by Ty Tagami | Aug 14, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Florida man will spend 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in connection with a Ponzi scheme that bilked more than 2,000 investors out of about $380 million.
U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson sentenced Todd Burkhalter, 55, to the maximum allowed in federal court in Atlanta Friday after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in January.
Two of his associates had already been sentenced in connection with the scam, which Marlo Graham, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Atlanta, described as likely the largest Ponzi scheme in Georgia history.
Burkhalter, who is from St. Petersburg, Fla., founded and led a Georgia-based financial advisory group called Drive Planning LLC.
He and his associates used the firm to defraud investors between September 2020 and June 2024, according to a federal charging document filed in January.
“Burkhalter operated a massive Ponzi scheme in which investor funds were being used to finance a luxury lifestyle, pay off other Drive Planning investors, and make commission payments to Drive Planning’s agents,” said the document, a criminal information filed on Jan. 21 that accused Burkhalter of one count of wire fraud.
Drive Planning offered two investment vehicles purportedly backed by wholly owned real estate. The firm claimed that the plans used investor money to make secured loans to developers, with promises of substantial returns.
The biggest such vehicle, the Real Estate Acceleration Loan, promised quarterly returns of 10%, according to the federal court filing.
The firm had loaned less than $2 million to one well-known developer and then leveraged that to tell investors it had an enduring relationship with the developer, the charging document says.
Upon discovering this, the developer, who is not identified, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drive Planning in June 2023 and then sued two months later.
Burkhalter and his firm failed to disclose this to investors. Instead, they used money from one investor to pay off the next, encouraging people to deplete their children’s college funds, take early retirement account distributions and borrow money at high interest rates to invest in Drive Planning, Theodore S. Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement Friday.
“Todd Burkhalter lured investors to send millions of dollars to Drive Planning for investments that he knew didn’t actually exist,” Hertzberg said.
The act that landed Burkhalter in prison was clicking send on an email on Nov. 28, 2022.
The wire fraud charge involved a message from Burkhalter to the owner of a Maryland-based financial services company in which Burkhalter mischaracterized his firm’s relationship with that developer, claiming that there existed “wholly owned real estate which serves as a collateral.”
Before he was caught, Burkhalter skimmed enough to finance a lavish lifestyle. According to the criminal charging document, he used at least $2 million of his investors’ funds to buy a yacht called Stillwater, which he renamed Live More.
He also used more than $2 million in investor money to buy a $4.2 million condominium in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He chartered private jets and luxury cars, bought a motorcoach for about $614,000, two Land Rovers for nearly a quarter million dollars, and at least $320,000 in clothing, jewelry and beauty treatments.
As part of his sentence, Burkhalter was ordered to repay his victims nearly $234 million.
The court appointed a receiver to try to recover funds and sell assets to repay victims, according to Hertzberg’s office.
Earlier this week, Judge Johnson sentenced two Drive Planning employees: David Bradford, 53, of Peachtree Corners; and Julie Edwards, 59, of Cumming.
Bradford, the chief operating officer, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and the judge sentenced him to four years and three months in prison. He was ordered to pay $4.3 million to victims.
Edwards, the chief administrative officer, pleaded guilty to laundering proceeds from the Ponzi scheme and will serve two years in prison. She was ordered to pay $630,000 to victims.
All three were also sentenced to three years of supervised release after completing their prison terms, which will be served without possibility of parole.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 13, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — With healthcare costs continuing to rise, the issue could prove to be a potent one in Georgia’s upcoming election for governor.
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms has made it a core part of her campaign, blaming Republicans for refusing to accept Medicaid expansion as a solution.
Rick Jackson, her Republican opponent, agrees that rising costs are a problem, but he argues that increased access to commercial insurance is the solution.
A new survey of about 1,000 likely voters by the University of Georgia complicates the narrative.
Conducted in June for the Georgia Health Initiative, the survey found that more than 90% of Democrats and Republicans who responded had health insurance coverage.
Yet concerns about rising costs crossed party lines, with 54% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans saying they were very or somewhat worried about being able to afford their monthly premiums over the next year.
“Republicans on average, compared to Democrats or independents, tended to be slightly less worried about various healthcare-related costs,” said M.V. Hood III, the political science professor in charge of the survey. But he said he found remarkable similarity regardless of party affiliation. GOP respondents “weren’t quite up at the same level as Democrats or independents, but you’re still talking about a very sizable number of people here.”
