by Ty Tagami | May 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The penalty for trafficking fentanyl just got more serious in Georgia after Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation that seeks to suppress illicit sales of the dangerous drug.
When used in a medical setting with proper dosing, the painkiller can help patients experiencing discomfort. But it is 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and it can be lethal on the street where it can be found laced with other drugs, such as Adderall, Oxycodone and Xanax.
Two milligrams can kill depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage, according to the DEA, which maintains a memorial exhibit for the drug, which has predominantly killed teenagers.
The Fentanyl Eradication and Removal Act imposes a range of mandatory minimum sentences on convicted traffickers in fentanyl. Four grams to 14 grams, the smallest amounts covered by the legislation – Senate Bill 79 — will result in at least five years behind bars.
Kemp signed the legislation Monday, along with 19 other bills.
Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, drove more than eight hours round trip to watch the ceremony. The South Georgia blueberry farmer said Tuesday that he introduced SB 79 because fentanyl is unlike any other drug experienced by older generations. If those older drugs are BB guns, then fentanyl is a nuclear bomb, he said, and teenagers are particularly at risk because they are unaware.
He has many anecdotes from his part of the state — about a medical administrator whose child died after consuming marijuana laced with fentanyl or three young men who took cocaine laced with fentanyl while harvesting crops late one night. Two of them died, Goodman said.
“It’s really gotten personal for me. I’ve met so many people who’ve lost their children.”
by Ty Tagami | May 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Schools across Georgia will have to figure out how to pry cellphones from students’ hands next year now that a new ban will be taking effect.
House Bill 340 prohibits personal communications devices in public school classrooms from kindergarten through eighth grade.
The ban goes into effect in the summer of 2026. Gov. Brian Kemp signed the legislation last week after it passed the Georgia General Assembly with broad bipartisan support earlier this year.
A handful of school systems have already implemented local bans, including Marietta City Schools.
Marietta Superintendent Grant Rivera was among the leading proponents for a statewide ban, telling lawmakers in March that he’d seen dramatic changes in middle school, where students were talking with each other rather than hunching over screens.
“It impacts academics, it impacts their well-being, it impacts their relationships,” Rivera said at a legislative hearing. He said disciplinary issues were down, as well.
School districts have until January to write policies and procedures for locking up students’ phones from the first bell in the morning to the last one in the afternoon.
They must implement those policies by July 1, 2026, with hundreds of thousands of students affected when school starts that fall.
School leaders welcome the legislation. John Zauner, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, called the ban a well-meaning attempt to remove a major distraction during the school day.
“Cellphones in the hands of youngsters are definitely a distraction,” he said.
Fulton County School System, one of the largest school districts in Georgia, is already preparing.
“These new restrictions were already planned for the upcoming school year, and the new law affirms the direction we were taking to reduce distractions and strengthen student learning,” a district spokesman said. School board members will vote on the new policy in June. It not only would ban use during the school day through eighth grade, but also would prohibit use in high schools during instructional time.
While the idea of a statewide ban is popular, some have expressed concern about being unable to reach their children during an emergency, such as a school shooting.
That’s why the bill’s chief co-sponsor, Rep. Scott Hilton, R-Peachtree Corners, didn’t push for a ban in high schools. But he and others expect the K-8 ban to spread to high schools in the future, after middle school students and their parents become accustomed to it.
Hilton said in an interview Monday that high school is more complicated, and it will take time to study implementation there and to develop a cellphone-free culture.
“I think this bill begins an important conversation that’s going to lead to a cellphone-free environment in grades 9 through 12,” he said.
That culture is deeply embedded. Hilton said that when Kemp signed HB 340 on Friday, lawmakers instinctively pulled out their smartphones to capture the moment. And Hilton said that when he was presenting his bill on the floor of the House of Representatives, his colleagues couldn’t resist the moment.
“My phone starts to light up,” he said. “People are calling, texting — and it’s my colleagues in the House having fun with me. It was distracting.”
by Ty Tagami | May 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – John King, Georgia’s insurance commissioner, has joined the Republican primary election in hopes of unseating Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff next year.
Gov. Brian Kemp’s announcement last week that he would not be running for the Senate opened the door to a host of potential candidates. Days later, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter of St. Simons Island became the first Republican to enter the race.
