ATLANTA – Seven Georgia school districts will receive nearly $60 million in federal funding for new electric and low-emission buses.
The Georgia grant is part of $1 billion going to school systems across the country to pay for clean buses. The money comes from the bipartisan infrastructure spending bill Congress passed in 2021.
Every day, nearly 25 million children ride more than 500,000 predominantly diesel buses to school in the U.S., which contributes to air pollution that exposes children to unhealthy air.
“This is about converting fleets of diesel-powered school buses into clean energy vehicles for the future,” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who was instrumental in getting the school bus funds into the infrastructure bill. “This investment demonstrates the power of bipartisan cooperation to deliver tangible results for our communities.”
The Georgia grant will provide 156 new electric buses. The Clayton and DeKalb County school districts will receive 50 buses each, with 25 going to Richmond County Schools, 15 to Bibb County schools, 10 to the Carrollton City School District, and six to Glynn County schools.
In addition, the Marietta school system will receive 15 propane-fueled buses.
ATLANTA – The state awarded more than $9 million Monday to support more than 400 housing units in four Georgia communities, the second round of grants through a program Gov. Brian Kemp created last year.
The Rural Workforce Housing Initiative, which Kemp announced during his annual State of the State address last January, includes $35.7 million to help spur the development of critically needed workforce housing across the state. The first round of grants totaling nearly $8.4 million was announced last September.
“This latest round of grants will help four more communities provide the needed infrastructure to meet demand as even more opportunity comes to rural parts of our state,” Kemp said Monday. “Georgians deserve to be able to live in the same communities where they work, and this program is helping make sure they can.”
Three of the grants, worth about $2.5 million each, are going to the cities of Alma and Vidalia, and to the Development Authority of Donalsonville and Seminole County.
Alma’s grant will go to construct water, sewer, and street improvements to accommodate 60 new homes at the 40-acre Teresa’s Estate subdivision. Vidalia will use its funding for water, sewer, street, and drainage improvements for the Triple Oaks subdivision, which will include 70 homes and the capacity for an additional 150 in the second and third phases of the project.
The grant to the Development Authority of Donalsonville and Seminole County will go toward the necessary water, sewer, and drainage improvements for 53 homes in the first phase of a subdivision. The development also has the capacity for an additional 67 homes.
The fourth grant, for $1.5 million, will go to the Dalton-Whitfield County Joint Development Authority for street and stormwater drainage required to complete the South Hamilton Residential Infill Project, which will support 39 new homes.
In addition to meeting OneGeorgia Authority requirements, applicants for the grants leveraged other funding sources to demonstrate community commitment to increasing access to affordable workforce housing.
ATLANTA – The 2024 General Assembly session got off to a slow start under the Gold Dome Monday.
With Democratic and Republican leaders already have been chosen last year at the start of the two-year legislative term, there were no leadership elections. Rep. Jon Burns, R-Newington, began his second year as Georgia House speaker, while GOP Lt. Gov. Burt Jones did the same as presiding officer of the state Senate.
The two legislative chambers were content with passing resolutions formally notifying Gov. Brian Kemp that the General Assembly is in session and scheduling a joint session for Thursday to hear Kemp deliver his annual State of the State address.
Despite the relative lack of activity on Monday, the 40-day session is expected to pick up quickly. Lawmakers will be anxious to complete their business as soon as possible so they can get out of the campaign trail in this election year. All 236 seats in the legislature will be on the ballot in November, and candidate qualifying is set for early March.
Easter comes early this year – on March 31 – giving legislative leaders another reason to move forward at a fast pace.
The governor’s State of the State message will be his second of the 2024 session’s opening week. Kemp is scheduled to headline Wednesday morning’s Eggs and Issues breakfast sponsored by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, being held this year at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta.
ATLANTA – The 2024 session of the General Assembly starting Monday is expected to feature renewed debate over issues lawmakers have wrestled with for years, including private school vouchers, legalized gambling, and tort reform.
What’s different this year is that Georgia is sitting atop a $16 billion budget surplus and another $11 billion undesignated funds. What to do with that unprecedented pile of cash likely will dominate the 40 days under the Gold Dome.
“The state has the chance to make a real difference in the lives of Georgians by investing in critical areas such as child care, education, and workforce development,” said Danny Kanso, senior fiscal analyst with the left-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. “We have the resources to make historic investments that will benefit all Georgians for generations to come.”
However, the legislature’s Republican majorities aren’t likely to abandon a long-running reputation for fiscal frugality to satisfy state agencies and interest groups with long lists of uses for tax dollars.
“The world is full of ideas for spending other people’s money,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia.
On the other hand, Tillery acknowledged the toll inflation has taken on core government services.
“We’re probably going to have to spend more to do what the government needs to do,” he said.
Gov. Brian Kemp already has identified some of his spending priorities. Early last month, the Republican governor announced he will ask the General Assembly to accelerate the state income tax cut the legislature approved two years ago.
The measure, which took effect at the beginning of this month, reduces the tax rate from 5.75% to 5.49%. Kemp is proposing to lower that rate further to 5.39%, a level that barring new legislation would not kick in until next year.
