by Ty Tagami | Mar 26, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Republican measure to limit out-of-state support of Georgia political campaigns passed a state House committee and is nearing final passage in the final days of this year’s legislative session.
Senate Bill 423 would make it a felony punishable by up to a decade in prison for an intermediary to launder money from out-of-state donors and give it to a local campaign.
The campaigns would have to return whatever portion of non-Georgia donations exceed their total local dollars raised, or the state would take the money.
It would be the responsibility of candidate’s campaigns to source the dollars and ensure they came from people who — or companies that — pay taxes in Georgia.
“What we’re saying is you can run the ads. We just want to know who you are,” said Sen. Tim Bearden, R-Carrollton, the sponsor of the bill.
The measure passed the Senate with opposition from Democrats in early March.
Rep. Martin Momtahan, R-Dallas, member of the House committee that passed the bill out of the House committee on a party-line vote Thursday, said it was a necessary measure to protect Georgians from out-of-state interests that want access to the state’s natural resources, such as water.
Rep. Solomon Adesanya, D-Marietta, countered that wealthy candidates who can self-fund their campaigns could escape the limitations by simply giving enough of their own money to match whatever they collected from outside Georgia.
“So this is going to be unfair,” he said. “This is actually not going to be protecting Georgia. It’s going to give a certain candidate who can self-fund an … advantage.”
He didn’t name names, but two GOP candidates for Georgia governor — Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and businessman Rick Jackson — have reservoirs of personal money that they can tap for their campaigns.
When Rep. Rhonda Burnough, D-Riverdale, asked what would happen if her friends from other states wanted to give her money, Bearden responded that she’d have to raise more money locally to match the amount.
The committee made a small change that Bearden approved.
So if the House were to pass the measure, it would have to return to the Senate for agreement.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 26, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Legislation that raised alarms about public access to police videos passed through a House committee Thursday with amendments that eased access for members of two Georgia media associations.
Senate Bill 482 started out as a way to restrict the free flow of mugshots online, where unscrupulous operators are reportedly violating a state law that requires removal upon request, free of charge when the person depicted was not convicted.
Along the way, the bill morphed into a broader restriction on the release of police body-worn camera footage and other law enforcement videos.
Free speech advocates worried that videos showing police misconduct could be withheld from the public if the legislation were to become law.
On Thursday, the House committee charged with vetting the bill exempted certain media organizations from many of the bill’s provisions: “bona fide credentialed” members of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters and of the Georgia Press Association, which has 139 newspaper members and operates Capitol Beat.
Everyone else, except those depicted or their next of kin, would have to go in person with a notarized document to obtain a mugshot or video.
And no one except next of kin and association members would have access to state recordings depicting death.
No one would be exempt from a core requirement: that they be able to identify either a person depicted or, in the case of a video, alternative information about the time, location or officer who recorded it.
Police would be authorized to redact images in videos of people the requester cannot identify, except for law enforcement personnel.
Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, said he introduced the legislation because of the harmful invasion of privacy by a rogue mugshot industry.
He said the video component was hastily added in a Senate committee and, in retrospect, was not properly vetted. He said he opted to include videos because police should not be compelled to release them to be exploited “for some kind of sick entertainment.”
During a hearing earlier this week, one public commenter challenged the notion of a video industry profiting from grief. That prompted Rep. Terry Cummings, D-Mableton, to describe a video of a friend’s husband, decapitated in a motorcycle crash, circulating on YouTube. She said the person who posted it demanded money to take it down.
On Thursday, Sarah Hunt-Blackwell, with the ACLU of Georgia, said the new restrictions combined with a prohibition in another bill would “completely gut” public scrutiny of police activity through video.
The other bill she referenced, Senate Bill 268, would require the observing public to remain 25 feet away from police and other first responders doing their duty.
“We understand the sensitivities around exploiting people’s most vulnerable moments,” she said, “but placing an almost impenetrable shield around observance of law enforcement actions is not the solution.”
Lobbyists for the two media associations asked for the media exemption on access to videos depicting death.
Both Cummings and Rep. Bill Werkheiser, R-Glennville, asked why those associations were singled out to decide which media organizations get access, and Strickland said it was because they are known to the state and have a credentialing process.
Their members are known entities that would be subject to enforcement of Georgia law governing use of the material, he said, adding that nothing would prevent the General Assembly amending that provision later “if these two groups are being too exclusive.”
Another amendment expanded the definition of next of kin, giving courts more latitude to decide if a familial relationship exists.
The bill then passed the committee unanimously. Should the House approve it, the Senate would have to agree to the changes before it could become law.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 25, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Georgia Senate wants to nearly double the tax breaks that go to donors who give to a program that pays for private school scholarships.
The tax credit program for elementary, middle and high school scholarships has been capped at $120 million a year since 2023.
House Bill 328 would lift that to $225 million.
The Republican-led measure faced the same criticism from Democrats as had similar measures in the past: that the program diverts money from public schools, that it favors the wealthy and that there is minimal accountability.
The Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit was enacted in 2008 with a $50 million cap. It gives taxpayers all their money back, subject to certain maximums, when they donate to a student scholarship organization.
The organizations then hand out scholarships that cannot exceed the average spent on public school students statewide.
HB 328 would exempt students with certain learning disabilities from the scholarship maximum. It would also exempt them and students from military families from the requirement that they attend their local public school before entering the program.
The scholarships are only available to students zoned to attend a school performing in the bottom quartile on various state measures.
Democrats argued that the current average scholarship amount of $4,800 would cover only a half to a third of private school tuition. This effectively excludes students from lower-income households who cannot cover the difference while diverting money from their schools, said Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta.
“So, the question is, who does this work for? The answer,” he said, “is it works for families who can already afford to send their child to these schools.”
Republicans countered that many families needed the taxpayer help to give their children an opportunity they might not otherwise be able to afford.
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican, said he knew plenty of families who had used the program to send their children to private schools where they thrived.
Sen. Shawn Still, R-Suwanee, observed how much this debate resembled those in the past. “I think we all already know how we’re voting on this,” he said.
And he was right: the measure was approved 30-20 in a party-line vote, with Republicans on the winning side.
HB 328 must now return to the House, which can decide whether to accept or reject the changes.
When the House approved the measure, it increased the cap a lot less, to $140 million. Both chambers agreed that business donors should be able to count scholarship contributions against their state insurance premium tax liability, though each set different caps on that amount, as well.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 25, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia state employees would enjoy more consistent cost of living increases under the state Senate’s version of the budget for next year.
The Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved its amendments to the Fiscal Year 2027 budget that starts in July, adding $100 million to the state employee retirement system.
That was among the biggest changes from the state House’s version of the $38.5 billion budget.
“I believe this is one of the best line items that you see,” said Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Democrats agreed with that and other parts of the Senate budget, contributing their votes for unanimous passage of House Bill 974.
“I think it’s a breakthrough decision and one of the most important things in the budget,” Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, said of the pension funding.
Gov. Brian Kemp capped expenditures at $38.5 billion, so the Senate had to cut elsewhere to pay for the pension increase. Among their targets was online education at public colleges and universities, where they extracted $125 million from the higher education funding formula.
Online programs should cost less to operate, Tillery said, so the Senate budget funds them at a slightly lower ratio than in-person classes. Each 1.1 hour of online class time would earn the equivalent of an hour in person.
Another big change by the Senate also affects education.
The Senate overhauled the funding method for a signature initiative of both chambers this legislative session: teaching the state’s youngest students how to read.
The Senate agreed with the House’s plan to pay for about 1,300 literacy coaches in schools with kindergarten through third grade classrooms.
But the Senate opted to pay for the program with a grant of $70 million.
The House had wanted to pay for it by building it into the K-12 education funding formula that guides the recurring annual budgeting for schools. Tillery said the House budget had allocated less than half the necessary money because it assumed it would take more than a year to hire all the coaches.
The Senate also found $11 million by deleting the House plan to hire more staffers to confirm food stamp enrollees are eligible. Georgia has one of the highest “error” rates in the country. That can mean loss of federal funding, so lawmakers hope to get it down.
Tillery said the Senate would accept an offer from Equifax to do the work for free.
The budget must now get a vote on the Senate floor, before heading back to the House for consideration of the amendments.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 24, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A state-funded college scholarship based on financial need rather than academic merit took another step toward becoming a reality in Georgia on Tuesday when a Senate committee approved the bipartisan measure.
House Bill 1413 passed the Senate Higher Education Committee unanimously after three other bills were merged with it. The idea was to give them all a better chance of passage in the hectic, waning days of this year’s legislative session, with one vote on the Senate and House floors required rather than four.
The measure would place the Georgia Student Finance Authority in control of the fund, with $325 million in seed money already allocated in the amended budget for the current fiscal year.
“I want you to know how important the DREAM scholarship is for our state. And I want you to know how excited I am for the DREAM scholarship to be implementable,” committee chairman Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, said after the vote.
The measure advanced after many hearings this year and last year where experts testified about a relatively high dropout rate among students from low-income households. These students often must hold a job to get through college, which takes time away from their academic study. When their grade point average falls below the threshold for the merit-based HOPE scholarship, many quit school.
One major change was the deletion of medical school scholarships that were expected to cost $30,000 a year per student. Good idea, said Burns, but he said it was the wrong time to chisel it into law.
The new omnibus bill folds in three others.
House Bill 419 would allow opioid antagonists in certain college buildings and shield those who administer the life-saving drug from liability. House bill 1113 would clarify that part-time college students who are employees cannot participate in the state pension plan. And House Bill 962 would increase the individual cap on Georgia’s 529 college savings plan to $550,000, up from the current $235,000.
The measure can now go to the Senate floor for an up or down vote.
The House passed the measure 165-2 in early March. But due to the Senate changes, the bill would have to return there.
All this would have to happen before lawmakers gavel out for a final time this year on April 2 or in the wee hours after.
