by Dave Williams | May 9, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed a $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 state budget Friday, a spending plan that prioritizes education and prisons.
“(This) budget makes important investments to meet the needs of our growing state without growing government or adding to our long-term liabilities,” Kemp said during a signing ceremony at the Georgia Capitol.
The budget, which the General Assembly passed overwhelmingly last month, includes $300 million to fully fund the state’s Quality Basic Education K-12 student funding formula. Another $108.9 million in state grants will help local school systems pay for safety improvements on their campuses – providing each school with $47,124 – while $47.9 million is earmarked for student mental health programs.
The school safety and mental health money come in the wake of the school shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County last September that killed two students and two teachers.
The budget also includes more than $141 million to launch the state’s new private-school vouchers program, which will kick off in time for the coming school year.
Kemp and the legislature responded to a federal audit criticizing the state prison system for failing to protect inmates from violence by putting up $200 million to hire more correctional officers and raise the salaries of the current workforce.
More than $1.7 million will be used for additional positions and technology at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, more than $1 million will go toward two crime scene technical leaders and three digital forensic investigators. Another $1 million will pay for a new gang case management system and gang enforcement efforts statewide.
For the second year in a row, the state will fund building projects with cash instead of borrowing the money. The capital projects package includes $290 million for transportation improvements and $715 million for a host of building projects with an emphasis on K-12 school systems, universities, and technical colleges.
Kemp said the pay-as-you-go approach on capital projects will save Georgia taxpayers $150 million a year on debt service costs for the next 20 years.
In a separate letter to Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, Kemp identified nine spending items in the budget as “non-binding” and instructed lawmakers to disregard them.
The largest of those line items would have provided just more than $600,000 to the secretary of state’s office to cover additional operating expenses incurred by the State Election Board. Kemp ordered the agency not to spend any money on new positions for the board.
“Additional personnel should not be hired by the board until the impact of the positions added in the fiscal 2025 budget has been assessed and new funds have been appropriated specifically for such purpose,” the governor wrote.
The fiscal 2026 budget will take effect July 1.
by Dave Williams | May 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed controversial legislation Thursday denying the use of state funds for sex reassignment surgery, hormone replacement surgeries and other gender-affirming care sought by Georgia prison inmates.
Georgia House Democrats walked out of the chamber in protest when the Republican-controlled General Assembly gave final passage to Senate Bill 185 early last month on the next-to-last day of this year’s legislative session. Only two Democrats remained in their seats to vote “no” on the bill, which had cleared the state Senate in early March largely along party lines.
Republicans held out the bill as a fiscally responsible step amid widespread public opposition to spending tax dollars on such procedures for Georgians in the state’s custody. Supporters also pointed to exceptions in the bill that will allow the state Department of Corrections to pay for “medically necessary” treatments, including for those inmates born with chromosomal abnormalities resulting in ambiguity regarding their biological sex.
Democrats argued the legislation is a mean-spirited attack by the GOP affecting Georgia’s tiny transgender community at a time lawmakers should have been addressing more important priorities including education, health care, and public safety. Opponents noted that only five state inmates have asked for such health care.
Kemp signed the bill during a trip to the Georgia Public Safety Training Center in Forsyth. He also signed several other measures related to public safety, including legislation granting the Georgia Bureau of Investigation subpoena power in investigating cyber crimes and doubling the indemnification benefit for public school employees killed in the line of duty from $75,000 to $150,000.
Kemp traveled to the Georgia Forestry Association offices in Forsyth later Thursday to sign legislation aimed at helping Georgia farmers and timber producers who suffered losses from Hurricane Helene.
House Bill 223 exempts federal crop loss payments and disaster payments from the state income tax, establishes a reforestation tax credit to help timber producers recover from the storm, allows local governments to temporarily suspend their collection of the harvest tax on timber producers to assist them in cleanup efforts, and provides a temporary addition to the state sales tax exemption on purchases of building materials to repair and rebuild poultry houses, livestock facilities, greenhouses, and other agricultural structures.
“Our farmers and foresters are tough people,” Kemp said. “Their commitment to moving forward after all they’ve faced is an inspiration to us all.”
by Ty Tagami | May 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Educators who want to open a charter school will have an expedited process under new rules adopted by the state school board Thursday.
