by Mark Niesse | Feb 17, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Georgia House approved a bill Tuesday that aims to protect residential and retail customers from bearing the costs of data centers, but critics said the legislation won’t do enough.
The proposal is the first of several pending data center bills to pass either the House or Senate during this year’s legislative session.
The measure, House Bill 1063, requires electric utilities and new data centers to agree on contract terms that shield other power customers from costs of data center construction and operation.
“This bill is to ensure no family in the state should ever have to choose between keeping their lights on and keeping food on the table because someone else didn’t pay their fair share,” said state Rep. Brad Thomas, R-Holly Springs. “Data centers will pay their own way, period.”
The Public Service Commission, which regulates Georgia Power and other electricity providers, adopted similar rules last year, and Thomas said HB 1063 would make those requirements permanent.
State Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta, said the bill falls short because it still allows the Public Service Commission to raise electricity rates in response to rising demand from data centers.
“It adds no additional protections for consumers and no cost cutting mechanisms,” said state Rep. Ruwa Romman, D-Duluth. “I want every Georgian to know that this bill will not help with the concerns they brought to us. It simply codifies the status quo.”
The House passed HB 1063 with a 159-5 vote, and it now goes to the state Senate, which is considering its own customer protection proposal. Senate Bill 34 would prohibit costs from data center fuel generation and transmission from being included in residential electricity rates.
by Mark Niesse | Feb 17, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Another Democratic state legislator, state Rep. Dexter Sharper, is expected to plead guilty to COVID-19 unemployment fraud charges.
Sharper, D-Valdosta, allegedly obtained $13,825 in unemployment insurance benefits even though he was still earning income in 2020 through his party rental business and his job as a state representative, according to charges filed Jan. 30.
Sharper initially pleaded not guilty, but federal court documents filed last week show he plans to change his plea during a hearing next month.
Sharper didn’t comment Tuesday, and his attorney didn’t respond to an email.
U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg said in a statement last month Sharper violated citizens’ trust in their government.
“While many of his constituents and fellow citizens were losing jobs and desperately needed unemployment assistance during the pandemic, Representative Sharper allegedly pretended to be out of work to collect a share of unemployment benefits for himself,” Hertzberg said.
Sharper was the third Democratic representative charged with defrauding pandemic unemployment programs.
Former state Rep. Karen Bennett, D-Stone Mountain, pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining $13,940 in unemployment supplements, and she resigned Jan. 1. She hasn’t yet been sentenced.
State Rep. Sharon Henderson, D-Covington, pleaded not guilty to similar charges related to $17,811 in unemployment benefits. Gov. Brian Kemp suspended her from office last month.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 17, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Republican incumbent on the Georgia Public Service Commission announced Tuesday that she will not stand for reelection, just months after two Democrats ejected two GOP incumbents with decisive electoral victories.
Tricia Pridemore, appointed in 2018 and up for reelection this year, announced on social media that she was considering a run for Congress rather than for another term on the agency that regulates monopoly utilities such as Georgia Power.
“This decision comes after deep reflection and with profound gratitude for the honor of serving our great state,” she said in her statement.
Pridemore voted in December with the rest of the five-member PSC to approve a controversial 10 gigawatt expansion for Georgia Power, mostly to serve anticipated demand from data centers.
Among the other four members who voted with Pridemore were Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson. The pair had lost their seats in November to Democrats Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, who powered their way to upset victories by channeling frustration over the cost of living.
Both Republicans had voted in recent years to approve a series of utility rate increases that hit voters’ in the pocketbook.
When the two new Democrats succeeded the two outgoing Republicans last month, the GOP was left with a one-vote margin. Pridemore’s decision to stand down, leaves the future balance of power uncertain.
The commissioners must live within their PSC district, but they each stand for election statewide.
Pridemore said she was considering a run for the northwest metro Atlanta U.S. House seat held by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican who recently announced that he will not be running for reelection.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 16, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — An income tax cutting proposal designed by Georgia’s Senate Republicans to address the election year affordability issue would also cut into the supply of new housing for low wage earners, potentially harming some of the same people it would help.
Senate Bill 476, approved by the Senate last week, would return billions a year to taxpayers, and it would pay for that by reducing and then eliminating some $30 billion in tax credits and exemptions.
A chunk of that money goes to developers as a match that doubles the value of federal credits to build apartments that rent at below market rates. The credit gets paid over a 10-year period, so developers with newer projects would see their balance sheets go from black to red as they lost future credits that helped to make those projects feasible.
That would mean less housing for restaurant workers, school cafeteria employees and janitors, said Ken Blankenship, a developer who taps the credits.
“Where is that money going to come from? I’m not going to put it in. I’m going to foreclose on the property,” he said. “It is a financial disaster for our industry. Now, you take my deal and multiply that times 50 or 60 deals that are under construction right now,” said Blankenship, who is president of the Georgia Affordable Housing Coalition.
