ATLANTA – First-time unemployment claims increased in Georgia last week as the state Department of Labor began working to implement the new economic stimulus package Congress passed this week.
Initial unemployment claims totaled 26,673 last week, up 2,971 from the work before, the labor department reported Thursday.
Meanwhile, Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler warned that fully implementing the provisions of the new bill will be slow going, and that’s if President Donald Trump even signs it into law. Trump is threatening to veto it because it includes $600 weekly stimulus checks for Americans rather than the $2,000 checks he supports.
“Some of the provisions included in the bill should be able to be implemented fairly quickly,” Butler said Thursday. “However, most of the new additions in the bill are going to take a substantial amount of time due to their very complicated nature.
“These new enhancements could take months of system development to implement along with the other changes that we will have to program.”
If the president does not sign the bill, all federal unemployment insurance programs created last March as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act will end on New Year’s Eve. The last week payable ends on Dec. 26 for individual-filed claims and on Dec. 30 for employer-filed claims.
If Trump does sign the legislation, federal guidelines must be established by the U.S. Department of Labor before states can determine the timeline for delivering the benefits to Georgians. The guidelines are not expected before the first of the year.
Even before the uncertainty over the new stimulus bill, unemployed Georgians have been complaining over delays in processing claims under the current system, with the labor department overwhelmed with an unprecedented number of claims sparked by the pandemic’s impact on the economy.
“We’re seeing incredible delays with making determinations on claims,” Lisa Krisher, director of advocacy for Georgia Legal Services, said this week during a hearing held by the state House Democratic Caucus’ Subcommittee on COVID-19. “You can’t get anyone on the phone at the labor department to explain what’s going on.”
Krisher said the online appointment scheduling system the labor department set up during the fall has helped some, but claimants still are having a hard time getting answers when their claims are delayed or denied.
Since the pandemic exploded in Georgia last March, the labor agency has paid out more than $16.6 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits to nearly 4.2 million Georgians, more than the last nine years combined.
During the week ending Dec. 18, the job sector accounting for the most initial unemployment claims in Georgia was accommodation and food services with 6,941 claims. The administrative and support services sector was next with 2,880 claims, followed closely by manufacturing with 2,481.
More than 161,000 jobs are listed online at EmployGeorgia.com for Georgians to access. The labor department offers online resources for finding a job, building a resume, and assisting with other reemployment needs.
ATLANTA – The Small Business Development Center at the University of Georgia will offer free online seminars next week to update business owners on the $900 billion coronavirus relief package Congress passed this week.
The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act includes $284 billion for a new round of small business loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Within that appropriation is $15 billion targeted specifically for live performance venues, independent movie theaters and other cultural institutions that have experienced revenue declines of at least 25%.
The package also includes $20 billion in grants through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, which provides targeted aid of up to $10,000 per applicant based on the number of employees. The first COVID-19 relief legislation Congress passed last March also contained $20 billion, but those funds ran out in less than four months.
The one-hour seminars will take place Dec. 29 at 10 a.m. and Dec. 30 at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Also available on demand will be a session that was pre-recorded on Wednesday and reflects the most up-to-date information available at the time of the recording.
Registration information can be found on the Small Business Development Center’s website at www.georgiasbdc.org.
One important caveat is that President Donald Trump has yet to sign the legislation. He has threatened to veto the bill because it doesn’t provide enough direct relief to Americans.
The legislation offers $600 stimulus checks to most Americans, while Trump is calling for $2,000.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoff races are grabbing a huge amount of attention, both inside the Peach State and around the nation.
But a third runoff also will be contested on Jan. 5 to decide a seat on the state’s utility regulating Public Service Commission (PSC).
Incumbent Republican Lauren “Bubba” McDonald captured 49.7% of the vote in the November general election, barely falling short of the 50%-plus-one margin he would have needed to avoid a runoff.
Now, McDonald must go another round with Democratic challenger Daniel Blackman, who won nearly 47% of the vote in November.
McDonald, who served 20 years in the Georgia House of Representatives before joining the PSC in 1998, is taking a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to his reelection bid.
“We continue to have the most reliable energy sources of any state in the nation,” he said.
That dependability is what keeps companies knocking at Georgia’s door, McDonald said, pointing to Georgia’s ranking by Site Selection magazine as the No.-1 state in which to do business eight years running.
“If a business comes to Georgia, foreign or domestic, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘What are my energy sources?’ and ‘What’s the reliability of it?’ ” he said.
But Blackman said that strong business climate hasn’t spread throughout Georgia. He said he’s running for the PSC to help people in the less prosperous parts of the state through lower utility bills and expanded broadband connectivity.
“We like to say Georgia is the No.-1 state in which to do business,” Blackman said. “But a lot of counties outside metro Atlanta haven’t had a chance to recover because they were already struggling.”
