by Ty Tagami | Jul 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The public reaction to the meltdown of a financial institution connected to Republican politics in Georgia continued Monday as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called on campaign finance recipients to return any contributions from First Liberty Building and Loan or the family that controlled it.
“Now is the time for every elected official, candidate, or political action committee who received financial support from this entity currently under investigation to stand up and help the victims,” Raffensperger said. “Ill-gotten gains do not belong in the State Capitol.”
The federal Securities and Exchange Commission sued the institution last week alleging it had operated as a Ponzi scheme, bilking investors.
The complaint in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia said Edwin Brant Frost IV, owner and president of First Liberty, used investor funds to make more than $570,000 in political donations.
The company raised at least $140 million from about 300 investors, telling them that their money would go toward short-term, high-interest, small business loans, the lawsuit said. Frost, who is also a named defendant, misrepresented the success of the loan program to his investors, the suit said, noting that he also used their money to pay himself and his family at least $5 million.
Frost’s son, Brant Frost V, is chairman of the Coweta County Republican Party.
“We take allegations of financial fraud seriously, especially when it puts hardworking Georgians at risk,” Raffensperger said, urging anyone who lost money in a transaction with First Liberty to contact his office immediately. “If you believe you’ve been misled or victimized by First Liberty, we need to hear from you.”
by Dave Williams | Jul 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The Georgia Council for the Arts has awarded more than $1.3 million in grants to recipients in 49 counties across the state.
The 177 grants will support both single arts events and ongoing arts education programs.
“The arts are at the heart of Georgia’s communities, and our vibrant arts organizations are enhancing downtowns, creating jobs and connecting people,” Pat Wilson, commissioner of the state Department of Economic Development, which oversees the arts council, said Monday.
“These grants will help strengthen communities across the state, encouraging tourism, business opportunity, and local pride. These awards also will provide educational opportunities for students, fostering creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that are essential for the future workforce in any industry.”
Grant recipients include the second annual Statesboro Festival of the Arts in Bulloch County, the creation of a mural in a prominent location along U.S. 1 in Jefferson County, an arts education afterschool program in Catoosa County, and a musical program at Woodland High School in Bartow County.
The arts council used peer-review panels to evaluate grant applications. Additional grants for fiscal 2026 will be awarded this fall.
The council is funded by the General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts.
by Dave Williams | Jul 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – When Congress passed President Donald Trump’s controversial budget bill July 3, Republicans and Democrats went to their corners to portray it either as the largest tax cut in U.S. history or a devastating gutting of the nation’s safety net.
But beyond the politics, Georgia health-care and clean-energy advocates warned that cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and food stamps, as well as the phasing out of clean-energy tax credits will hurt low- and middle-income Georgians in exchange for easing the tax burden on the wealthy who don’t need such government largesse.
“It’s the largest cut ever, and it moves us in the wrong direction,” said Monte Veazey, president and CEO of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals. “It’s a moral failure that hurts everyone who depends on our health-care system.”
The bill’s cuts to health care will kick about 93,000 Georgians off of Medicaid and raise health-insurance premiums for more than 1.2 million Georgians, according to numbers released by U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. More than 120,000 Georgia children will lose some or all food assistance, according to Warnock.
Veazey said rural Georgia will be hit particularly hard, with 16 cash-strapped rural hospitals facing potential closure and others being forced to reduce services they offer that lose money.
“For every Medicaid patient we serve, we lose about 17 cents on the dollar,” he said. “This is going to grow that number. It’s going to be difficult for people to access the health-care system.”
Advocates for low-income Georgians and children said the federal cuts will shift the cost of paying for health insurance and food to states.
Georgia will have a couple of choices, they said: dig into its own treasury to fill the void or cut services.
State cutbacks to the ACA, Medicaid, and SNAP (the food stamps program) could be achieved by introducing more administrative requirements, they said, something the federal government is already imposing.
Identity “proofing” challenges with ACA “mean that many folks just won’t enroll because of administrative burdens,” said Whitney Griggs, director of health policy for Georgians for a Healthy Future.
Work requirements and direct cuts will cost Georgia $10 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade, said Leah Chan, director of health justice for the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute.
SNAP cuts will also hit the state, said Ife Finch Floyd, the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute’s director of economic justice.
The federal government historically has covered the full cost of SNAP, but the new budget bill changed that by requiring states to pay a percentage of their cost if they have an unacceptable payment “error rate,” meaning inaccurate eligibility roles, Chan said.
