ATLANTA — Republican Rick Jackson unveiled an expansive pitch to voters Tuesday as he campaigns against Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms to win the governor’s office.
Speaking before a small invitation-only group at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter, Jackson made five campaign promises that were broad in scope but narrow in detail.
His appearance came after Bottoms held an event at a Lawrenceville grocery store last week to unveil a plan to target the rising cost of living by encouraging local officials to waive their taxes on groceries.
The “Jackson action plan,” as he called it, goes far beyond one problem and one solution.
He reiterated the state tax-cutting plan he unveiled at an Atlanta barbershop last month: reduce income taxes by half, eliminate the tax on tips, suspend the gasoline tax during price spikes and eliminate taxes on energy for residential and small-business customers.
Jackson said at that campaign stop last month that he would pay for those tax cuts by increasing government efficiency, for instance with new computer systems, and by cutting the budget.
His new tax plan builds on something he announced last month: taking a bite out of rising local property taxes by freezing property values. On Tuesday, Jackson said he would require local governments to hold a public hearing and take a recorded vote before raising property taxes.
Rick Jackson, Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, unveiled his five-point “Jackson action plan” at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
Georgia law already requires local governments to advertise extensively and to hold three public hearings before voting to set a property tax rate that does not fall enough to offset any increase in tax proceeds caused by rising property values.
Jackson said he would attack housing costs by expediting permitting and inspections, which are largely functions of local government. He said he would ensure no data centers are approved unless they would not increase local utility costs. For the college-bound, he said he would freeze tuition, room and board at Georgia’s public colleges and technical schools.
And he said he would build on Gov. Brian Kemp’s template for Medicaid with “intelligent” expansion.
Kemp’s Pathways to Coverage program limits access by requiring participants to work, attend college, care for others or volunteer their time.
Jackson said he would expand coverage for those who earn too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid but too little to afford other coverage.
Unemployed able-bodied adults would be trained and linked to employment, he said. Meanwhile, he would discourage people from swapping private insurance for Medicaid.
“I believe every Georgian should have access to healthcare coverage or insurance,” said Jackson, who founded and operates a healthcare staffing company. “So on day one, I will close the coverage gap with intelligent Medicaid expansion. We will cover those who need it the most and keep work requirements in place for those who are able. And we will not force the 500,000 people who have subsidized private plans onto a government plan.”
Jackson said he would reduce overall medical costs by requiring “meaningful price transparency” so patients can price shop. He did not say how he would accomplish this.
He said he would pursue fraud, waste and abuse in state healthcare programs by using “modern technology.”
And he said he would use the state’s bulk-purchasing power to drive down drug and healthcare-related costs.
“Nothing is more important than making Georgia more affordable,” Jackson said. “Many Georgia families are working harder than ever and still feel like they’re falling behind. Affordability is a crisis and government needs to treat it like one.”
But Jackson also said public safety was the most important part of his plan. “Nothing else in this plan works if a family does not feel safe in its home, a child does not feel safe in walking to school, or a small-business owner is afraid to open the door,” Jackson said.
Jackson said he would end child sex trafficking and set high standards for law enforcement while providing the “right” resources. He took a dig at his opponent for her handling of public unrest when she was mayor of Atlanta.
“Keisha Lance Bottoms’ record in Atlanta offers a warning about what happens when police morale and staffing are not treated as priorities,” Jackson said. “As governor, I will make public safety a daily responsibility, not a talking point after a crisis.”
ATLANTA — Amie Anderson’s first instinct was rage.
Her daughter, a nurse, had just told her how a young mother had walked into the hospital and surrendered her infant.
Under Georgia law, hospitals are among the safe places where a mother can leave her newborn.
“I was just like, ‘Who in the world does this and why?’,” the elder Anderson recalled recently.
“And I’m just raging. I mean all-Christianity-out-the-window raging,” she said. “And my daughter was like, ‘Mama no, no, no: she was so brave.'”
