by Dave Williams | Apr 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – An energy watchdog launched a nonprofit organization Monday aimed at bringing transparency and accountability to energy regulation in Georgia.
The goals of Georgia Utility Watch, the brainchild of Patty Durand, a former candidate for a seat on the state Public Service Commission, is to advocate for fair electric rates, a more transparent PSC, and more accountable state leadership on energy issues.
“Decisions are made with complete disregard for the state mandate to set rates that are just and reasonable,” Durand wrote in her new organization’s inaugural newsletter. “Never, ever are people prioritized or protected.”
Durand cites an unprecedented 23.7% increase last year in the rates Georgia Power’s residential customers pay that she says went unchecked by either the commission or the General Assembly. Specifically, she pointed to the legislature’s failure for two years in a row to pass a bill that would have reestablished the state Consumer Utility Counsel, disbanded in 2008 amid budget cuts brought on by the Great Recession.
She also criticized Gov. Brian Kemp’s veto last year of a bill that would have temporarily suspended a state sales tax exemption aimed at attracting data centers to Georgia after business interests objected to the measure. Another measure introduced this year to prohibit Georgia Power from passing on the costs of providing electricity to data centers to residential and small business customers cleared the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee but failed to reach the Senate floor for a vote.
Durand also noted that nearly 200,000 Georgia Power households were disconnected last year, an alarmingly high rate.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Out-of-state investors own tens of thousands of houses in Georgia, and lawmakers tried to limit the number due to concerns about decaying properties and diminished options for would be homeowners.
A bill that sought to cap each big owner at 2,000 properties didn’t get far after constitutional concerns were raised. But a measure that requires these companies to hire Georgia brokers did pass, and some lawmakers are waiting to see whether it will become law.
House Bill 399 also requires tenants of houses or duplexes to give code enforcement officers the contact information for the property manager.
First, the tenants have to know who manages their property, which is one reason Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, gave for bringing her bill.
“It requires out-of-state investors, hedge fund type entities to have a local broker and a local property manager,” Oliver said last week. She said local officials often cannot identify the owners of properties that have deteriorated to the point that they are violating local ordinances.
Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, carried the bill through the Senate, which had just passed the measure 41-9 when the two talked about it with reporters.
“The renter has to have someone that they can call and talk to and resolve any problem,” Burns said, adding that investors had acquired whole subdivisions in suburban Augusta near his hometown.
“They all go into the rental market. And that undermines the single-family home buyer, especially that first-time homebuyer,” he said.
Seven corporations own more than 51,000 single-family homes in the 21-county metro Atlanta region, according to a blog by the Atlanta Regional Commission late last year.
Paulding County in northwest metro Atlanta was a hotspot for this ownership model, with as much as a fifth of the single-family homes in some census tracts there owned by investors, the ARC reported, using data provided by Parcl Labs. Overall, 6.5% of the houses in Paulding were corporate-owned.
Rep. Martin Momtahan, R-Dallas, said he has constituents in Paulding who don’t know how to contact their out-of-state landlords.
“They have a lot of issues with just getting things fixed,” he said. “Imagine a septic tank is leaking in your backyard.”
Momtahan voted for HB 399 and also was among all but one of the lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee who voted for a more aggressive bill last month. House Bill 555 sought to limit companies from having an ownership interest in more than 2,000 single-family residences or 10 multifamily residences in Georgia.
Former state Attorney General Sam Olens testified against the bill as a representative of the National Home Rental Council, calling it “constitutionally unfirm.” He said investors who buy houses are doing Georgians a favor by renting them out at a lower monthly price than renters would be paying if they bought a house under current mortgage rates.
A representative of the Georgia Association of Realtors also opposed the bill, saying investor home ownership is a problem but that HB 555 wouldn’t fix it. Corporate owners would just create a network of subsidiary companies that would each own fewer than 2,000 properties, she said. She also said her group opposed a bill by Momtahan that would have required companies to disclose the properties they own, so local governments could keep track.
The vice chairman of the committee, Rep. Matt Reeves, R-Duluth, said creating subsidiary companies to hide properties would be illegal.