“This is unprecedented, and this is a fundamental change in the structure of the SNAP program,” she said.
In a few years, states with an error rate of 6% or more will have to pay 5% to 15% of their program benefit costs, Chan said, noting that in Georgia, 5% is equal to $162 million.
It also will become harder for Georgians to qualify for SNAP with the new federal work requirements. Currently, people ages 18-54 without children or a qualifying disability must prove they are working 80 hours a month to receive benefits. The federal cuts extend that to age 64 and will require parents of kids ages 14-17 to hold a job.
The phasing out of clean-energy tax credits will do tremendous damage to fast-growing renewable energy and electric vehicle operations across Georgia, said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. The massive EV plant Hyundai opened in March west of Savannah in Bryan County is the largest economic development project in the state’s history.
“The renewable sector, solar manufacturing, battery production, electric vehicle manufacturing will all be hurt,” Ossoff said. “This bill is a direct attack on the industry that is driving Georgia’s economic development, job creation, and wealth creation.”
The same goes for the state’s solar energy industry, added Hannah Shultz, program director at the nonprofit Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.
“Solar tax incentives have allowed over a dozen faith communities in the last several years to build resilience, reduce their electric costs, and reinvest savings into vital mission and ministry initiatives in service to their communities,” she said. “It is incredibly disheartening to see partisan politics take precedence over real impacts to people and our planet.”
While most of the reaction to the budget bill has come from critics decrying the various spending cuts, one group that stands to benefit from the legislation is farmers.
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tyler Harper said prices of farm inputs have increased by 30% in the last half dozen years. Nationally, the bill invests an additional $60 billion in farm programs.
“It helps agriculture across the board,” Harper said. “Investment in farm programs … is a success for all farms regardless of size.”
Even taxpayer advocates are criticizing the bill because of its impact on the nation’s growing debt. Nearly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts nationwide are projected to add a net $3.24 trillion to the red ink.
“Congress has officially lost its mind when it comes to fiscal responsibility,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a really ugly, scary, ticking debt bomb.”
But Kyle Wingfield, president and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, said the bill’s tax cuts simply make permanent the lower tax rates Congress enacted early in Trump’s first term in the White House. Without the bill, those 2017 tax cuts would have expired, leading to a major tax increase, Wingfield said.
Wingfield disputed claims by opponents that the measure only benefits the wealthy.
“It’s all the brackets all the way up and down,” he said. “The bulk of the tax money that gets cut goes to the middle class because there are so many middle-class taxpayers.”
The work requirement in the bill for Medicaid recipients has been widely criticized since many face significant barriers to employment including health problems and child-care duties.
But Wingfield said the legislation could give able-bodied recipients the incentive they need to find a job.
“Far from being a punitive or harmful policy, this could end up helping people be in a better position,” he said.
Staff writer Ty Tagami contributed to this report.
by Dave Williams | Jul 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – What if they held an election and no one came?
That was nearly the case last month when only about 2.4% of Georgia’s roughly 8.4 million registered voters cast ballots in Republican and Democratic primaries for seats on the state Public Service Commission (PSC), which regulates utilities.
The low turnout likely will be even more dismal Tuesday when Democratic primary voters return to the polls to choose the party’s nominee for the PSC’s District 3 seat. With incumbent Commissioner Tim Echols having won the Republican nod to seek reelection in District 2 in last month’s GOP primary, the Democratic contest in District 3 will be the only race on Tuesday’s runoff ballot.
Neither former Atlanta City Councilwoman Keisha Sean Waites nor clean-energy advocate Peter Hubbard won a majority of the vote in last month’s three-way Democratic primary in District 3, which covers Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton counties, forcing the runoff. Former utility regulator and technology executive Robert Jones finished third and was eliminated.
Waites and Hubbard differ more in their career backgrounds than in their positions on issues facing the PSC. Waites served three terms in the Georgia House of Representatives before being elected to the Atlanta City Council in 2021. Before entering city and state politics, she spent 15 years working in the federal government, with the Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Hubbard has worked on energy issues from outside of government circles as an advocate for the nonprofit Georgia Center for Energy Solutions. In that role, he has served as an intervenor calling for reducing the use of fossil fuels in the production of electricity, which is expensive, pollutes the air and harms human health.
