by Ty Tagami | Jun 4, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Some homeowners could eventually see a rollback in their property tax bills after Gov. Brian Kemp revised his call for a special session.
Last month, Kemp ordered lawmakers back to the Capitol to redraw district lines and to address legal concerns with the state’s voting system.
On Wednesday he expanded his proclamation to allow lawmakers from each county to vote on a sales tax-funded subsidy for homeowners.
A 1% Local Homestead Option Sales Tax (LHOST) would go before voters in each county in November if their local legislative delegation approves a referendum at the special legislative session, which starts June 17.
The sales taxes, which would go into effect in 2028, would subsidize property taxes owed by homeowners.
The new sales tax was authorized by Kemp’s signature on Senate Bill 33, which will cap increases in county valuations of owner-occupied homes at the rate of inflation.
The law is aimed at restraining rapid rises in value that have been driving up property tax bills.
Any LHOST approved under SB 33 would apply to a variety of products and services, including food, alcohol and motor fuels up to $3 in retail sales price per gallon.
Kemp’s revised proclamation also calls on lawmakers to ratify after the fact his extended suspension of the 33-cent a gallon motor fuel tax.
After lawmakers temporarily waived that tax in March, Kemp extended it last month using his authority after declaring a state of emergency.
The gas tax suspension ended at midnight Tuesday.
It is unclear how many counties will call for an LHOST.
Clint Mueller, deputy director of ACCG, the association for county commissioners, said Thursday that he had heard of a few interested delegations.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 4, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The federal government will review safety protocols and security spending at Atlanta’s transit agency after two stabbing attacks last week, one of them fatal.
The investigation comes as Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority was supposed to be celebrating an important milestone with a public unveiling of its new high-tech railcars and fare gates.
MARTA has been upgrading its trains and stations in preparation for visitors from across the globe for the FIFA World Cup, which begins in Atlanta on June 15.
“Every American should be disturbed by the horrific crimes we have seen on MARTA in the last month,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said in a statement Thursday, when he ordered the Federal Transit Administration to launch an investigation.
The first stabbing occurred after lunchtime on May 24 when a 40-year-old man was attacked in an Atlanta MARTA station. The next one, just before noon on Saturday south of downtown, left a great-grandmother from Atlanta dead.
Margaret Swan, 66, was looking at her phone while seated on a train headed away from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, as many visitors will soon be doing.
Surveillance footage showed a man standing nearby as he pulled a folding knife from his right pants pocket and stabbed her more than 20 times around the chest and neck, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in a U.S. magistrate judge’s courtroom in Atlanta.
Terrified passengers ran to the other side of the train, calling for help.
John Elijah Matthews, 25, of Decatur, was arrested at the next stop, the Oakland City station, and charged in the killing, according to the complaint, which was filed by an FBI special agent.
Matthews was formally accused on charges of committing Violence Against a Mass Transportation System.
The U.S. attorney general will decide whether to seek the death penalty, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Theodore S. Hertzberg said in a statement afterward.
“Atlantans and the many people who will soon visit for the FIFA World Cup deserve to travel free from fear of a violent attack,” Hertzberg said.
MARTA has been installing a new payment system intended to ease friction at fare gates. It allows riders to tap their phones to pay. Riders can now add a MARTA Breeze transit card to their phone’s payment system without downloading the MARTA application.
Previously, riders had to use the Breeze Mobile app, which has a rating of 1.5 out of five stars in Apple’s App Store.
MARTA has also been updating some of its rolling stock, adding railcars that feature open gangways, digital customer information displays and wireless charging stations.
The new CQ400 railcars, built by the Swiss company Stadler, are “the most technologically advanced in the country,” MARTA said last week, as it announced an unveiling for this week.
The agency had planned to show off the new railcars at an event for reporters on Thursday at its Avondale station in Decatur.
But on Tuesday, the day Matthews was charged in connection with Swan’s death, the agency canceled the event.
The new railcars were still being tested and were not ready to enter “revenue service,” a spokeswoman explained. “We are committed to ensuring all testing and safety certifications are complete before the railcars begin serving riders.”
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens had planned to attend, along with other dignitaries, including Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts.
The national attention for MARTA comes during a peak in Georgia’s election cycle, with primary runoffs on June 16.
Pitts, a Democrat, is locked in a contest with a challenger. So are Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a candidate for governor against billionaire Rick Jackson, and former state Sen. John F. Kennedy, who is running against Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, for the post that Jones will vacate at year’s end.
Both Jones and Kennedy seized on MARTA’s recent troubles.
Kennedy blamed MARTA for leaving fare gates open last month.
The agency had been allowing free access to trains while it upgraded its payment system. It had planned to close the gates and begin charging on May 2, but the “customer grace period” was extended to May 30 due to delays.
“The installation of our better Breeze system was not as far along as we’d hoped,” MARTA’s interim general manager and CEO, Jonathan Hunt, said at the time.