Amie Anderson then felt a sense of guilt so profound that it spurred her to spend three years prodding Georgia lawmakers to amend the law.
She searched online and found news about babies abandoned in dumpsters and trash cans.
She also saw heartening stories, such as one about a firefighter in Ocala, Florida, who adopted an infant left in the “baby box” at his fire station.
Then, she had an epiphany: some scared mothers needed anonymity.
“My assumption is that having to look a person in the face and hand that baby over is scary,” she said. “And when people panic, they do stupid things.”
The Anderson family — from left to right, Jay, Amie, Kerri and Kadi — inside a Henry County fire station with Georgia’s first Safe Haven Baby Box. Kerri Anderson is the nurse who set her mother, Amie Anderson, on a three-year journey to make the boxes legal in Georgia. CONTRIBUTED
The Indiana nonprofit Safe Haven Baby Boxes made the box that delivered a baby girl to the Florida firefighter and his wife.
Each unit is built into an exterior wall at a fire station, hospital or other approved site. The temperature-controlled compartment contains a plastic bassinet. The external door locks after it is closed, and two alarms alert building personnel. The box also alerts 911 if no one opens the Plexiglass door on the inside and retrieves the baby.
Anderson called Safe Haven to ask about installing boxes in Georgia.
She said the organization told her she would have to get the law changed first. At the time, babies in Georgia could only be surrendered to warm hands at a designated safe place.
Anderson gathered allies, including her local state representative, who wrote legislation and then handed it to Rep. Mike Cameron, R-Rossville.
Finally, this year, they got the box law passed, but it almost didn’t happen.
House Bill 350 got a final vote during the last minutes of this year’s legislative session.
The 164-4 House vote was nearly derailed by a Senate amendment. It required that a camera be aimed at each box, in case someone put something harmful inside.
A Democratic representative asked a salient question: Wouldn’t the loss of anonymity undermine the whole point of the boxes?
“No. Maybe not,” Cameron said, refusing to take more questions and calling for the vote.
He was worried about where that debate might go, and how long it might take, he recalled. “It was a nail-biter.”
Cameron, who lives in northwest Georgia, read accounts of these boxes being installed in nearby Tennessee. He said he thought Georgia should do the same.
Georgia is now among 27 states where they are legal, according to Safe Haven.
“There’ll be babies saved,” Cameron said.
During hearings in the Senate, some lawmakers expressed unease about the boxes and wondered about the need.
“It looks like a book depository or something,” one of them said.
Another, Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, said the concept gave him “kind of a weird feeling, because who would leave a baby in a box, right?”
But he said he felt obliged to vote for the bill because the GOP-led General Assembly had banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected.
“If we’re going to be a state that is pro-life, this is also notice to parents, to moms, that we’re all in, and we’re willing to help you even if you think you have no options,” Strickland said. “So I support this.”
Anderson, who testified at that March hearing, said she feared the committee would table the bill. Even if it didn’t, she worried about the addition of a camera mandate. She said that would have violated Safe Haven’s rules about the anonymity of parents.
Then, Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, mentioned an account of a young woman in his part of the state who had given birth to an infant, then placed her in a cooler and left her by the side of a road. The body of the infant was found days later.
Brass worried about a failure with the baby box safety features, for instance if the alarm that calls 911 rolled over to voicemail. Still, he said, “I do think this is a way better option than a trash can or a cooler.”
A week later, the senators heard from a woman who was forever scarred by the incident Brass referenced.
Anderson had called a friend who knew her and asked her to speak at the hearing.
Jill Patterson told the lawmakers about how a detective had come to her door in March 2020. The officer told her a dead infant had been found in Troup County more than a year before, swaddled in sweatpants and zipped into a rolling cooler decorated with a pattern of watermelon slices.
Genetic evidence had linked the baby to Patterson’s family.
“Within three minutes, I learned that I had a granddaughter and she was dead,” Patterson said.
