ATLANTA – Georgia Sen. Ben Watson doesn’t care whether the Peach State observes standard time all year or daylight saving time.
Watson, R-Savannah, a physician, just wants Georgians to pick one or the other because studies show switching back and forth every six months causes heart disease and sleeping disorders.
“I prefer either way,” he said. “Let’s quit changing it.”
Watson pre-filed two bills this month, one calling for a nonbinding advisory referendum asking Georgians whether they would rather the state observe standard time all year, daylight saving time all year, or whether they would rather continue switching between the two.
Under the other measure, Georgia would observe standard time all year, bypassing a referendum.
A third bill pre-filed this month by state Rep. Wes Cantrell, R-Woodstock, calls for observing daylight saving time all year.
The Senate passed legislation introduced by Watson last March calling for a nonbinding referendum on the issue. But the General Assembly shut down for three months shortly after that vote due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the measure died in the Georgia House of Representatives.
“It just got caught up in the pandemic, and I didn’t press it,” Watson said.
Only two states – Hawaii and Arizona – remain on standard time all year, as do the overseas U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Any state wishing to observe daylight time all year must seek congressional approval.
“My gut is most people would like to go to daylight time all the time,” Watson said. “It may be better to put it on the ballot and see if we can get some consensus.”
Supporters say sports betting could regenerate interest in pro sports at a time COVID-19 has emptied the stands.
ATLANTA – Advocates for bringing legalized gambling to Georgia will be back under the Gold Dome next month, pitching the financial benefits of casinos, horse racing and sports betting together and separately.
But a betting man might give legislation authorizing online sports betting in the Peach State the best odds to advance.
“It’s the easiest one to pass,” said Georgia Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, chairman of the House Economic Development & Tourism Committee. “It clearly does not require a constitutional amendment. … It’s just a matter of us giving the [Georgia] Lottery Commission direction and authority they already have.”
Efforts going back the better part of a decade to legalize casino gambling and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing in Georgia have been unable to muster the two-thirds majorities in the state House and Senate required to approve constitutional amendments and put them on the statewide ballot.
Supporters say sports betting, on the other hand, would only require simple majorities to get through the two legislative chambers because it could be accomplished simply by amending the law that created the Georgia Lottery during the 1990s.
Sports betting also enjoys the advantages of being a relative newcomer to the debate, having been taken up in the General Assembly for the first time during this year’s session. Lawmakers haven’t had time to grow tired of talking about it.
Sports betting has the backing of Atlanta’s four professional sports teams – the Braves, Falcons, Hawks and Atlanta United – which formed a coalition last winter to lobby on the legislation’s behalf.
The teams are counting on sports betting as a way to generate more fan interest, particularly at a time when they have had to shorten seasons and limit attendance because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Increasingly, the cellphone is the primary means of entertainment for younger fans,” said Billy Linville, spokesman for the Georgia Professional Sports Alliance. “[The teams] have to engage them or they’ll go elsewhere.”
Some new ammunition the sports alliance will bring to the 2021 debate is the revenue numbers sports betting is generating in the nearly two dozen states where it’s legal.
In Tennessee, online sports betting produced $131.4 million in wagering last month – an average of more than $4 million per day – after legislation legalizing sports betting took effect Nov. 1.
In 2019, the first full year of sports betting in New Jersey generated $4.55 billion in wagering, with more than $3.8 billion bet online.
Legislation backed by the sports alliance to be introduced into the General Assembly this winter will call for dedicating 20% of the proceeds from sports betting in Georgia to the HOPE Scholarships program.
The lottery-funded HOPE program covered the full tuition costs of eligible Georgia high-school students until 2011, when then-Gov. Nathan Deal pushed a cut in benefits through the General Assembly to keep the program solvent amid rising student enrollment and the increasing costs of tuition.
“We’ve got the COAM [Coin-Operated Amusement] Machines and the lottery drawings producing more than $4 billion [a year] in revenue, and it’s not able to completely fund the HOPE scholarship anymore,” said state Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, who has been the legislature’s leading champion of horse racing. “We’re going to have to find different revenue sources.”
Other lawmakers are advocating other uses for the state’s share of legalized gambling proceeds.
Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, chairman of the House Regulated Industries Committee said he’d like to put the revenue generated by casinos in Georgia toward “the No.-1 hole in the [state] budget: health care.”
House Democrats have expressed an interest in setting aside a portion of the state’s share of gambling proceeds for low-income families that can’t afford to cover the funding gap the 2011 cuts to the HOPE Scholarship opened up in the program, or for a new scholarship program to help young Georgians pay off their student loans.
Besides the financial argument, supporters of legalized gambling also argue that illegal gambling is generating billions of dollars in Georgia without the state seeing any benefit.
“All we’re going to do is capture the tax,” Stephens said.
“It’s time to bring it out of the darkness and into the light,” Linville added.
But Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, chairman of the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee, said competition for Georgians’ limited entertainment dollars from legalized sports betting, casinos or horse racing could hurt the lottery program’s revenues.
Lawmakers also should consider how casinos, racetracks and/or online sports betting available at the fingertips might affect problem gamblers and their families, he said.
“We need to make certain we educate the gamblers what the risks are … and do something to make sure they don’t hurt themselves,” Cowsert said.
The 2021 version of the legalized gambling debate should kick off early. Backers of all three options – sports betting, casinos and horse racing – say they plan to pre-file legislation during the first week of January. The 2021 session begins Jan. 11.
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.