Kemp also will ask lawmakers for funding to provide one-time pay supplements of $1,000 for each of about 112,000 state employees and 196,000 teachers and school support staff, and to send $45,000 to every public school in Georgia to strengthen campus security.
Meanwhile, GOP legislative leaders are expected to mount another bid in their perennial fight to get private school vouchers through the General Assembly.
Last year, the Senate passed a bill to provide Georgia students in low-performing schools $6,000 scholarships to pay for private school or certain other educational costs. But the legislation failed in the House on the final day of the 2023 session when a group of rural Republicans joined minority Democrats opposed to diverting funds from public schools in voting against it.
The rural Republicans objected to the bill because there aren’t enough private schools in rural counties to make vouchers viable in those areas.
“We keep hearing, ‘school choice, school choice, school choice,’ ” said Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators. “For the vast majority of Georgians living outside the metropolitan area, that’s not an option. … It’s disingenuous to say any voucher bill would benefit those students.”
Kemp signaled last summer during a speech at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event that tort reform would be one of his top priorities for the 2024 General Assembly session.
One of the first things Republicans did in 2005 when the GOP took control of both legislative chambers for the first time in modern history was pass a bill setting a $350,000 cap on non-economic damages in lawsuits. But the state Supreme Court overturned the law in 2010.
“The cost of defending itself against one bogus lawsuit could be enough to put a small business out of business,” said Hunter Loggins, director of the Georgia chapter of the National Federation for Independent Business.
Legislative Democrats have long blocked major tort reform initiatives in the legislature, arguing changes to the system would strip away the rights of victims of car crashes and medical malpractice to their day in court.
Another issue lawmakers debate virtually every year but have yet to act on is legalized gambling. Of several forms of gambling that have been proposed, supporters say sports betting should be the easiest to pass because it could be done without amending Georgia’s Constitution, which requires two-thirds votes of the House and Senate.
But not everyone buys that legal argument. State Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, said he will introduce a constitutional amendment early in the session to legalize not only sports betting but casino gambling and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing.
If it passes, the amendment would land on the statewide ballot in November for Georgia voters to decide.
Beach said half of the state’s share of revenue from legalized gambling under his proposal would go to infrastructure spending, including highway and bridge improvements. Last month, Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry warned the state needs a significant boost in transportation funding during the coming decades to keep people and freight moving on highways that otherwise will becoming increasingly congested.
“They can’t spend the money on salaries or new F150 trucks,” Beach said of his legislation.
Beach said the rest of the state’s share of funding from legalized gambling would be divided between mental health care, rural health care, and chronically underfunded Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Legislative Republicans also are expected to renew efforts to repeal or at least streamline the state’s Certificate of Need (CON) law governing hospital construction. After years of failure on the CON front, GOP leaders have signaled a willingness to talk about expanding Medicaid coverage in Georgia – a longstanding priority for Democrats – in exchange for CON reform.
Under a Medicaid expansion model adopted in heavily Republican Arkansas, individuals with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line are eligible for coverage. Georgia Pathways, the limited Medicaid expansion that took effect in Georgia last summer, sets the income limit at 100% of the poverty line.
“If we’re going to have conversations about significant CON changes, we need to have conversations about how we’re going to get people access to health care,” said Anna Adams, executive vice president of external affairs at the Georgia Hospital Association. “There’s going to be conversations about both.”
Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Democrats and Republicans in Georgia are assembling all the tools they can muster to sway voters in what promises to be a hotly contested election year.
On the GOP side, former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., announced Friday the national rollout of a technology company she has founded to support conservative candidates. RallyRight LLC deployed new technology platforms across several states during the last election cycle, including Georgia.
“As a candidate in 2020, it was clear that Democrats held a significant infrastructure advantage,” Loeffler said Friday. “While the Left has spent years investing in technology to improve their fundraising and voter contact operations, I saw the need to innovate and build technology for the conservative movement.”
RallyRight’s two campaign technology platforms include DonateRight, designed to help candidates with fundraising, and FieldRight, which helps candidates reach and mobilize voters.
Since losing her Senate seat to Sen. Raphael Warnock, R-Ga., three years ago, Loeffler has been active on the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization fronts. Toward that end, she founded the organization Greater Georgia to help register conservative voters.
Not to be outdone, Georgia Democrats announced Friday a plan to recruit enough Democratic candidates to make sure no Republican goes unchallenged this year up and down the ballot.
Part of a national campaign, the program will use text messages, coaching calls and in-person organizing to identify and mobilize Democrats to run for local office, focusing on areas outside of major cities where a high percentage of Republicans typically go uncontested.
“Georgia Democrats are committed to competing up and down the ballot all across our state, without discounting or taking for granted a single county – including rural and non-metro areas,” said Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, the Democratic Party of Georgia’s executive director.
The 2024 candidate recruitment program is targeting nearly 3,000 local races across 876 localities in almost every county, with a focus on county commission, city council, and school board races. The goal is to recruit at least 100 new Democrats to file for office.
