ATLANTA – Republicans have positioned themselves to keep control of the General Assembly and Georgia’s U.S. House delegation through the rest of this decade even though the state’s been increasingly friendly toward Democrats in recent years.
New legislative maps Georgia lawmakers adopted during this month’s special redistricting session are likely to let minority Democrats gain half a dozen seats in the GOP-controlled state House of Representatives and pick up at least one seat in the Georgia Senate.
By targeting the 6th Congressional District seat held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, final passage of the Republicans’ new congressional map expected Monday likely would build on the GOP’s current 8-6 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, yielding a 9-5 split.
In both the General Assembly and congressional delegation, Republicans could have done better, argues Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who has written extensively on redistricting.
However, GOP legislative leaders smartly opted instead for a conservative approach that still promises to produce comfortable majorities without jeopardizing their prospects later in the decade, he said.
“Democrats overreached 20 years ago.” Bullock said, referring to the last time Democrats controlled the legislature and, thus, were in charge of redistricting. “They ended up slicing up some of those districts so thin they couldn’t defend them.”
“The Republican Party learned from the mistakes of the Democratic Party,” state Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, added during one of the Senate redistricting committee’s map debates.
Bullock said a more aggressive strategy aimed at gaining Republican seats in the General Assembly and picking up more than a single seat in the congressional delegation could have backfired on the GOP.
He said spreading Republican voters too thin wouldn’t work in a state where Democrats prevailed in the last three high-profile election contests: President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia over Republican incumbent Donald Trump and the two runoff wins of Democratic U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
“The state’s changed a lot over the years,” Bullock said. “The seats [Republicans] could narrowly hold in 2022 or ’24 might not be winnable in subsequent elections. … They could see control slip away from them.”
Two of the six state House seats Democrats stand to gain are in otherwise solidly Republican North Georgia.
GOP mapmakers have drawn House District 4 in Whitfield County with a minority voting-age population (VAP) of nearly 50% thanks to a high concentration of Hispanic textile workers. Districts with minority VAPs above 40% are generally considered competitive for Democrats.
An even more pronounced minority VAP of more than 55% can be found in Gainesville’s District 29, home to a large community of Hispanics who work in the poultry processing industry.
Cobb County, which has experienced significant growth in its minority population in recent years, has another House seat that could flip to the Democrats. District 43 southeast of Marietta and north of Smyrna has a minority VAP of 45.8%.
The other three House districts now in Republican hands but likely to go Democratic were caught up in a battle within the GOP.
The new House map draws Republican Rep. Philip Singleton of Sharpsburg, who has been critical of House Speaker David Ralston, out of his district and extends three heavily Republican districts centered in Coweta and Fayette counties north into the Democratic stronghold of South Fulton County.
The white VAP in the three new districts ranges from 26% to 31%. Residents of the districts showed up to committee hearings en masse, making the move against Singleton the most controversial affecting the House map.
“The plan you have is going to be a loss of voice for so many people in Peachtree City,” Suzanne Brown of Peachtree City complained to the House redistricting committee.
The new state Senate map gives Democrats a shoe-in to gain at least one seat by moving the rural South Georgia district served by Sen. Tyler Harper, R-Ocilla, to a portion of Gwinnett County with a heavily minority population. Harper’s district became expendable for the Republicans when he decided to run for state agriculture commissioner.
However, that gain Democratic gain could be offset by the substantial redrawing of Senate District 48. Formerly centered in Gwinnett County, the new map extends the district north into Forsyth County, turning what had been a majority-minority district into one with a white VAP of more than 52%.
The move brought complaints that Republicans were targeting Sen. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, the first Asian woman ever elected to the Georgia Senate.
“It took our state 230 years to elect an Asian woman on the Senate side,” said state Rep. Bee Nguyen, D-Atlanta.
But the loudest objections that Republicans are going after incumbent Democrats was over the substantial redrawing of the 6th Congressional District.
By law, redistricting must leave all congressional districts virtually even in population, and the current 6th District is fewer than 700 voters above the ideal population of about 765,000. As a result, Democrats argued little change was necessary to comply with the law.
But the Republican map removes heavily Democratic portions of DeKalb County from the 6th and runs the district north through Republican-friendly Forsyth and Dawson counties as well as eastern Cherokee County. As a result, what was a competitive, racially balanced district now has a white VAP of 63.7%.