Kennedy said in a campaign statement Wednesday that the fact that anyone could enter the system without paying had created “an enormous burden” for police, adding that it “undermines the safety and security of Georgians who rely” on the trains.
Jones seized on the moment Tuesday, the day Matthews was charged, saying “a deranged homeless man” had stabbed a woman to death.
Jones’ campaign said that if he were to win the governor’s office, he would deploy state troopers on trains if necessary. Jones noted that MARTA will be on a world stage soon.
“Atlanta is hosting the World Cup this summer and this is an embarrassment and a tragedy,” he said. “This has to stop.”
by Ty Tagami | Jun 3, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court has removed a pandemic-era barrier to executions, checking off a legal condition that must be met before ending the lives of certain inmates sentenced to death.
The decision overturned a lower court ruling that had put executions on hold over access to COVID-19 vaccines. But at least one legal obstacle remains before executions can resume in those cases.
In an order issued Tuesday, the high court ruled for state Attorney General Chris Carr, who had appealed a 2022 decision in Fulton County Superior Court after the Federal Defender Program, Inc. secured a pause in the execution of death row inmate Virgil Delano Presnell, Jr.
The Fulton decision that was reversed on Tuesday involved access to COVID-19 vaccines. The Fulton judge had halted executions until vaccines became “readily available.”
The opponents of executions argued that this condition had not been met because COVID-19 vaccines were not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for children under six months old.
However, the high court’s opinion, authored by Justice Carla Wong McMillian, said the lack of approval for babies was not relevant for convicts sentenced to death and that vaccines are now widely available.
“Given that the State produced undisputed evidence that the supply of the COVID-19 vaccine is adequate for all members of the public to obtain the vaccine and that no legal impediment exists for all members of the public to be vaccinated, if deemed medically appropriate, the trial court erred in concluding that the COVID-19 vaccine was not ‘readily available’ to all members of the public,” the opinion said.
One obstacle to executions remains. A footnote in the opinion said a separate condition involving inmate visitation has not yet been litigated.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 2, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The final Republican gubernatorial primary debate revealed more about Lt. Gov. Burt Jones than it did about billionaire Rick Jackson, as the latter declined to attend.
Or maybe it revealed a lot about Jackson, Jones said, speaking next to an empty lectern in a Georgia Public Broadcasting studio in Atlanta.
“You show up if you want to show people that you actually care,” Jones said.
Jackson declined to attend the debate sponsored by the Atlanta Press Club on Monday ahead of the June 16 primary runoff. Instead, he hosted a campaign event in Kennesaw with U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican.
Jones fielded questions about election law, abortion and tax credits.
He characterized the state’s $30 million-a-year tax credits to various companies as “corporate welfare,” but he did not specify which he would eliminate. As governor, he said he would cut those that do not produce enough jobs. He added that the state’s film tax credit has been a good investment.
He said he still supports Georgia’s ban on abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which he voted for when he was a senator.
And he supports Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to call a special legislative session on June 17, the day after the runoff, to redraw district lines. Kemp’s decision came after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in April that invalidated a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana. Black lawmakers contend Republicans want to maintain their grip on power by redrawing lines in a way that dilutes the impact of Black voters.
Districts should be drawn from “a geographic standpoint,” Jones said, rather than by racial demographics.
He also supported the new state law that forced five Democratic-leaning counties in metro Atlanta to hold nonpartisan elections for offices such as district attorney and county commissioner starting in 2028.
“Those were brought forward by people in the local delegations that felt so inclined to bring that legislation forward and they were able to get it through both chambers and then it was signed by the governor,” Jones said.
He opposed a similar state mandate on Georgia’s other 154 counties, saying it should be up to local delegations whether they want such offices to be partisan or nonpartisan.
Jones’ reference to local delegations sounded like the traditional deference of the Senate and House to so-called “local” bills that affect only one county. If most lawmakers from that county approve of such a bill, the whole Legislature usually rubber-stamps it.
In this case, though, House Bill 369 started as a measure to regulate food trucks, and it was originally sponsored by a Democrat from Valdosta. But Senate Republicans commandeered it and reworked it into legislation modeled in part after Senate Bill 14 by five Republicans from three of the affected counties — Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett. (Democratic lawmakers hold overwhelming majorities in the other two affected counties, Clayton and DeKalb.)
Democrats railed against the new law as a desperate attempt by Republicans to maintain some control in those counties as they shift Democratic.
Jones repeatedly hammered home the fact that his opponent had skipped the debate, using Jackson’s absence as an opportunity to attack him on ethics and on issues such as immigration.
At the last such debate, Jackson had stumbled in a response to an accusation by Jones that he had employed “illegals.” Jackson, who founded and leads a health care staffing and services company, responded that he did not know the answer because he had hired thousands of people, though he said he had always followed the law.
“Probably the reason why he’s not here now is he doesn’t have the answers for these questions,” Jones said. “It just shows a man’s character when he won’t show up and take questions and Q and A from journalists.”
That may have been a reference to a gubernatorial forum in April hosted by the Georgia Association of Manufacturers.