Both candidates have criticized the five-member commission – all Republicans – as a rubber stamp for Atlanta-based Georgia Power, signing off on a series of rate increases in recent years without sufficiently considering the impacts of rising monthly bills on the company’s residential and small business customers.
“Georgia Power has brought in record profits,” Waites said. “I don’t have a problem with Georgia Power making money. I just don’t want them to do it on the backs of consumers.”
Hubbard said members of the PSC have stood by while Georgia Power increases its profits by building more electric generating capacity using fossil fuels.
“With Georgia Power, the more you build, the more you earn,” he said. “We’re just keeping [coal and gas plants] for reliability purposes. But I say renewable energy technology has reached a point where those sources have become reliable.”
Waites said Georgia Power could do more to increase its use of solar energy, given the Peach State ranks seventh in the nation in solar power generating capacity. If elected, she said she support increasing the cap the PSC has imposed limiting its rooftop solar program to no more than 5,000 homeowners.
“Georgia Power has no incentive to push that because it messes with their profits,” she said.
Hubbard said solar, wind, and batteries accounted for 90% of the new power generation in the U.S. last year.
“With solar, you build it once and there’s no fuel costs,” he said.
The winner of the Democratic primary between Hubbard and Waites will challenge incumbent Republican Commissioner Fitz Johnson in November.
Early voting ends on Friday, and polls across Georgia will open on Tuesday from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.
by Dave Williams | Jul 10, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – An agreement Georgia Power and state energy regulators reached this week acknowledges that the utility’s forecasts for future energy demand are uncertain at best and will need updating during the next several years.
However, much of Thursday’s final Public Service Commission (PSC) hearing on the mix of power-generating sources Georgia Power plans to rely upon focused on criticism the company isn’t doing enough to promote energy efficiency.
The commission will vote next week on Georgia Power’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), which calls for a huge increase in electric generating capacity to accommodate the needs of “large-load” customers, mostly the rapid growth of power-hungry data centers across the state.
While the IRP calls for up to 8,500 megawatts of additional capacity, an agreement Georgia Power and the PSC’s Public Interest Advocacy (PIA) Staff reached late Wednesday concedes the exact amount of power the utility would need to meet that growing demand is hard to nail down.
“The load forecast is largely driven by the anticipated growth from only one customer class for which there is a lack of historic information to inform many of the assumptions used in the forecast,” the 13-page agreement states.
Representatives of the PIA staff told commissioners at a hearing in May that Georgia Power overestimated the additional generating capacity it would require to supply the data centers. Environmental advocates echoed that sentiment on Thursday.
“While we didn’t contest the fact that Georgia Power will see an increase in load … the amount of megawatts might not materialize as quickly or as steeply as the company projected,” said Curt Thompson, a lawyer representing the Sierra Club, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“If this speculative demand fails to materialize, [ratepayers] will be left paying billions of dollars in stranded assets,” added lawyer Juan Estrada representing the Georgia Conservation Voters Education Fund.
In the agreement, Georgia Power committed to continuing quarterly reports to the commission on any new projects proposed by large-load customers and how much power each of those projects would consume. The company also agreed to update its projected load forecasts this October, in February 2027, and as part of the next IRP it will file in 2028.
Several who testified Thursday also asked the commission to order Georgia Power to pursue a more robust “demand-side management” (DSM) plan aimed at reducing the need for the amount of additional power-generating capacity the utility is seeking.
“The cleanest, cheapest form of energy is that which is not produced,” said Liz Coyle, executive director of the statewide consumer advocacy group Georgia Watch.
Commissioner Tim Echols joined several witnesses in criticizing Georgia Power for abandoning an earlier commitment to beef up its demand-side efforts.
“Your reputation is golden,” Echols told Steve Hewitson, the lawyer representing Georgia Power at Thursday’s hearing. “You jeopardized that.”
But Hewitson said Georgia Power is stepping up its demand-side management program, proposing to increase its annual spending from $90 million in 2021 to $160 million.
“DSM advocates should be happy about this,” he said.
Hewitson urged commissioners to approve the agreement next week without changes.
“No one ever gets everything they want in a proceeding,” Commissioner Tricia Pridemore said. “It is a compromise.”
But representatives of several environmental groups who spoke Thursday asked the PSC not to approve portions of the IRP that call for the company to continue operating coal-burning power plants at Plant Bowen near Cartersville and Plant Scherer near Macon and upgrading existing natural gas units.