“The new 6th District doesn’t make sense,” Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, D-Stone Mountain, said Friday. “Sandy Springs and Dawson County share less in common than Sandy Springs with East Cobb and North DeKalb.”
The other flareup in the debate over the new congressional map was over controversial Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 14th District in predominantly white, mostly rural Northwest Georgia expanding south into mostly Black areas of Cobb County.
“This is not what the citizens of my district deserve,” state Rep. Erica Thomas, D-Austell, told members of the House redistricting committee Thursday. “They have been paired with a district that does not look like them or share values with them.”
If this month’s redistricting session has the expected impact on next year’s congressional and legislative elections, Republicans would emerge with majorities of 97 of the 180 seats in the Georgia House, 33 of the state Senate’s 56 seats, and nine of the 14 congressional seats.
But Bullock injected a note of caution. No matter how the districts are drawn, he said, Republicans and Democrats still must field strong candidates to win them.
“You can’t beat somebody with nobody,” he said.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – A 2020 Democratic candidate for a seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) is President Joe Biden’s choice to become Southeast regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Biden appointed Daniel Blackman Thursday to head an Atlanta-based EPA region covering six states. Blackman was recommended for the post by U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
“I am confident and expect that he will bring vision and focus to environmental protection in the Southeast region,” Ossoff said Thursday.
“As climate change presents a real and urgent threat to our country, Daniel has been a steadfast champion for environmental stewardship and creating opportunities for underserved communities across Georgia,” added Sen. Raphael Ossoff, D-Ga. “EPA’s Southeast region will benefit from his leadership.”
Blackman, who lives in Forsyth County, has spent more than a decade advising policymakers at the Georgia capitol and advocating on behalf of Georgia ratepayers and small businesses in energy-related matters before the PSC.
He ran for the commission last year, forcing Republican incumbent Lauren “Bubba” McDonald into a January runoff before losing by a narrow margin.
“I’ve spent my entire career working to protect the environment and our communities from the effects of climate change, especially those marginalized and left behind,” Blackman said.
“I look forward to hitting the ground running to support Administrator [Michael] Regan in advancing the Biden administration’s commitment to working with our state, local, and tribal partners to secure clean air, safe food, and clean drinking water throughout the region.”
Blackman is the son of immigrants from Barbados and is an alumnus of Clark Atlanta University.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s unemployment rate dipped to 3.1% last month, the lowest in the state’s history, the Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL) reported Thursday.
October joblessness in Georgia was well below the national unemployment rate of 4.6% and slightly below September’s 3.3%.
“We have seen continuous job growth this year as we have gained back 90% of the jobs lost during the pandemic,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said.
“The continual increase in employment opportunity, particularly in those areas hardest hit by the pandemic, reinforces the critical need for encouraging available Georgians back into the workforce.”
Jobs in Georgia have increased by 117,400 since last May, and October’s growth of 21,000 jobs marks only the fifth time since 1990 that over-the-month job growth for that month exceeded 20,000.
The administrative and support services, transportation and warehousing, and retail trade job sectors have all recovered the jobs lost during the pandemic and added to their respective totals.
However, sectors including accommodation and food services, local government, and religious, grants, civic, and professional services continue struggling to fill jobs.
Jobs in Georgia were up 21,000 last month and are up 4.5% over the year to more than 4.6 million.
But the labor force remains down 32,000 compared to March of last year, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck Georgia.
The sectors with the most over-the-month job gains in October were transportation and warehousing, which gained 3,600 jobs; retail trade, which gained 3,000 jobs; and the 2,500 jobs gained by the health care and social assistance sector.
First-time unemployment claims last month were down 1,525 from September to 27,310, a 5% decline. For the year, initial claims fell by 86%.
More than 208,000 job openings are posted online at Employ Georgia for Georgians to access. Market salaries range from $23,000 to $103,000 with a median salary of $42,000.
“The GDOL is working to ensure that every Georgian who wants a job can find a job,” Butler said. “Our Business Services Unit is helping the state’s employers find employees that meet their business needs, and we are scheduling in-person appointments across the state in our career centers to make sure jobseekers have the support they need to successfully find employment.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
As electric vehicles sales increase, gasoline tax revenue is expected to decline.