McDonald has gained a reputation on the PSC as a champion of solar energy. He led a move in 2013 requiring Georgia Power to add 525 megawatts of solar power during the next 20 years, more than tripling the amount the company had voluntarily pledged to add through its Advanced Solar Initiative.
“They had no solar in their mix,” McDonald said. “Now, we’re sixth in the nation in solar deployment with no upward pressure on rates and no state subsidies.”
But Blackman said Georgia’s progress on solar isn’t coming quickly enough. The share of the state’s energy generating portfolio derived from renewable sources remains in the single digits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That’s “crumbs off the table,” Blackman said, and is a result of “overinvestment in the fossil fuel industry and underinvestment in the renewable energy space.”
Blackman has made the issue of electric service disconnections a cornerstone of his campaign. The PSC suspended service disconnections last March, citing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on customers’ pocketbooks, but voted in July to let Georgia Power resume the disconnections.
Since then, about 107,000 households have had their power shut off, while an additional 381,279 have received disconnection notices on their bills, according to numbers compiled by Georgia Power.
Blackman said the PSC ended the moratorium on disconnections too soon.
“I felt the long-term impact [of the pandemic] would be much longer than six to eight months,” he said.
But McDonald said Georgia Power and other utilities offer payment assistant programs to help customers having trouble paying their bills.
“There is no free electricity,” he said. “Somebody’s going to be paying for it.”
Along with the development of solar energy, McDonald cites the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion project as an example of “clean, reliable and affordable” power he is helping to bring online.
He concedes the project has proven “costly to get off the ground,” with a series of cost overruns and scheduling delays that have nearly doubled the budget from the $14 billion estimate when the PSC approved the work in 2009.
But McDonald said the first new nuclear capacity in the U.S. in 37 years will more than pay for itself in the long run.
Blackman said the commission should have imposed a cap on the Vogtle expansion’s costs to protect Georgia Power customers footing the bill on a project he said eventually could run up to $35 billion over budget.
“We should have stopped charging ratepayers a long time ago,” he said. “The shareholders don’t have any skin in the game.”
Expanding broadband connectivity into unserved portions of rural Georgia is another of Blackman’s campaign priorities.
He criticized the PSC’s recent vote encouraging electric membership cooperatives (EMCs) to run broadband to their customers because commissioners rejected a proposal to let the PSC change the rates EMCs charge telecom providers for utility pole attachments after two years if they prove a disincentive to expanding broadband.
“We need to be able to have checks and balances in place,” Blackman said. “I’d like to see the PSC much more aggressive in pushing the EMCs.”
McDonald dismissed assertions from telecom providers that they might take their investments to other states with more favorable pole attachment rates. He said Georgia is too good an investment for them to pass up.
“Georgia’s got too much going on for them not to come,” he said.
Blackman also criticized the commission’s decision to let Georgia Power recover from ratepayers $525 million in coal ash cleanup costs.
The utility is working on a multi-year plan to close all 29 of its coal ash ponds at 11 power plants to meet federal regulations for handling coal ash, which contains toxic chemicals that can pollute drinking water supplies.\
“Georgia Power has done a great job employing people and keeping the lights on,” Blackman said. “But when it comes to the coal ash problem, we’ve got to take a more serious approach to protect the health and safety of all Georgians.”
The Sierra Club recently took Georgia Power to court in a thus-far unsuccessful effort to force the utility to pay for the cleanup rather than pass on the costs to customers.
But McDonald said it’s those customers who have reaped the benefit of inexpensive power generated by coal-fired plants.
“Coal ash was the residue of generating energy over many years,” he said. “The ratepayers are the people who enjoy the energy that comes from the coal.”
McDonald won his current term on the PSC by defeating Blackman in 2014 by almost a dozen points, 53.4% to 41.8%.
But the race figures to be closer this time. Democrats have gained strength in Georgia during the last six years, as shown by Stacey Abrams’ narrow loss to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018 and President-elect Joe Biden’s razor-thin win over President Donald Trump last month.
With the two Senate runoff races polling essentially even, Blackman also stands to benefit from being on the same ballot as Democratic Senate challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock
On the other hand, wins for incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler likely would translate into another six-year term for McDonald.
ATLANTA – Two Georgia men have pleaded guilty for taking part in a wide-ranging tax scheme involving the sale of fraudulent syndicated conservation easement (SCE) tax shelters.
According to federal court documents, Stein Agee of Canton and Corey Agee of Atlanta, partners at a Sandy Springs accounting firm, promoted fraudulent tax shelters between at least 2013 and the end of last year designed to generate deductions for high-income taxpayers through partnerships purported to be making real estate investments.
In reality, the partnerships were a sham, lacking economic substance and serving no legitimate business purpose.
