by Dave Williams | Jul 22, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The State Ethics Commission has dismissed a complaint calling for an investigation of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ $10 million loan to his gubernatorial campaign.
In a letter dated Monday, commission Director David Emadi wrote that the complaint failed to allege a violation of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Act.
“A financial disclosure report filed by Mr. Jones three years prior (filed 3/16/2022) which details his financial assets and standing at that specific point in time does not form a factual and legal basis to investigate an alleged false or incorrect filing regarding a loan made in a campaign disclosure report more than three years later,” Emadi wrote.
Campaign finance disclosures Jones and state Attorney General Chris Carr – who will face off in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary – filed earlier this month show each raised about $3 million from contributors. But Jones — an executive in a family-owned oil company — added another $10 million of his own money.
The loan came from Jones’ leadership committee, which he created based on a 2021 law that allows him to collect unlimited campaign donations due to his role as lieutenant governor.
The law authorized leadership committees to raise campaign contributions on behalf of major-party candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and legislative leadership positions. The law does not apply to those serving as attorney general.
After Carr’s gubernatorial campaign questioned the loan, the Jones campaign dismissed the complaint as a political ploy to gain attention.
Carr was the first Republican to enter the race to succeed term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp, announcing his candidacy late last year. Jones then jumped into the contest earlier this month.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Republican lawmakers have pushed through numerous changes to Georgia’s voting system in recent years, reacting to a concern, mostly among conservatives, that lax security produced stolen elections.
Now, House Speaker Jon Burns has empaneled a study committee to consider more changes, with the Republican from Newington selecting a likely candidate for secretary of state to lead it.
The Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Election Procedures led by Rep. Tim Fleming, R-Covington, met for the first time this week, tapping discontent with the digital voting system Georgia used when Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden in 2020.
It will provide a platform for Fleming, who filed this month to raise campaign funds to run for secretary of state, which oversees elections. Burns’ office noted that Fleming used to work as chief of staff there, making him “exceptionally qualified” to oversee this committee.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been a magnet for election critics due to his assurances about the Dominion Voting System’s security. Neither his statements nor Trump’s victory last year have quelled the concerns. Nor, it seems, has onetime Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s loss in a defamation lawsuit brought by two Fulton County election workers after he falsely accused them of election fraud.
Phoebe Eckhart of Roswell expressed a concern shared by several others who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing, the first of a half dozen that will occur around the state. She said she had repeatedly watched a video of a ballot count inside a building in Fulton.
What she saw made her deeply suspicious: workers repeatedly tabulating the paper ballots printed by the Dominion voting terminals.
They were “taking the ballots and putting them in the machine, just over and over and over again,” she said. “It was fraud.”
Eckhart then expressed the frustration that is driving Republican lawmakers to revisit election law. She attended a GOP breakfast five years ago where a speaker outlined the party’s top issues.
“And the very first one was election integrity,” Eckhart said. Yet there is still “no election integrity,” she told the lawmakers. “Please, please, please, can you do something about this?”
Others, including Brad Carver, a state GOP leader, criticized the various options for casting a ballot in Georgia, including early voting. It costs too much and should be reduced to two weeks, he told the committee. “Three weeks of early voting is a very long period of time, it’s very costly to a lot of our local governments,” said Carver, who chairs the GOP’s 6th Congressional District, which includes parts of Cobb and Fulton counties.
The lone Democrat on the seven-member committee, Atlanta Rep. Saira Draper, countered with other methods of cutting costs that do not reduce voter access, such as ranked-choice voting. That would have eliminated the need for the state Public Service Commission runoff election that was occurring the same day as the hearing, she noted.
Only 2.4% of Georgia’s 8.4 million voters cast a ballot in the PSC primary last month, and the turnout for the runoff, when fewer than 114,000 cast a ballot, was even smaller.
Carver had already expressed criticism of ranked-choice voting and of absentee voting, which he claimed was not secure. Draper challenged him to produce evidence of that. “I don’t believe in fearmongering as a basis for policy changes,” she said.
Others from the public echoed that sentiment.
Brian Nunez, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, cautioned against passing new election laws based upon rumors about rigged elections.
“A widespread false narrative about fraud in our elections persists,” he said. “The allegations have been proven time and time again to be unfounded.”
Karen Davenport of Decatur criticized an election law passed last year that enables mass voter challenges, saying it empowers “conspiracy theorists” and amounts to voter intimidation. She implored lawmakers not to erect barriers to voting.