ATLANTA – With sales of electric vehicles on the rise, transportation agencies are going to have to find a way to raise tax revenue other than the gasoline tax, a transportation consultant told Georgia lawmakers this week.
Robert Poole, director of transportation policy for the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, urged members of the Georgia Freight & Logistics Commission to start thinking about replacing the gas tax by taxing motorists based on the number of miles they drive.
“Electric vehicle technology is coming much faster than most people realize,” Poole said. “Fuel tax revenues have begun what is going to be a long decline. We’re going to need to replace the fuel tax as a source of transportation funding.”
Poole and Benita Dodd, vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, teamed up on a recent report extolling the potential of the vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax.
“We support looking at this as an alternative to a declining fuel tax base,” Dodd said.
Poole said another reason to consider the VMT besides the flood of electric vehicles hitting the auto market is the tightening of mileage standards for new cars by the federal government.
While the Trump administration temporarily blunted the push for higher mileage requirements by rolling back the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, the Biden administration is working on restoring them, Poole said.
“You can expect even tougher miles-per-gallon standards,” he said.
Poole said Oregon and Utah have launched pilot projects experimenting with the VMT, and the new $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill President Joe Biden signed this week authorizes a federal VMT pilot.
But Poole conceded the concept of a VMT has run into both practical and psychological obstacles.
On the practical side is the bureaucratic complexity of collecting a tax based on miles driven, compared to the simplicity of collecting gas taxes at the pump.
“This looks like a lot of record-keeping,” said state Sen. Frank Ginn, R-Danielsville, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee and a member of the Freight & Logistics Commission.
Poole said the collection issue could be addressed by phasing in the VMT tax to apply only to interstate highways at first, which account for 28% of the road miles traveled in Georgia. Transponders installed along interstates could reduce the cost of collection to 5% of the revenue the tax brings in, he said.
But the idea of using transponders to track how far drivers are traveling has raised concerns among the public.
“One of the biggest worries is privacy, that you have Big Brother in your car tracking you,” Poole said.
“Everywhere you go, there’s a camera,” Ginn added. “I just don’t want to go that route.”
Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, suggested a way to sell the VMT politically would be to levy the tax only on electric vehicles and continue taxing motorists who use gasoline when they fill up.
He said the General Assembly passed legislation in 2015 levying an annual fee of $200 on non-commercial EVs in order to avoid the unpopular idea of tracking motorists.
The Reason Foundation report recommended that Georgia take part in a multi-state VMT pilot project, then look to phase in the tax by imposing it first on limited-access highways before moving to state and local roadways.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) is targeting distracted and impaired driving through a partnership with a nonprofit foundation.
The DOT is entering a two-year partnership with the Lutzie 43 Foundation, created after former Auburn football player Philip Lutzenkirchen died in 2014 as a passenger in an auto crash in LaGrange involving a driver who had been drinking.
The partnership, being launched ahead of the holiday travel season, will promote the foundation’s 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative together with the DOT’s Drive Alert Arrive Alive campaign in an effort to reduce the number of crashes and fatalities in Georgia caused by unsafe driving.
“We are looking forward to working with the Lutzie 43 Foundation to make the roadways in Georgia safer,” Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry said. “Together, these driver safety-focused initiatives can make an impact on driver behavior.”
The partnership will include a comprehensive communications plan, new Safe Driving Summit events and the distribution of the Lutzie 43 Foundation’s 43 Key Seconds keys through the DOT’s HERO and CHAMP programs.
The 43 Key Seconds key serves as a safe driving tool. By keeping the key on a keychain or somewhere visible in their car, drivers are prompted to take 43 seconds to ensure they have a clear head, clear hands, clear eyes and click their seatbelt before starting the car.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with GDOT to share our 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative and work together to make our roads safe,” said Mike Lutzenkirchen, Philip’s father and executive director of the Lutzie 43 Foundation.
“Through the Safe Driving Summits, paid marketing campaigns and distribution of the 43 Key Seconds keys … we believe that at the end of this partnership, we will have made a difference not only on the roads, but in the lives of drivers across the state.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol BeatNews Service, a project of the Georgia Press EducationalFoundation.