“If a company large or small does a transfer of an asset to avoid the law, that’s fraudulent,” he said. “Give the American Dream back to individual homeowners in Georgia. That’s what this bill is trying to do.”
HB 555 passed that committee on March 3, but didn’t get a vote by the full House of Representatives. It will remain in play when lawmakers return next year though.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are waiting to see whether Gov. Brian Kemp will sign HB 399 into law, opening a new channel of communication with these big property owners.
by Dave Williams | Apr 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – President Donald Trump’s decision on Wednesday to pause a huge hike in tariffs on dozens of countries for 90 days gave the slumping stock market a bump.
But that surge was short-lived amid investors’ fears that tariffs remained historically high – 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% for nearly all other nations. Of even greater concern is that Trump has ratcheted up the tariff on Chinese imports to 145%, with China retaliating in kind in a full-blown trade war.
It’s the volatility of the economy that has business owners in Georgia and elsewhere most worried, said Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.
“Businesses need and want consistency,” Clark said. “A lot of the anxiety right now in the Georgia business community comes from that uncertainty.”
“We don’t know what to charge our customers,” said Felipe Arroyave, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Spectrum International, a manufacturer of contact lenses. “We’re just in limbo.”
Throughout U.S. history, tariffs have been used to raise revenue for the federal government. In fact, until a federal income tax was established early in the last century, tariffs were the government’s primary source of revenue.
Tom Smith, an economics professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, said tariffs essentially are a tax.
“These tariffs are not paid by other countries,” he said. “They are paid by our businesses and our consumers. … Georgia companies will have to pay the tax, and they will likely have to pass some of that on to consumers.”
While higher prices will be felt broadly throughout Georgia’s economy, the businesses likely to feel the most impact are those that rely heavily on imports or exports.
Joseph Cortes, executive director of the Georgia Craft Brewers Guild, said his industry imports aluminum primarily from Canada to produce beer cans and imports steel that goes into brewing equipment. The tariff on both is 25%.
“If these tariffs continue, we’re going to see a continued slowdown in growth and investment,” he said.
Cortes said it’s not simply a matter of raising prices to cover the cost of the tariffs because beer is not an essential product.
“This is a discretionary spending item,” he said. “The last thing our small breweries will do is raise prices.”
On the export side, poultry is one of Georgia’s top agricultural products, Mexico being the top market. The industry exports about 17% of the broilers produced in Georgia.
China was a key market for Georgia poultry in the past. But that’s no longer the case, a result both of high tariffs and non-tariff related steps China has taken including banning Georgia poultry following outbreaks of bird flu.
“Exports are an important part of the success of Georgia’s poultry industry,” according to a statement from the Gainesville-based Georgia Poultry Federation. “Georgia poultry can compete in any market in the world when the terms of trading are fair.”
While Georgia’s auto manufacturers are high on the list of industries that will be affected by the tariffs, confusion over how that will play out illustrates the complexities of enforcing the tariff hikes. Clark said cars produced in Georgia cross U.S. borders an average of seven times during the manufacturing process.
Ironically, the Georgia Ports Authority is enjoying a booming business with high tariffs looming. The Port of Savannah set a monthly record last month for containerized cargo traffic for the second month in a row, while the Port of Brunswick also broke its monthly record for autos and heavy equipment in March.
That success was due in part to customers front-loading orders in anticipation of the new tariffs, short-term gains that likely will go away once the tariffs set in.
Clark said large companies have the resources to make such adjustments in their orders.
“I worry about the small businesses,” he said. “They don’t have the capital to go out and buy everything. They’re going to take a hit.”
The president has stated the main goal of raising tariffs is to encourage manufacturers to move their overseas operations to the United States.
Smith said that’s a lofty goal but one that couldn’t begin to pay off in the short term because of the time it takes to acquire land, find workers, and build new plants.
“Those facilities couldn’t be open any time in the next year, or the next two or three years,” he said. “The idea of bringing manufacturing back to the United States is very impractical, at least in the short run.”
Clark sees a silver lining in the ramping up of tariffs. The Trump administration has announced that leaders of more than 70 counties have called to express an interest in negotiating tariff deals rather than retaliating against the U.S.
