Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger discusses absentee voting in Georgia amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Georgians have taken to early voting in a big way.
The Peach State ranked second in the nation for early voting last November, according to a new study released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The report found that 58% of Georgia voters cast their ballots before Election Day, up from 48% in 2018.
“Georgia leads the nation in voter access, election security, and innovation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. “Georgia voters have the confidence that they can cast their ballot easily, and that their vote will count.”
Raffensperger famously refused then-President Donald Trump’s request to “find” enough votes to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results in January 2021. Democrat Joe Biden had carried the state the previous November by 11,779 votes.
Since then, Raffensperger has defended the security and accuracy of Georgia elections and backed innovations to further improve the voting process.
In May, he announced the state will be conducting “health checks” in all 159 Georgia counties. The health checks will examine election management systems, ballot marking devices, and scanners to verify that the software used in last year’s elections has not been changed.
The new study found that Georgians voted early last year more than any other state except Texas. At the same time, only 6% of Georgia voters cast their ballots through the mail, returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Only about one-third of voters waited until Election Day to cast their ballots in person, which kept lines at the polls short or nonexistent in most precincts.
ATLANTA – The state slapped a moratorium on drilling new irrigation wells in large portions of Southwest Georgia in 2012, responding to a two-year drought that dried up one stream and significantly decreased flows in others.
Now, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) is moving to partially ease the ban, due in part to court victories Georgia has won in the long-running tri-state water wars with Florida and Alabama. The agency is proposing to lift the moratorium to protect vulnerable citrus and blueberry crops from spring freezes.
Farmers in the Flint River Basin and the region’s political and business leaders are cheering the plan as the a first step toward revitalizing the state’s No.-1 industry in the heart of Georgia farm country.
“We understood the need for [a moratorium] years ago,” said Will Bentley, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council. “But now, technology and producer education are catching up to where they need to be.”
Bentley cited technological improvements during the last decade that are allowing farmers to better track the amount of water they’re using to irrigate their crops as a key to improved conservation of groundwater supplies. Farmers also are making progress with variable rate technology, he said.
Gordon Rogers, executive director of Albany-based Flint Riverkeeper, said the need to defend Georgia’s agricultural water use against water wars lawsuits was a driving force in that technological progress. The state won its most important legal battle two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Georgia in a lawsuit Florida filed in 2013 over the allocation of water that flows between the two states.
“All during the litigation, the work that’s bearing fruit now was going on in the background,” Rogers said. “Some of it was explicitly to create defenses in court, and some was common sense.”
Rogers also pointed to a grant program the state launched last year to reduce water withdrawals from surface streams and the Floridan aquifer by drilling deeper irrigation wells. The $49.8 million award to Albany State University’s Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center is being funded mostly with federal pandemic relief.
Bentley cautioned that the EPD’s proposal is limited to freeze protection for citrus and blueberries.
“We have a pretty new citrus industry in South Georgia, which is really growing,” he said. “They’re particularly vulnerable to a late freeze.”
Not all farmers are happy with the state’s plan. A public hearing on the proposal in Albany last month drew complaints that lifting the ban only for the limited time of the year when freezes are a concern doesn’t go far enough.
“There’s a desire for EPD to do a better job and allow more withdrawals,” then-EPD Director Rick Dunn told members of the Georgia Board of Natural Resources late last month. Dunn has since moved on to become director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget.
Rogers said he expects the EPD will expand the easing of the ban sooner rather than later.
“This is just the first of several episodes,” he said. “I’m convinced in the next three to five years, we’ll see further loosening of the moratorium.”
The EPD will continue reviewing public comments on the plan through the summer. The agency plans to begin accepting applications from interested farmers on Sept. 1.
ATLANTA – U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been kicked out of the conservative House Freedom Caucus after voting to raise the nation’s debt limit and making disparaging remarks about a fellow House Republican, The Daily Beast and other Washington, D.C.-based media outlets reported.
Greene, R-Rome, has aligned herself in recent months with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was opposed by many Freedom Caucus members last winter in his successful bid to become speaker after Republicans captured control of the House.
Her alliance with McCarthy continued into last month, when she voted in favor of raising the debt limit after McCarthy negotiated a compromise agreement with President Joe Biden to prevent the U.S. from going into default.
Also last month, Greene was involved in a well publicized spat with Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., a prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus and one-time ally. At one point, Greene called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face, according to The Daily Beast.
Greene appeared unfazed by the action of the Freedom Caucus.
“In Congress, I serve Northwest Georgia first, and serve no group in Washington,” Greene told The Daily Beast in a statement.
“I will work with ANYONE who wants to secure our border, protect our children inside the womb and after they are born, end the forever foreign wars, and do the work to save this country,” she continued. “The GOP has less than two years to show America what a strong, unified Republican-led Congress will do when President Trump wins the White House in 2024. This is my focus, nothing else.”
Greene has been a lightning rod since winning election to the House in 2020. After taking office at the beginning of 2021, the then-Democratic majority in the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments for – among other things – questioning whether the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and school shootings were staged.
She got her committee assignments back after Republicans took control of the House in last year’s midterm elections.
Greene’s Democratic challenger in 2022, Army veteran Marcus Flowers, raised millions of dollars in an effort to unseat her, with a large portion of his campaign contributions coming from out of state. However, Greene trounced Flowers last November, racking up nearly 66% of the vote in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.
ATLANTA – The University of Georgia has sold the largest undeveloped parcel on Lake Blackshear to an undisclosed buyer for $18.5 million.