She said her 19-year-old son did not know about his high school girlfriend’s pregnancy and that the news devastated him.
The infant’s mother later pleaded guilty in the child’s death and was sent to prison.
Patterson said her family struggled every Dec. 28, the anniversary of the 2018 death, and each March 17, the date they learned of the infant they would name Eliza Jane.
“There are no simple answers for my family. Just the cold, harsh reality of what happened,” Patterson said. “But there is a simple answer before you, ladies and gentlemen.”
That was all the bill needed, Cameron said. “We all broke up. It was just a horrific story.”
One of the reluctant senators was so moved that he asked to change the name of the underlying law.
The Safe Place for Newborns Act of 2002, which gave mothers immunity from prosecution when they left their infants in a designated safe place, would become the Eliza Jane Warner Act.
The committee added that amendment and others, including the camera mandate and a ban on using state funds for the baby boxes.
The next week, on the final scheduled day of the legislative session, the Senate voted 49-1 to pass HB 350. That was about half an hour before midnight. More than an hour later, the House approved the Senate’s changes.
In late August, a fire station in Henry County celebrated the installation of the first baby box in Georgia.
Anderson said her group wants to raise $100,000 to $125,000 to install several more in the county, at a cost of $20,000 to $25,000 apiece for the installation, training and ongoing maintenance.
And what about those cameras that undermine the case for anonymity, the reason a scared mother might be drawn to such a box in the first place?
“We were all very angry about the whole camera thing,” Anderson said, but she said Safe Haven was fine with the final language in the law.
The wording requires a camera capable of recording anyone who accesses a box. It was “not real specific,” Anderson said, so they put the camera inside the box.
“That camera goes directly to 911, and you can see the baby, and you can probably see mama’s arms,” she said, “but you cannot see mama’s face.”
ATLANTA — The economic boom continued in Georgia last year, with a second record-topping year of business investment and job growth.
Gov. Brian Kemp and the state Department of Economic Development announced $35.2 billion in project investments for the fiscal year that ended June 30. That is up from $26.3 billion the prior fiscal year, which had also broken records.
The figures are for companies newly locating in Georgia and for expansions by existing companies. Expansions accounted for 79% of projects and for 15,370 of the estimated 25,300 new private-sector jobs, the joint statement Thursday said.
Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt, but that adage does not seem to apply to Georgia and business.
“The greatest vote of confidence is a company choosing to expand their existing operations in our state,” Kemp said.
Three out of four of the new projects and expansions were outside the 10-county metro Atlanta region, spreading economic opportunity to rural Georgia.
A chunk of that investment came from overseas. Foreign companies invested $7.8 billion and creating 9,350 jobs, according to the state. The top investors were South Korea, Italy, Belgium, Canada, and France.
Last month, German industrial giant Siemens announced plans to develop a 550,000-square-foot manufacturing plant near Pendergrass. The $185 million investment was expected to produce 1,400 jobs.
Kemp said the investments last year showed how his administration was delivering on its promise “to bring good-paying jobs to hardworking Georgians in every zip code.”
Kemp often refers to that magazine’s ranking when touting his administration’s record. On Thursday, he said that with the latest economic development figures, “we’re proving why we remain the No. 1 state for business.”
Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, has portrayed his priorities as a continuation of Kemp’s policies.
Jackson has said he would cut taxes while continuing to recruit companies to the state.
“I’m going to try to beat his record on putting together the most jobs, what he’s done in the rural areas,” Jackson said in August, when Kemp appeared alongside him at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce event in Athens.
Kemp said Georgia had “the most people working ever in the history of the state,” and he said he believed Jackson could “keep this going, and that’s why I’m supporting him.”
Jackson’s Democratic opponent, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, has targeted the cost of living as a top campaign issue, saying she has a plan to help Georgians afford their grocery bills.