Nearly three-quarters of Democrats and more than two-thirds of independents said healthcare in Georgia was not very affordable or not affordable at all. Fewer Republicans, but still just shy of half, felt the same.
Nearly half of Democrats and a quarter of Republicans said they had skipped or delayed care in the past year due to the cost.
Democrats were more exposed to the cost of private insurance — either through an employer or a personal policy, with a fifth of them on Medicare versus nearly a third of Republicans.
A minimal number of respondents, 2.5% of Republicans and less than 8% of Democrats, said their primary coverage was through Medicaid, the federal and state program that gives many low-income Americans access to healthcare.
That may be why affordability outranked healthcare as a major issue, with inflation and the cost of living being the top concern for respondents from both parties, followed by the economy and jobs.
Healthcare ranked third for Democrats, with 13% saying it was the single most important issue facing Georgia today. It ranked eighth for Republicans, with only 3% considering the issue that significant.
In short, ensuring access to healthcare for all is a bigger issue for Democrats, who were twice as likely as Republicans, at 86% to 43%, to say they thought it was very important for Georgia’s next governor to focus on it.
That may be why Bottoms portrayed healthcare in Georgia as a crisis while speaking at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce event last week. Her solution is to expand access to Medicaid. The federal government would cover 90% of the cost, but the state would have to pay for the rest.
That would hit the state budget. But everyone, not just the poor, feels the consequences when hospitals close or when emergency rooms are overrun by people using them in lieu of a primary care physician they cannot afford without insurance, Bottoms told the businesspeople assembled at The Classic Center in Athens.
She blamed Georgia’s Republican-led refusal to expand Medicaid for the closures of nine rural hospitals. “It’s not a Republican, independent, Democratic issue,” she said. “This is an issue that’s impacting the strength of our state.”
Bottoms also told the crowd that she had heard from small business owners this year about the rising cost of premiums to provide health insurance to their employees after the Republican-controlled Congress let enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expire.
Talking to reporters later, she leveraged the issue to attack Jackson, who built his personal wealth through the healthcare staffing company he created.
“I’m not mad about him being a billionaire,” Bottoms said of Jackson. “God hasn’t seen fit to make me one yet. But what I am mad about is that he’s got a healthcare company and he doesn’t want to expand Medicaid.”
Jackson pushed back, telling reporters at that same event that he had the inside knowledge required to reduce healthcare costs.
“I will guarantee you that we will have the most cost-effective healthcare plan because I know how it works inside out,” Jackson said. “I know what people do to game the system.”
Rather than standard Medicaid expansion, he said he would pursue a federal grant to implement what he called “an intelligent Medicaid expansion.” He said he would establish training programs that would give Medicaid recipients the skills to land a job providing insurance.
“I’m not going to measure our state by how many people are on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m going to measure how many people are on commercial insurance. And the way to do that is reduce the cost of commercial insurance.”
That plan may face headwinds if these newly employable workers wind up at a small company.
Firms with 50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees may see a median 14% increase in premiums in 2027, according to an analysis released last week by KFF, which reviewed federal data about preliminary rate filings by insurers across the country.
The nonprofit also reported that the number of people enrolled in the fully-insured small-group market fell by 41% between 2013 and 2024, down to 10 million.
Democrats and Republicans aligned on one nagging issue in the UGA survey: the lack of transparency in healthcare pricing.
At least 80% of partisans from both sides of the aisle said it was very or somewhat important for the next governor to make information about the cost of healthcare services more available.
Cindy Zeldin, a vice president with the Georgia Health Initiative, said focus groups conducted alongside the UGA survey indicate that people want to know in advance how much they will be billed for a medical service.
“That can really heighten the stress when you don’t know what you’re going to be charged,” she said. “That seems to be a stressor for people across the board.”
Hood, of UGA, speculated that consensus on the issue stems from the lack of an explicit price tag for demanding price transparency, unlike the public funding required to increase access to healthcare coverage.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 11, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Rick Jackson, the Republican running to be Georgia’s next governor, raised more money in the past two months than his Democratic opponent, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, has collected since starting her campaign more than a year ago.
The latest reporting period ended July 31, with filings due by the end of last week.