“If this administration is able to reduce existing tariffs, you could see new markets,” Clark said.
In its statement, the Georgia Poultry Federation also expressed reason for optimism.
“While we are monitoring these negotiations closely for impacts on our members, we support the administration’s goal of bringing balance and fairness to the international trading landscape,” the statement read.
For now, however, uncertainty remains the driving factor in how businesses are responding to the tariffs.
“A lot of business decisions, large and small, are on hold until we have a better understanding of what the tariffs set,” said Jeff Humphreys, director of the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. “I don’t think we’ll get a lot of new project announcements. … A lot of projects will be on hold.”
Clark said he’s advising Georgia Chamber members not to panic.
“I tell them to be calm, plan ahead, and don’t make rush decisions,” he said. “That’s really the best play now.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 9, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The annual federal child tax credit will shrink in half at the end of the year, falling to $1,000 if Congress does not intervene.
Most of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, including Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, are calling not only to prevent that from happening but also to permanently expand the credit.
Legislation introduced Wednesday by Sen. Mchael Bennet, D-Colo., would increase the annual credit to $4,320 for parents with a child aged 5 and under and to $3,600 for each child aged 6 through 17. It would also offer a one-time $2,400 “baby bonus” to parents of newborns.
“This is about attacking poverty in our country and ensuring that the government isn’t taxing people into poverty,” said Warnock, who is among more than 40 other Senate Democrats co-sponsoring the bill.
Crucially, no members of the Senate’s Republican majority have signed onto the measure.
The tax credit was temporarily expanded in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan, which got no votes from Republicans in Congress.
But last year, J.D. Vance, then running for vice president, floated the idea of doubling the credit. And Republican state lawmakers in Georgia demonstrated that the GOP can get behind such policies when, in bipartisan votes, they passed House Bill 136 this year to establish a $250 per child state credit.
Child tax credits are growing in popularity as an effective way to support families, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.
After Congress temporarily expanded the credit in 2021, the child poverty rate for children under 6 fell nearly in half, from 9.8% to 5.3%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The poverty rate for older children fell to 5.2% from 8.9%.
When that temporary expansion expired, child poverty shot back up, with 5 million more children living in poverty in 2022, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
Unlike the existing federal credit and the state credit in HB 136, the national Democrats’ proposal would establish a “refundable” credit, meaning low-income families who owe less in taxes than the value of the credit would actually get money from the federal government. Currently, they lose out on the difference between the credit and their tax bill, so higher earners are more able to take full advantage.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The surge of measles infections in West Texas connected with the death of two children is prompting Georgia health officials to stress the importance of vaccination against the highly contagious disease.
“It’s a really very unique and very, very large outbreak,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Cherie Drenzek said Tuesday. “I think that we can expect that this Texas outbreak will likely go on for months more as well.”
Two children have died during the outbreak in a largely unvaccinated religious community, Drenzek said at a briefing for the Georgia Board of Public Health, adding that a U.S. adult has died of measles as well.
The infections have resulted in nearly two dozen calls to the Georgia Department of Public Health from concerned medical providers about potential measles infections here, but so far Georgia officials have identified only three cases.
The infections were all in one family and resulted from international travel, with no connection to Texas.
But the Texas infections appear to be spreading to nearby states, with New Mexico recently reporting 56 cases and Kansas reporting 24.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday that there have been 607 documented measles cases in the country so far this year, up from 285 in all of 2024. This year, 12% of the infected have been hospitalized.
Children and adults under 20 have been the most affected age group, with a fifth of those hospitalized being under age 5.
The CDC reports that 97% were either unvaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown.
Measles was declared eliminated in the Unted States in 2020, meaning there was no spread within the country and new cases developed only after travel abroad.
But infections started climbing during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 49 cases in 2021 and 121 in 2022. Infections fell to 59 in 2023 but then started rising sharply last year.
“Every single one is a public health emergency,” Drenzek said.
She said the measles vaccine is the most effective prevention and urged Georgians to ensure they’ve been vaccinated unless they contracted the disease as children and that children get the vaccine in preschool.
Drenzek also urged medical providers to continue calling the state hotline with suspicious cases, at 866-PUB-HLTH.