“Elected state officials should strive to make voting easier and not more difficult for Georgians,” she said.
In addition to costs, Republican lawmakers on the panel had questions about Georgia’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate data-sharing compact designed to root out voters who cast ballots in more than one state. Among their concerns was the security of the encrypted personal information shared between states.
But the computerized Dominion system was at the center of complaints. A common critique at Tuesday’s hearing was the way the system uses a Quick Response (QR) code to transfer voter intent into each polling place’s database. After a voter casts a ballot, the terminal prints a piece of paper with the code — a matrix of black and white squares — in addition to recording the voter’s intent on a data card. The voter then places the paper into a QR reader, producing another record of the vote.
One man’s T-shirt summed up the concern about this technology, which renders ballots inscrutable to the human eye: The words “I voted” were followed by an image of a QR code. Then, came the punch line: “Can you read this?”
Such concerns have helped drive doubts about election results.
When Draper pressed Carver about whether he believed Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election, he said he did not believe it. The room at the Capitol then erupted in cheers.
Last year, Georgia lawmakers banned using QR codes to tabulate ballots starting with the 2026 elections, so the state must modify its system.
Many want paper ballots, counted by hand. Field Searcy, co-founder of Georgians for Truth, tried and failed to get Republican party leaders to use paper ballots for their own officer selection process when he attended the state GOP convention in May. Party leaders instead used electronic “clickers,” saying they lacked the resources to do a hand-count, even though Searcy said he had brought 3,000 printed ballots and 120 people trained to count them.
The convention crowd had jeered when party leaders announced they would be using electronic voting instead of paper. Rank-and-file Republicans were still upset about it Tuesday, with one complaining to lawmakers about the clickers.
That controversy illustrates the political risk for Republican lawmakers on this issue.
Searcy, who testified on Tuesday about his election suspicions, said in an interview that his interest is non-partisan. Trump’s victory in the last election did not assuage his concerns.
He said his clicker failed twice at the convention and noted that there was no way to validate that it accurately recorded his intentions. He had the same concern about the voting terminals Georgia uses on Election Day.
“If we don’t have trust in our elections, we don’t have a country,” he said. “If our elections are not secure and trustworthy, it’s all a farce.”
by Dave Williams | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – An Atlanta-based environmental advocate is criticizing the Georgia Department of Community Affairs’ (DCA) decision to pause state reviews of new data center proposals.
While the decision will not stop local governments from approving data center projects, it will rob local water planners of the state’s valuable input, Chris Manganiello, water policy director for the nonprofit group Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said Thursday.
“Rather than the state helping regions think through this stuff, it’s going to leave planners flying blind,” he said. “We’ll end up with a patchwork of moratoria and ordinances at the local level addressing data center development.”
Manganiello’s comments came during the kickoff meeting of a Georgia House subcommittee examining the potential impacts of the growing number of data centers springing up across the state on water use. A second subcommittee is looking at how data centers are likely to affect consumption of electricity.
Data centers have exploded so quickly that elected officials in DeKalb, Coweta, Douglas, and Bartow counties have imposed moratoria on new projects. The Atlanta City Council voted last month to prohibit data centers from setting up in some neighborhoods and require developers to seek a special-use permit for construction.
Danny Johnson, director of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, told water subcommittee members more than 50 data centers are operating currently in Georgia while more than 40 more have been proposed.
Data centers use huge quantities of water, with a typical data center consuming the same amount of water per day as the cities of Marietta or Valdosta, he said.
However, data center developers have proven willing to install water-saving strategies including “closed-loop cooling” to reduce their water consumption, even though such technology is expensive.
“We encourage smart, sustainable development that ensures critical infrastructure like data centers can thrive without compromising our water resources,” Jackson said.
“The data center industry remains committed to responsible water use in Georgia communities,” added Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Northern Virginia-based Data Center Coalition. “Data centers prioritize efficient water practices and responsible management to minimize their water footprint.”
Manganiello suggested that the General Assembly put limits on tax incentives the state offers to attract “high-resource use facilities” to Georgia requiring that they disclose how much electricity and water they plan to use. A bipartisan bill to that effect sponsored by state Rep. Debbie Buckner, D-Junction City, failed to gain traction during this year’s legislative session.
Manganiello also recommended that the state use tax credits to incentivize data centers to employ water-saving technology and establish a self-sustaining infrastructure fund to help support data centers.