The board overhauled its rule that controls the charter school petition process, shifting much of the authority from the Georgia Department of Education to the State Charter Schools Commission.
The commission was established more than a decade ago by a constitutional referendum promoted by lawmakers who were frustrated by local resistance to charter schools and the slow approval pace. It can approve charter schools that have been denied by local school districts, but some complain that local school boards drag out their own process, leading to delays in state approvals.
Lawmakers continue to pass legislation favorable to charter schools, including House Bill 318 last year, which mandated the new rule that was adopted Thursday by a unanimous vote of the Georgia Board of Education.
The rule requires local school boards to approve or deny local charter petitions in less than a year. School districts must publish their petition schedule by Sept. 1, with a petition deadline of Jan. 1 and a board vote by the following June 30.
And it replaces the education department’s authority over most of the process, handing it to the commission’s Office of Charter School Compliance.
That office’s senior director, Allen Mueller, summarized the effect at a state board committee meeting on Wednesday.
The changes amend procedures “so that when folks make local decisions, it creates a path for those petitioners to move to the commission, not have to wait another year or two years as had been happening,” he said.
by Dave Williams | May 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons Island, has become the first Republican to jump into next year’s U.S. Senate race following term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to pass on the contest.
Carter announced his candidacy Thursday with a 30-second video ad posted on YouTube declaring the sixth-term congressman’s close ties with Donald Trump.
“Trump has a warrior in Buddy Carter,” the narrator says in the ad, which goes on to call Carter a “MAGA warrior.”
Carter, 67, a former mayor of Pooler and former member of the General Assembly, was elected to Congress in 2014. He represents Georgia’s 1st Congressional District, which covers all six coastal counties and all or parts of nine inland counties in southeastern Georgia.
The ad criticizes Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff for voting against securing the nation’s borders and opposing efforts at the federal level to ban transgender athletes born male from participating in girls’ sports. Both the illegal immigration and transgender sports issues have been high on Trump’s list of priorities.
With Kemp out of the race, the Republican field is expected to grow significantly larger. Other members of Georgia’s GOP delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives reportedly considering joining the fray include Mike Collins, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rich McCormick.
Other high-profile potential candidates include Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John King.
Kemp announced on Monday that he would not running for Ossoff’s Senate seat. The governor was widely considered as having the best shot among Republicans at turning Ossoff out of office next year after a single term.
by Ty Tagami | May 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Institutional investors who vacuumed up single family homes when prices cratered after the Great Recession are drawing more political heat as renters complain about the impact.
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia announced Wednesday that he is launching inquiries with several of the top companies in the sector, following a congressional hearing last year when tenants complained about roach infestations, water-damaged ceilings, and sewage leaking into showers.
The Democrat’s announcement came after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday that he will not seek to unseat Ossoff, triggering speculation about who the GOP primary candidates will be for next year’s election.
State Republican lawmakers have also targeted the housing industry, illustrating the political traction of the issue.
Last month, lawmakers sent Kemp bipartisan legislation that would require tenants of houses or duplexes to give code enforcement officers contact information for their property manager.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, the chief co-sponsor of House Bill 399, said it would require out-of-state investors, such as hedge funds, to have a local broker and a local property manager.
A more aggressive bill that sought to cap each big owner at 2,000 properties didn’t get far after constitutional concerns were raised by former state Attorney General Sam Olens, who testified for the industry.
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.
Metro Atlanta was the top region nationally for this investment activity, with 25% of the single-family home rentals — 71,832 homes — consolidated in the hands of large investors in 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last year.
The 2008 recession forced many homeowners into foreclosure, flooding the market with cheap housing. Institutional investors, such as publicly traded real estate investment trusts, leveraged their access to capital to buy them at scale.
Algorithms allowed investors to identify desirable properties while online management portals allowed them to attract tenants and efficiently manage geographically dispersed portfolios, the GAO report said.
It noted a 2018 report by one organization that said the difficulty in scaling the acquisition and management of properties before the advent of this technology “was the primary reason large-scale investment in single-family housing did not develop sooner.”