During a campaign stop at a Gwinnett County grocery store Wednesday, Bottoms unveiled her plan to encourage cities and counties to waive sales taxes on groceries.
The Democratic state senator for the area opened the event by saying that Kemp — and by extension Jackson — had their priorities backward.
“Things are tough for everyone,” Sen. Sheikh Rahman, D-Lawrenceville, said, asserting that Bottoms, not Jackson, would be best at attacking high costs.
She will do “everything to make sure the state of Georgia is not the No. 1 state for business,” he said, “but the No. 1 state for family.”
ATLANTA — With voters upset about the cost of living, both candidates for governor are rolling out affordability plans to woo them.
After Republican Rick Jackson pitched cuts to income and energy taxes last month, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms unveiled her proposal Wednesday to lower grocery bills by cutting the sales tax.
The state already exempts groceries from its 4% sales tax. Her new plan would give cities and counties the option of waiving theirs, too.
The former Atlanta mayor said that if voters make her the first Democratic governor of Georgia in more than two decades — and the first Black woman ever — she will ask lawmakers to let cities and counties opt out, too.
Speaking at a campaign stop in a small grocery store in Lawrenceville, Bottoms framed rising costs as an existential crisis.
Whether she goes to the hair or nail salon, the grocery store or church, Bottoms said, “people are talking about how expensive it is just to exist.”
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms discussed rising prices and her plan to reduce costs by cutting local grocery sales taxes at a press conference at Al Huda Grocery in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Caroline Newbern/Capitol Beat)
President Donald Trump has endorsed Jackson, and Jackson has said he would be Trump’s favorite governor.
The Bottoms campaign hopes that alliance hurts Jackson more than it helps him.
“Donald Trump ran on lowering grocery costs, specifically the cost of eggs, immediately when he came into office,” Bottoms said. “Well, we are still waiting on him to deliver on that.”
Bottoms’ affordability plan offers local leaders two options: permanently eliminate their sales taxes on groceries and other eligible essentials, or temporarily suspend those taxes when prices rise sharply.
She would establish a one-year $250 million state fund to subsidize communities for revenue losses in excess of 5% of the prior-year grocery-tax collections.
Bottoms could not do this alone as governor. Her plan is predicated on a major assumption: that Democrats will win control of both the state House and Senate, long controlled by Republicans.
She would need the cooperation of the General Assembly to get enabling legislation approved.
Bottoms said she hopes Democrats seize control of the Legislature but said she was prepared to collaborate with Republicans if they remained in power.
The Jackson campaign dismissed Bottoms’ plan, asserting that Atlanta became unaffordable when she was mayor from 2018 through 2021.
“Rick Jackson has treated it as a crisis since day one, and his plan doesn’t need permission from 159 county commissions,” Jackson campaign spokesman Garrison Douglas said in an email.
Speaking at an Atlanta barbershop in mid-August, Jackson said he would address the cost of living by attacking other types of taxes.
He said he would gradually cut the state income tax in half, eliminate state taxes on the electricity and natural gas delivered to residences and suspend the motor fuels tax during gasoline price spikes.
Jackson also pledged to freeze the rising home valuations that are driving up property tax bills.
The Bottoms campaign has labeled her opponent “Slick Rick,” an insult she used at her Al Huda Grocery stop Wednesday.
When a reporter asked her why Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the Republican who lost to Jackson in the GOP primary runoff, had not endorsed Jackson, Bottoms said she thought it was because Jones did not trust Jackson, in part due to the money Jackson’s healthcare staffing company has earned from the state.
“Slick Rick received a $700 million no-bid contract in the middle of COVID, and he stood before cameras like this and said if he were elected, he wouldn’t continue to do business with the state of Georgia,” Bottoms said. “And then he just extended that contract three weeks ago.”
Jackson addressed the issue last month.
During his campaign stop at Tommy’s Barbershop, Jackson said any contracts his company held with the state could and would be canceled if he were elected governor.
