.0%.
Several other employment indicators were up last month. The number of jobs in Georgia rose by 0.2% to an all-time high of almost 5 million, the state’s labor force was up to nearly 5.4 million – also a record – and the number of employed Georgians increased to more than 5.2 million, yet another all-time high.
“Despite national economic challenges and inflation, Georgia’s businesses are stepping up and creating more opportunities for hardworking Georgians to secure high-quality jobs,” state Commissioner of Labor Bruce Thompson said Thursday.
The job sectors posting the largest over-the-month gains in May were local government, which added 3,200 jobs; accommodation and food services, which gained 2,700 jobs; and health care and social assistance, which added 2,300 jobs.
On the downside, the state government sector lost 1,600 jobs last month, with durable goods down 1,500 and arts, entertainment and recreation losing 1,300 jobs.
Initial unemployment claims were down by 7% to 20,034 in May compared to the previous month, while jobless claims declined by 16% last month compared to May of last year.