The water subcommittee will hold two more meetings in South Georgia – one in Moultrie next month and the other in Claxton in September – before issuing findings and recommendations.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Tobacco companies are using social media influencers, bright packaging and fruity flavors to lure new customers to vaping, and state lawmakers heard Thursday that they appear to be targeting teenagers.
Flavors like mango, cucumber and creme brulee sound delectable and contribute to widespread use, along with easy access from older siblings and third-party vendors, said Suhaas Reddy Bonkur, a Georgia Tech student.
“It’s super easy for them and very convenient to just take a hit, maybe it’s as simple as grabbing a snack after school,” said the fourth-year biomedical student, who is a member of the American Heart Association’s state advocacy committee. “And this easy access normalizes its behavior and fuels the addiction.”
A medical expert testified about the cornucopia of health risks for young people who vape — risks that science can “extrapolate” from cigarette use.
“They include things like various respiratory illnesses and pneumonias, worsening asthma as well as the risk of developing asthma,” said Dr. Mary Ellen Fain of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “Lots of behavioral problems like ADHD, antisocial behavior, middle ear infections that can cause hearing impairment.”
Thursday’s hearing of the House Study Committee on the Costs and Effects of Smoking was the second in a series that started last month. The first hearing focused on smoking and Georgia’s exceedingly low cigarette tax. At 37 cents a pack, it is well below the national average of $1.97. Only Missouri, at 17 cents, charges less.
Testimony Thursday revealed a similar tax policy for vaping. Georgia and 32 other states plus Washington, D.C., have a vape tax policy, said Danny Kanso, an analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
“Among those 33 states, we are at the very bottom,” said Kanso, who said Georgia taxes the product at 5 cents per milliliter while the national average is 82 cents.
No one from the industry spoke this time or at last month’s hearing.
Advocates at both hearings proposed raising the tax rate on tobacco products. They also advised more sales restrictions and cessation programs.
Bonkur, the Tech student, lamented the recent defunding of Georgia’s Tobacco Use Prevention Program, a victim of federal cuts.
The state health department said last month that core tobacco and vaping prevention and cessation programs were still operating, but Bonkur said it was a loss of “instrumental” prevention work, adding that the state should invest more into it.
These temporary study committees take deep dives on complicated topics, then advise the broader General Assembly. No specific tobacco legislation has emerged so far, but this committee will meet one more time to discuss concrete proposals ahead of next year’s legislative session.
The chairwoman, Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, who also leads the House’s standing Public and Community Health Committee, lamented that Congress omitted menthol when it banned cigarette flavors in 2009, suggesting a direction she might want to take.
Rep. Lee Hawkins, R-Gainesville, chairman of the House Health Committee, another key lawmaker on the topic, said he would like to see more transparency requirements for vape product packaging.
“I would like to include in there that the ingredients of these vaping products must be disclosed,” said Hawkins, a dentist who has also been leading a summer study committee on cancer care access. “Because you’re putting all kinds of things in these vaping products, and I think the public and the user should know.”
by Dave Williams | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Electric-vehicle manufacturer Rivian will establish a new East Coast headquarters in Atlanta, creating about 500 jobs when completed.
Rivian will occupy the top floor and lobby of a building on Auburn Avenue adjacent to the Atlanta Beltline’s Eastside Trail.
“Georgia is a prime location for any company headquarters,” Gov. Brian Kemp said Thursday. “We’re glad to see Rivian will soon join the growing list of brands not only operating in our state but also wholly or partially based in our capital city.”
Rivian is no stranger to Georgia. The California-based company announced plans in late 2021 to build a $5 billion truck manufacturing plant near Covington, generating 7,500 jobs. It was the largest economic development project in Georgia history for a few months until Hyundai revealed plans to build a $5.5 billion EV plant west of Savannah.
While the Hyundai plant opened earlier this year, the Rivian project has been delayed by financial challenges. A nearly $6 billion federal loan announced last November is allowing construction to restart following a switch in plans to producing R2 crossover models. The plant is due to open in 2028.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said the Rivian headquarters will help burnish the city’s reputation as technology hub.
“Atlanta continues to lead in EV innovation and technology integration, and Rivian’s growing presence here reinforces our city’s role in shaping our future economy,” he said.
Rivian expects to employ around 100 people at the headquarters site by the end of this year.