Every candidate for governor except Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms attended and answered formal questions from the hosts. Seven of the eight present then met up with reporters afterward for a round of informal questions.
Jackson was the only one who skipped that part.
One reporter asked each candidate to pick a word that best described them, and the public will never know what Jackson might have come up with on the spot.
Jones’ answer bent the one-word rule: “I like to win.”
by Ty Tagami | Jun 1, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Most of Georgia’s statewide primary races have been settled on either the Democratic or Republican ticket, but the race for leadership of the state Senate remains up for grabs on both sides of the aisle.
While not a senator, the lieutenant governor presides over the chamber and can control committee assignments and the flow of legislation. The lieutenant governor also fills in for the governor when necessary.
The partisans who survived last month’s primary election for the job will face each other in a June 16 runoff. On Sunday, they squared off in person in a studio at Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta, for what will likely be their final debate.
It can be difficult to find daylight between candidates from the same party, so in the first debate the remaining two Republicans attacked each other’s leadership skills, pitching themselves as best able to execute on policy.
The Democrats followed a similar script in their subsequent debate.
Both Republicans, Sen. Greg Dolezal of Cumming and former Sen. John F. Kennedy of Macon, said they want to cut taxes further than the GOP-controlled Legislature did this year.
Dolezal said that could be done without reducing services.
“For far too long, the Republican Party has been the party of crony capitalism,” said Dolezal, blaming his own partisans for approving budget-eating tax giveaways. “And if we get rid of these crony capitalist tax cuts, we can reduce and ultimately eliminate the state income tax here in Georgia.”
Kennedy resigned in early December because Georgia bars lawmakers from raising campaign funds during the legislative session. So he did not have to shoulder responsibility for the Senate’s failure to abolish income taxes as planned or the House’s similar failure to eliminate property taxes.
Kennedy said he could reduce taxes further if he were lieutenant governor.
“The Legislature was not able to get relief to hard-working Georgians,” he said. “I come in with a good reputation of working with all people, working with folks across the aisle, excellent relationships with those in the House and the governor’s office. And that’s what it takes.”
Kennedy noted that he was elected Senate president pro tempore, the highest leadership office for a senator.
Dolezal never made it into one of the top six Senate leadership spots for Republicans after serving a similar amount of time.
Dolezal described himself as a loyalist to President Donald Trump, noting that he was among a handful of senators who called for a special legislative session to investigate Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
“If a close friend came to you and said, ‘I’m looking for a conservative fighter,'” Dolezal said. “Who would you recommend? The one who goes along to get along or the one who has a record of standing and fighting?”
He echoed fears voiced in Texas where some Republicans contend that parts of the state are at risk of falling under Islamic legal influence.
“I’m fighting to ban Sharia law,” Dolezal said.
The Democratic debate featured bitter exchanges between Sen. Josh McLaurin of Sandy Springs and Nabilah Parkes, a former state senator from Gwinnett County.
Parkes had initially planned to run for insurance commissioner, but she abruptly changed course in March to join the contest for lieutenant governor.
Like Kennedy, she resigned her seat in the Senate so she could raise money for her campaign.
Unlike Kennedy, she waited until the legislative session had already started, leaving her seat vacant from mid-March into the busiest period of lawmaking.
Kennedy was succeeded by a Republican in February after a special election. A special election to fill the remainder of Parkes’ term is set for June 16, the same day as the primary runoff in the race to succeed her next year.
McLaurin called Parkes a quitter, and she called him a feeble campaigner, an insult he returned. Parkes, who is Muslim, has pointed to Dolezal’s campaign ads about Islam as her reason for breaking ranks with Democratic leaders to run for lieutenant governor.
Parkes described herself as a fighter from a working-class family who attended public schools and qualified for the free and reduced-price meals there before she attended Georgia State University.
McLaurin attended a private K-12 school in Buckhead, then the University of Georgia and Yale Law School, though he said his parents came from hardscrabble backgrounds.
McLaurin described himself as a “skillful” operator, able to ridicule Republican lawmakers for supporting Trump while earning enough of their respect and trust to pass legislation. He cited a bill to regulate car booting and one another for therapies for veterans.
Parkes attacked McLaurin as a Democrat who “coddles” Republicans.
“We don’t need a candidate that goes along to get along, like my opponent,” she said.
McLaurin said the Senate would likely remain under GOP control after the November general election and that Republicans would almost certainly strip the lieutenant governor of power if a Democrat were to win the office.
He characterized Parkes as ineffective, noting that scores of Democratic lawmakers have endorsed him, as has Stacey Abrams, who twice won Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination. On Monday, Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock added his endorsement.
“I imagine that my bipartisan work probably does look like coddling Republicans to somebody who hasn’t done any of it,” McLaurin said. “So, the bottom line is this: I am a fierce fighter. I have stood up to MAGA Republicans. I’ve called them narcissist coddlers to their face, but I get stuff done, and that’s why I can win in November.”
Watch the debates online at https://www.gpb.org/election/press-club-debates.
