by Dave Williams | Jul 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia lawmakers resumed a perennial debate Monday over whether gambling should be legalized in Georgia.
“We’ve been talking about this issue since my hair was black,” decidedly gray state Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, quipped as the newly formed House Study Committee on Gaming in the State of Georgia kicked off a series of hearings due to run through the fall.
While future meetings will take up online sports betting and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, Monday’s hearing at the Oconee County Administrative Building in Watkinsville focused on casino gambling.
Ed Clark, president of EchoPark Speedway – until recently known as Atlanta Motor Speedway – used the occasion to reiterate the facility’s plan to build a “destination” casino resort adjacent to the racetrack in Hampton.
He said the project would create up to 3,000 construction jobs and another 2,500 to 3,000 permanent full-time and part-time jobs for Henry County residents, 70% of whom currently work outside of the county.
“This is an opportunity for them to work closer to home and make a comparable salary,” he said.
Legislation introduced in the General Assembly in previous years called for building six destination casino resorts around the state, which would generate an economic impact of $2 billion a year.
Clark cited a straw poll the Georgia Republican Party conducted during last year’s GOP primary that showed overwhelming public support for putting legalized gambling before voters in a statewide referendum.
“I don’t think the legislature should be legislating morality,” he said. “I think the citizens of Georgia need to decide.”
But Paul Smith, executive director of the Christian public policy organization Citizen Impact, said the deck would be stacked in any voter referendum on gambling by well-heeled industry lobbyists able to underwrite an expensive campaign in favor of legalization.
Mike Griffin, public affairs representative for the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, said any tax revenue the state could bring in from legalized gambling would be more than offset by the social costs.
“When gambling increases, crime goes up, bankruptcies go up, addiction goes up,” he said. “Jobs go down, savings go down, and spending on necessities goes down.”
Several members of the committee said a key question that will occupy their upcoming debate over legalizing gambling will be how to allocate the state’s share of the proceeds.
Rep. Yasmin Neal, D-Jonesboro, suggested the General Assembly consider using tax revenue from gambling to recover some of the federal dollars the state will lose because of spending cuts by the Trump administration.
Others favored putting the funds toward health care or using it for education along the lines of the Georgia Lottery, which steers tax revenue from ticket sales to Georgia’s HOPE Scholarships and pre-kindergarten programs.
Committee members who have backed legalizing gambling during past sessions countered the moralistic arguments against it by asserting that gambling is already widespread in Georgia. However, it is unregulated and the state isn’t benefitting in the form of tax revenue.
“My effort is not to expand or encourage but to regulate and put guardrails around things already happening in this state,” said Rep. Marcus Wiedower, R-Watkinsville, the committee’s chairman.
A resolution Wiedower sponsored this year calling for a constitutional amendment to legalize sports betting in Georgia remains alive for lawmakers to consider next year. The study committee has until Dec. 1 to issue recommendations.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A second Republican congressman has joined the race to unseat U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff next year.
In a brief announcement on social media Monday, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson, joined fellow GOP Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, in the campaign to replace Democrat Ossoff with a Republican.
Currently, both of Georgia’s Senate seats are held by Democrats, the other by Sen. Raphael Warnock, who will be up for re-election in 2028.
Collins and Carter will face off first in the Republican primary next year. Both have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump and his MAGA base of Republican voters. Last week, another Trump-aligned candidate, Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King, suspended his candidacy, saying he saw “little path forward to the nomination.”
Collins, a trucking executive, announced his entry into the race with the words “I’m in” on X. In a second post, he described himself as a “conservative workhorse” and “America First fighter,” adding, “Chip in some cash and I’ll stay on the gas!”
Collins added a video of himself driving a semi-truck. In the video, he touts Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and banning “boys from playing girls’ sports.” And he talks of writing the Laken Riley Act, which requires federal immigration agents to arrest, detain and deport immigrants who cross the border illegally and then commit nonviolent crimes.
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered last year while jogging on the University of Georgia campus. Both Ossoff and Warnock supported the bill, which Trump signed in January.
But Collins in his video calls them “California crazies.”
Democrats fired back, calling Collins a “MAGA extremist” aligned with Trump’s “toxic agenda, deep Medicaid cuts, and economic chaos.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The federal government has told Georgia it will soon release the rest of the education funding it had held back from public K-12 schools.
The Georgia Department of Education said Friday that the administration of President Donald Trump will send the state tens of millions of dollars tied to federal law.
The agency won’t know the total amount until next week, but last year’s funding in these categories came to more than $154 million.
The money that the U.S. Department of Education approved for release is tied to four sections of federal law:
Title I-C is for educating migrant children, Title II-A supplements educator training, Title III-A helps educate students who are not native English speakers, and Title IV-A is a flexible grant for discretionary use.
On Thursday, the Georgia education department confirmed receipt of $40.6 million for a fifth section of federal law, Title IV-B, for afterschool programming, which had been due July 1.
The state Board of Education has scheduled a meeting Tuesday to formally accept that money and any of the additional funding if it is received by then.