Bottoms, who missed the deadline and filed over the weekend, a day late, raised $3.1 million from the beginning of May through July.
Jackson raised nearly twice as much — $6.1 million — over a shorter period. His latest report goes back to June 11, a few days before he won his primary runoff.
The wealthy healthcare entrepreneur spent more than $100 million of his own money to win the GOP nomination. He subsequently created what’s known under Georgia law as a “leadership committee,” a special entity that certain candidates can use to raise limitless amounts of money.
His campaign reported a contribution of $5 million from For All Georgians Inc., his new leadership committee.
Jackson gave his campaign no money in the latest reporting cycle, though he did provide tens of thousands of dollars from his own pocket in in-kind contributions, such as legal fees, rent and travel.
Altogether, Jackson has raised or given his campaign more than $118 million, spending nearly all of it. His campaign had $4.3 million left as of the end of July.
Bottoms has raised $5.7 million since May 6, 2025. She won her primary outright in May and did not have to spend on a runoff. She had just over $770,000 on hand at the end of July.
Their money came mostly from individuals, with corporations giving a little over $360,000 to Bottoms’ campaign since the start and over $240,000 to Jackson’s. Nearly $200,000 of his donations were from outside Georgia while $2.3 million of Bottoms’ collections came from out of state.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 10, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia tax revenue continued rising in July, bolstered by strong receipts from the sales and use tax, which sent more money to local governments.
Net tax collections were $2.57 billion, up $78.1 million from July 2025.
That 3.1% increase came despite a 2.1% year-over-year drop in collections from the individual income tax.
That $27.1 million decline from July of last year was counterbalanced by soaring receipts from the corporate income tax, which rose 34.3%, up $18.4 million.
The decline in individual income tax revenue continues a slide from June, when individual income tax collections fell 6.7%, or nearly $100 million, driven significantly by rising tax refunds.
The recent increase in corporate income tax revenue builds on a 7% year-over-year increase in June.
The July numbers, released by Gov. Brian Kemp’s office, indicated that shoppers were helping to prop up tax revenues.
Net proceeds from the sales and use tax rose 10% year over year, up $79.2 million, for a total of $875.3 million. Gross receipts totaled $1.78 billion, up $162.8 million from July of last year.
Adjusted sales tax distributions to local governments rose $85.9 million, totaling $894.5 million.
The overall increase occurred despite another decline in motor fuel tax collections. The $10.6 million year-over-year drop in July came despite the end in early June of a gas tax suspension that Kemp and lawmakers had approved to counter rising prices during the Iran conflict.
The motor fuel tax fell had fallen nearly $197 million in June compared to the prior year, nearly the same amount as in May when the suspension first went into effect.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 7, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Residents in and around Jackson County in northeast Georgia will have access to more than 1,400 new jobs if Siemens Corp. can follow through on a new manufacturing plant expected there.
State development officials announced the 550,000-square-foot manufacturing near Pendergrass Friday, with buildout expected to begin in November pending final approvals.
The plant, which would take three years to complete, would produce low-voltage electrical components.
Barry Powell, North America president of the Siemens Electrical Products business unit, explained the minimum $185 million investment decision in a statement, saying Georgia offers a highly skilled workforce and close proximity to the company’s Southeast supply chain network.
“Building this facility strengthens our ability to serve customers more efficiently while expanding advanced manufacturing capacity in a region that is already home to many of the technicians, suppliers, and industry expertise that support our business,” Powell said.
Siemens Corp. is a U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG, a tech and manufacturing company involved in everything from infrastructure and transportation to healthcare and industrial artificial intelligence.
For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, Siemens Group USA had more than $24.4 billion in revenue, with 25 manufacturing sites and more than 50,000 employees serving customers in every state and in Puerto Rico.
Gov. Brian Kemp visited the company’s headquarters in Munich last year during a trade trip to Germany and Poland.
“German companies excel in industries like life sciences and automotive manufacturing, and Georgia serves as a strategic gateway for them and other European businesses entering the U.S. market,” Pat Wilson, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, said at the time.
Siemens has had a presence in Georgia for 140 years and already employs more than 1,700 at two manufacturing plants and six offices in the state, Kemp said in a statement Friday. He welcomed the expansion as “another testament to the strong economic partnership between our state and Germany.”