The money will go to benefit UGA’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.
The university received the 2,500-acre property in 1989 as a donation from businessman Charles Wheatley. It’s been used since then for timber and hunting, yielding $8.2 million from timber sales and other investment earnings.
“After years of stewardship, we felt the market was in a good place,” Dale Greene, the Warnell school’s dean, said Wednesday. “We are very pleased with the outcome, and the funds from the sale will be transformative for our school as we prepare the next generation of foresters and natural resources professionals.”
The school plans to create three separate funds from the land sale. One fund will be dedicated to modernizing the campus facilities in Athens. The other two will be established as endowments to allow the school to benefit in perpetuity.
“It means our faculty can find dedicated support for lab improvements or technology advances,” Greene said. “This kind of funding gives our faculty added flexibility when pursuing research funding and special projects, or in recruiting top talent for graduate students.”
ATLANTA – Georgia Republicans have sought to go their own way in expanding Medicaid coverage for more than a decade since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed by a Democratic Congress gave states that right.
Now, the “Georgia-centric” version of Medicaid expansion is about to take flight. The new Georgia Pathways program, a more limited expansion of Medicaid than its federal counterpart, is taking effect this weekend.
But Democrats in the General Assembly and health-care advocates say the state is missing an opportunity both to save taxpayer dollars and serve more low-income Georgians by not adopting a full-blown expansion of Medicaid coverage under the ACA, as 40 other states have done. Opponents are particularly critical of Georgia Pathways’ first-in-the-nation work requirement for Medicaid recipients.
Under Georgia Pathways, Georgia residents between the ages of 19 and 64 with household incomes up to 100% of the Federal Poverty Level will be eligible for Medicaid coverage. The program will not apply to low-income elderly Georgians or the disabled.
The federal program covers Americans with household incomes up to 138% of the poverty level, which is $30,000 a year for a family of four.
Recipients of Georgia Pathways coverage also must participate in at least 80 hours per month of “qualifying” activities, including work but also education, job training, or community service.
“This is not a work requirement,” said Caylee Noggle, commissioner of the state Department of Community Health (DCH), which oversees Georgia’s Medicaid program. “Work is one way to meet the requirement.”
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp first proposed a limited Medical expansion back in 2019, his first year in office. The administration of then-President Donald Trump approved Georgia Pathways in 2020 as a waiver from the requirement that states fully expand Medicaid coverage only to have the Biden administration reject the plan in 2021.
Georgia took the decision to federal court last year and won the right to move forward with the waiver.
The state estimates about 345,000 Georgians will potentially be eligible to enroll in Georgia Pathways, including about 200,000 current Medicaid recipients.
As the program ramps up, it will serve an estimated 100,000 during the first year. The DCH has budgeted $117 million in state dollars to cover the program initially, along with $227 million in federal matching funds.
Critics of Georgia Pathways say even if the program ultimately reaches that peak enrollment, it won’t cover all Georgians who are uninsured.
“Any program that doesn’t cover all 400,000 to 450,000 [uninsured] Georgians falls short of what Georgia needs,” said Laura Colbert, executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future.
Supporters of full Medicaid expansion say Georgia would gain access to a much larger federal match than Georgia Pathways – with the feds providing 90 cents of every dollar spent on expansion through the ACA compared to 66 cents on the dollar Georgia’s Medicaid program currently gets.
In fact, full Medicaid expansion comes at no cost to states for the first two years, thanks in part to a one-time bonus of up to $1.2 billion the American Rescue Plan offers states that choose to expand coverage through the ACA. Congress passed the legislation in 2021 as a pandemic relief measure.
“It’s past time for us to bring home those federal funds,” said Leah Chan, senior health policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an Atlanta-based nonprofit.
But Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for Kemp, said Georgia Pathways offers a “sustainable solution” to Medicaid coverage that the ACA can’t guarantee would continue indefinitely.
“When you rely on the federal government, you don’t know who’s going to be in office,” Douglas said.
Chan said North Carolina resolved those concerns when it adopted full Medicaid expansion by including a provision in the legislation stating the Tar Heel State would pull out of the federal program if the federal match is significantly reduced.
Advocates for full Medicaid expansion say it also would provide an economic boost to Georgia, creating thousands of jobs and stabilizing rural hospitals.
“Our rural hospitals are in trouble,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, an Atlanta oncologist and internist. “We’re losing their services and the employment and income they bring.”
Georgia Pathways’ supporters counter that many of the Georgians who would sign up for Medicaid under a full expansion already have health insurance coverage through their employers.
“The added cost of covering those already-covered Georgians pushes the price tag of Medicaid expansion far higher than proponents usually allow,” Kyle Wingfield, president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a think tank that advocates free-market approaches to public policy, wrote in a column last winter.
Opponents of the new program also raise the issue of timing. The federal government stopped doing the usual eligibility screening of Medicaid enrollees during the pandemic but resumed that “redetermination” process in April.
“It’s a very turbulent time for tens of thousands of Georgians,” said Joe Binns, Georgia state director of Protect Our Care, a nonprofit health-care advocacy group. “This is a terrible time to be conducting an experiment on the health-care system in Georgia.”
Noggle turned that argument on its head.
“This is a perfect time for this,” she said. “This is more coverage. This is another option.”
Noggle said Georgia Pathways will begin with a “soft launch” this weekend. The DCH expects to have application forms on the agency’s website by Sunday morning, she said. A mobile application will be launched later in July.