The Trump administration has already released funding for other programs, such as special education and Title I-A, for “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students.
State School Superintendent Richard Woods had been publicly pressuring the federal government to send the money. He expressed gratitude Friday for the decision to release these remaining funds. The money will be coming as schools prepare for the return students of students over the next two weeks.
“To lead effectively,” Woods said, “we must have timely and reliable access to resources approved by Congress and signed into law by the president.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Thousands of Georgians will soon be spending money from the state’s new subsidy for private K-12 education, as the first quarterly payouts appear in “promise scholarship” accounts.
More than 15,000 students applied for one of the $6,500 annual subsidies, and about 8,500 were approved. That means the state is on track to give about $55 million in taxpayer dollars — far less than budgeted — to families that have chosen private schooling over attendance at their nearby low-performing public school.
To qualify for the payments, most students had to spend a year attending one of the nearly 500 public schools performing in the bottom quarter of state academic measures. But the youngest students have a way around that requirement. Under last year’s law establishing the payments, often referred to as a “voucher,” rising kindergartners need not have attended public school to qualify.
According to new figures from the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which oversees the program, a third of the recipients will be attending kindergarten. Nearly half will be in elementary school, with the rest in seventh through 12th grades.
The money will be paid out quarterly, starting this month. Families can use it for a variety of education-related expenses. Two-thirds said they plan to spend it on tuition, according to the commission. The rest will use it to cover home schooling costs and other allowable expenses, such as tutoring, therapy and curriculum.
Opponents of these vouchers argued they would mostly be used by the wealthy, who are more able to afford the difference between the amount of the subsidy and the cost of private school tuition, which can exceed $10,000 a year.
As state Republican lawmakers were pushing Senate Bill 233 to final passage last year, Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes, D-Duluth, summarized the opposition, mostly from fellow Democrats.
The vouchers are “a mirage for families like mine and for countless others across our state,” she said on the Senate floor, adding that they would undermine education for kids who don’t choose private school, since public schools would lose state funding for each student who took a voucher.
“It is a battle for the soul of our education system,” Parkes said.
“I’ve got news for you,” responded Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, the chief co-sponsor of the bill. “The wealthy already have school choice, including some wealthy members in this room who have been able to exercise school choice for their own children.”
Supporters of the bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a month after passage, said the loss of state funding for public schools would not hurt them because they would no longer have to cover the cost of educating the voucher recipients.
The commission reports that three quarters of recipients are “lower-income,” meaning the students are coming from households with incomes at or below four times the federal poverty level. ($106,600 a year for a family of three and $128,600 for a family of four.)
Half of the recipients are Black and a third are white.
Two metro Atlanta districts will lose the most students — DeKalb County, with nearly 900 scholarship recipients, and Henry County, with nearly 800. Others rounding out the top five districts losing students to vouchers are Bibb County, at nearly 600 students; Richmond County at nearly 500, and Savannah-Chatham County with more than 400.
The commission cautioned that the numbers are a moving target because some students may yet opt out. But the participation numbers are well below the $141 million that lawmakers budgeted for this school year.
Tony West, Georgia director of Americans for Prosperity, a group that lobbied for this program, attributed the low participation to several potential reasons: parents haven’t heard of the program yet, they know about it but are skeptical or they did not apply because they do not live in the attendance zone of an eligible public school.
Only 56% of applicants were approved, which suggests that many who applied do not live near an underperforming school. Address and state residency were the two main qualifying criteria.
“I think that strongly suggests that the eligibility requirements are too restrictive,” said West, who noted that 16 states with similar scholarship programs have not based eligibility on address. He can see his group lobbying state lawmakers to convert Georgia’s program to universal access.
“We’ll see what the political appetite is moving forward,” he said.
by Dave Williams | Jul 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Columbus-based Synovus Financial Corp. and Pinnacle Financial Partners, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., have announced a planned merger, an $8.6 billion deal that will create the highest-return regional bank in the Southeast.
Under an agreement announced Thursday, shares of Synovus and Pinnacle will be converted into shares of a new Pinnacle parent company. Synovus shareholders will own about 48.5%, and Pinnacle shareholders will own about 51.5%.
“We are two high-performing institutions with one powerful future,” said Kevin Blair, chairman, CEO and President of Synovus. “Our belief in the success of this merger is grounded in a decade of strong results and proven execution from both companies, each delivering top-tier earnings and total shareholder returns.”
“We are pleased to join forces with Synovus in a combination that prioritizes client experience and inspires associates,” added Terry Turner, president and CEO of Pinnacle. “By combining Pinnacle’s operating model, which is anchored in a disciplined entrepreneurial spirit, with Synovus’ talented team and strong presence in attractive and fast-growing Southeastern markets, we will extend our legacy of building share in the most attractive markets nationally.”
The agreement provides for Turner to serve as chairman of the combined company’s Board of Directors. Blair will serve as president and CEO of the combined company.
The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of next year, subject to required regulatory approvals and the approval of Synovus and Pinnacle shareholders.