The placement of conservation easements over the real estate was a foregone conclusion, which enabled the investors to fraudulently shelter their income from the IRS with no economic risk and to claim substantial tax deductions to which they were not entitled.
The Agees and their co-conspirators promised investors that for every $1 invested in the partnership, the investor would receive more than $4 in charitable tax deductions.
“The defendants’ and their co-conspirators’ criminal conduct enabled their clients to claim more than $1.2 billion in fraudulent tax deductions and generated hundreds of millions of dollars of tax loss to the United States,” said Richard E. Zuckerman, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Tax Division.
“Taxpayers engaging in such schemes, and the lawyers, accountants, appraisers and other professionals that enable them, should understand that they will be held fully to account for their fraudulent conduct.”
“Each year, millions of law-abiding Americans painstakingly file accurate tax returns and pay timely their tax obligations,” added U.S. Attorney R. Andrew Murray for the Western District of North Carolina. “As the defendants admitted in court … their tax shelter scheme helped wealthy clients skirt their tax responsibilities and avoid paying their fair share.”
When legitimately created and used in compliance with the Internal Revenue Code, conservation easements can both protect the environment and provide tax incentives. Abusive SCEs are designed to game the system and generate inflated and unwarranted tax deductions.
The Agees both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the IRS, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. They also face a period of supervised release, restitution, and monetary penalties.
ATLANTA – The evidence police typically obtain through no-knock search warrants aren’t worth the inherent risks of knocking unannounced on a citizen’s door in the middle of the night, a criminal defense lawyer said Tuesday.
“No-knock warrants are almost exclusively used for drug cases. They’re never used for kidnapping, burglary, murder or theft,” Catherine Bernard, a partner with Atlanta’s Bernard & Johnson LLC, told members of a state Senate study committee. “[But] no-knock warrants are incredibly dangerous for everyone involved on both sides of the transaction.”
The Senate Study Committee on Law Enforcement Reform was formed this year as a follow-up to a hate crimes bill the General Assembly passed at the end of this year’s legislative session in June. Both the Senate panel and the House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee held hearings during the summer and fall to consider potential reforms to policing and the state’s criminal justice system.
Besides no-knock warrants, the committees also have been taking testimony on Georgia’s citizens arrest law and the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” that protects police officers from civil suits under certain circumstances.
While Georgia law does not give police the authority to execute no-knock search warrants, judges can and do sign orders allowing them if law enforcement authorities can show knocking on a criminal suspect’s door might be dangerous or might inhibit an investigation by, for example, giving suspects time to flush drugs down a toilet.
Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said no-knock warrants are rare in Georgia.
“I’ve been a prosecutor for 32 years. I have not seen many of them,” he said.
Bernard said no-knock warrants are routine, but most don’t get attention because they don’t yield the tragic results that make them high-profile cases.
Exceptions in Georgia include the death of David Hooks, a 59-year-old grandfather in East Dublin shot in 2015 during a drug raid based on false information from an informer, and Kathryn Johnston, an elderly Atlanta woman shot to death in 2006 during a raid by undercover police officers at what turned out to be the wrong address.
“Innocent lives are destroyed by no-knock search warrants,” Bernard said.
Bernard said justifying no-knock warrants as necessary to keep suspects from getting rid of illegal drugs doesn’t hold up because anyone possessing a large quantity of drugs wouldn’t be able to dump them so quickly.
“If it’s something that can be flushed down the toilet, it’s not worth risking somebody’s life over,” she said.
While Bernard urged senators not to tamper with the current state law that prohibits no-knock warrants, others who testified called for the repeal of Georgia’s citizens arrest law, which has come under scrutiny because of the Ahmaud Arbery case.
Three white men were arrested last spring in the February shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed Black man from Brunswick who was jogging in the men’s neighborhood. At first, the local prosecutor declined to bring charges, citing the citizens arrest law.
“The racist history of our law is on display,” said Mazie Lynn Causey, general counsel for the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It allows private individuals to take on the role of enforcer, prosecutor and judge.”
Other witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing complained that allowing police officers who commit misconduct in carrying out their duties qualified immunity from civil suits makes the burden of proof to win such cases virtually impossible.
Chris Stewart, an Atlanta personal injury and civil rights attorney, said he’s working on legislative proposals to either eliminate or modify Georgia’s qualified immunity law.
But Skandalakis said qualified immunity serves a useful purpose in law enforcement in that it encourages police officers to do their jobs without being afraid of being sued.
“Qualified immunity is not absolute immunity,” he added. “A police officer who does not follow policies and procedures or does not act in a reasonable manner can lose qualified immunity.”
Both the House and Senate committees are expected to make recommendations for the full General Assembly to consider when lawmakers return next month for the 2021 session.