King, a major general in the U.S. Army National Guard and a former police chief, is the first official elected statewide to join the race. He won the election for insurance and safety fire commissioner in 2022 after Kemp appointed him to the position in 2019.
The native of Mexico is the first Hispanic to have won statewide office in Georgia.
King came to America at age 17 and enlisted in the National Guard, rising from private to major general when he retired in 2023. He was deployed to Afghanistan, Africa, Bosnia, and Iraq. Over four decades in law enforcement, he rose from beat cop in Atlanta to police chief in Doraville.
In his announcement Monday, King emphasized these roles, his statement saying he “was shot and stabbed in the line of duty.” King also underscored his ties to President Donald Trump, noting that he was deployed to the southern border during Trump’s first term and co-chaired Trump’s 2020 campaign in Georgia.
Despite his statewide election success, King could struggle with national name recognition, which plays a role in campaign fundraising. Ossoff has proven a prodigious fundraiser, bringing in more cash than any sitting U.S. senator.
Still, King drew a veteran GOP strategist to his campaign. Dan McLagan, who worked for Gary Black’s campaign in the U.S. Senate primary won by Herschel Walker, is handling communications for King.
by Ty Tagami | May 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Educators who want to open a charter school will have an expedited process under new rules adopted by the state school board Thursday.
The board overhauled its rule that controls the charter school petition process, shifting much of the authority from the Georgia Department of Education to the State Charter Schools Commission.
The commission was established more than a decade ago by a constitutional referendum promoted by lawmakers who were frustrated by local resistance to charter schools and the slow approval pace. It can approve charter schools that have been denied by local school districts, but some complain that local school boards drag out their own process, leading to delays in state approvals.
Lawmakers continue to pass legislation favorable to charter schools, including House Bill 318 last year, which mandated the new rule that was adopted Thursday by a unanimous vote of the Georgia Board of Education.
The rule requires local school boards to approve or deny local charter petitions in less than a year. School districts must publish their petition schedule by Sept. 1, with a petition deadline of Jan. 1 and a board vote by the following June 30.
And it replaces the education department’s authority over most of the process, handing it to the commission’s Office of Charter School Compliance.
That office’s senior director, Allen Mueller, summarized the effect at a state board committee meeting on Wednesday.
The changes amend procedures “so that when folks make local decisions, it creates a path for those petitioners to move to the commission, not have to wait another year or two years as had been happening,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | May 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Institutional investors who vacuumed up single family homes when prices cratered after the Great Recession are drawing more political heat as renters complain about the impact.
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia announced Wednesday that he is launching inquiries with several of the top companies in the sector, following a congressional hearing last year when tenants complained about roach infestations, water-damaged ceilings, and sewage leaking into showers.
The Democrat’s announcement came after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday that he will not seek to unseat Ossoff, triggering speculation about who the GOP primary candidates will be for next year’s election.
State Republican lawmakers have also targeted the housing industry, illustrating the political traction of the issue.
Last month, lawmakers sent Kemp bipartisan legislation that would require tenants of houses or duplexes to give code enforcement officers contact information for their property manager.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, the chief co-sponsor of House Bill 399, said it would require out-of-state investors, such as hedge funds, to have a local broker and a local property manager.
A more aggressive bill that sought to cap each big owner at 2,000 properties didn’t get far after constitutional concerns were raised by former state Attorney General Sam Olens, who testified for the industry.
Seven corporations own more than 51,000 single-family homes in the 21-county metro-Atlanta region, according to a blog by the Atlanta Regional Commission late last year.
Metro Atlanta was the top region nationally for this investment activity, with 25% of the single-family home rentals — 71,832 homes — consolidated in the hands of large investors in 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last year.
The 2008 recession forced many homeowners into foreclosure, flooding the market with cheap housing. Institutional investors, such as publicly traded real estate investment trusts, leveraged their access to capital to buy them at scale.
Algorithms allowed investors to identify desirable properties while online management portals allowed them to attract tenants and efficiently manage geographically dispersed portfolios, the GAO report said.
It noted a 2018 report by one organization that said the difficulty in scaling the acquisition and management of properties before the advent of this technology “was the primary reason large-scale investment in single-family housing did not develop sooner.”