Lawmakers established the credit in 2000. A 2022 review of the program requested by the state Senate estimated that developers would claim $331 million in credits in fiscal year 2023 alone.
A summary of the review by the Department of Audits and Accounts said projects financed with the credits produced an estimated 19,500 jobs, mostly in construction, that paid about $1.7 billion in labor income. The summary also said much of the economic activity would have occurred without the tax giveaway. It noted, though, that “existing research has pointed to personal and public benefits from safe and secure long-term housing.”
The credit is only for below-market rental properties where a substantial portion of the renters earn 60% or less of the median income.
Under SB 476, the state tax credit would drop to half the federal credit in January before being abolished in 2032.
Blankenship said that in addition to bankrupting some developers in the near term, the loss of state funding would cause a long-term slowdown in construction of housing for people who struggle to make ends meet.
Those are the same people that Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, said he wanted to help when he crafted SB 476, which he likened to a pay raise for the middle class.
The legislation would use the revenue saved from tax credits to increase the state income tax standard deduction to $50,000 for an individual and $100,000 for a married couple, up from the current $12,000 and $24,000.
“I stand with those families making less than $100,000 and a yes vote fully supports them,” Tillery said Thursday on the Senate floor before the measure passed, mostly along party lines. He said firefighters, teachers, lunch counter workers and janitors would benefit the most.
The downsizing of the state subsidy would come amid an abiding shortage in affordable housing that a leading economic forecaster expected to endure at least through this year.
“Activity is depressed because affordability is at record lows, few people are desperate to buy or to sell, economic uncertainly is high, and almost nobody’s moving,” said the 43rd annual economic forecast by the Selig Center for Economic Growth.
The report by the Center, based at the University of Georgia’s business school, said construction finances were squeezed between two federal policies: elevated material costs due to tariffs and a labor shortage due to stricter immigration enforcement.
“Since we do not expect these negative factors to change very much in 2026, the homebuilding and real estate industries will remain in recession,” said the report, released late last year.
It is unclear how far the Senate will get with its tax cutting proposal. To become law, it would need approval by the state House and then by Gov. Brian Kemp.
The House has its own tax-cutting proposal focused on local property taxes. Kemp wants to reduce the income tax rate a fifth of a percentage point to 4.99%, which is something SB 476 also does.
But the governor proposed neither increasing the standard deduction nor cutting tax credits to pay for it — both cornerstones of the legislation.
Kemp’s state economist, Robert Buschman, was asked about approaches to reducing the income tax during a legislative budget hearing in January. Buschman praised Kemp’s approach of slowly lowering the tax rate based on “structural” revenue surpluses, but he also said culling ineffective tax credits to pay for continued lowering of the rate “would be a wonderful thing.”
He did not specify whether any particular credit, such as the affordable housing credit, was ineffective. But he was the lead co-author of the 2022 state review of that credit.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 13, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — People who worry about exposure to the HIV virus may soon be able to walk into a Georgia pharmacy and buy preventative medicines.
Bipartisan legislation that would allow pharmacists to order and dispense or inject preventative HIV drugs passed the Georgia House by a wide margin Thursday.
Seven Republicans opposed the measure, which was authored by a Republican.
Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, who has a master’s degree in medical science, said he introduced the measure for a simple reason.
“I’m in healthcare, I do anesthesia, and I look at the data, and the data says this is far, far more cost effective to prevent it then to treat it, as many things are in medicine,” he said.
The South had the highest infection rate in the country, with 49% of the new cases in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gay and bisexual men accounted for 67% of new infections and 86% of diagnoses among all men, the CDC reported.
Metro Atlanta was a hotspot, with more than 50 new diagnosed cases per 100,000 people in 2023, about twice the state average, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Senate Bill 195 would authorize pharmacists to order and then dispense or inject a 30- to 90-day supply of preexposure drugs and to do the same with a 30-day supply of postexposure drugs.
The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, said it was encouraged to see the legislation moving. “Increasing access to HIV and AIDS care and prevention by empowering pharmacists will save lives,” the group’s Georgia director, Bentley Hudgins, said in a statement.
Senate Bill 195 passed the House 155-7. It now returns to the Senate, where it passed unanimously last year. It must go back there due to amendments by the House that Hufstetler did not oppose. He said he would ask his colleagues in the Senate to agree to the changes, so the bill could go to the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp.
Should it become law, the State Board of Pharmacy would have until Jan. 1 to approve the training that pharmacists would need before they could offer the HIV prophylactic drugs.
Hufstetler said that if the measure becomes law, it could reduce misery and the need for costly medical care.
“This medicine, at about $26, is far cheaper than the cost of treating somebody with an HIV infection, which would be about $420,000 to $1 million — and obviously an improved quality of life,” he said.
