ATLANTA — Students in Georgia schools and colleges who face certain types of discrimination could soon have a path for redress that need not involve the federal government.
Both the state House and Senate have passed a measure that would establish a Georgia-based process for investigating complaints of discrimination involving race, ethnicity, national origin or religion.
The version of Senate Bill 523 that passed the House unanimously Wednesday had been stripped of language that would have required public schools to treat harassment or discrimination motivated by antisemitism the same as religious discrimination.
Even so, Rep. Esther Panitch, D-Sandy Springs, praised the measure, citing instances of Jewish parents who felt powerless when their children were subjected to harassment.
“These families had no real recourse short of going to the media or filing a federal complaint,” said Panitch, the only Jewish member of the Georgia General Assembly.
In its current form, the measure would require that the Georgia Department of Education employ a statewide coordinator of Title VI, the part of the federal Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.
Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, said he was moved to introduce the bill because of a family trip to Israel. They happened to be there the day Hamas attacked in 2023.
“There are extremes on both ends of the political spectrum that in today’s climate condone antisemitism,” he said at a House committee hearing on his measure last week. “History has shown us what happens when we allow antisemitism to take root in our society.”
He referenced the slaughter of World War II unleashed by Nazi Germany and the Americans who died “before we got the genie back into the bottle.”
He left that hearing before Rep. Deborah Silcox, R-Sandy Springs, presented the measure, saying that the language targeting antisemitism had been deleted.
Several public commenters, include one representing a Muslim civil rights advocacy organization, then praised the deletion. They said the bill now treated all faiths equally.
SB 523 would require public schools and colleges to establish policies for handling discrimination complaints or risk the withholding of their state funds.
The measure returns to the Senate, which can choose to accept or reject the House changes.
Georgia lawmakers have nearly passed legislation that could lead to hefty fines against businesses, colleges and nonprofits when they accept contributions or donations funneled from countries deemed to be foreign adversaries.
The debate fell along party lines before Senate Bill 177 passed the House 98-65 Monday with only two Democrats in favor.
It returns to the Senate for agreement on a few changes.
“All this does is require transparency,” said Joseph Gullett, R-Dallas, who presented the bill on the House floor.
The measure requires recipients of support by agents from hostile nations to register with the state ethics commission.
Among the House amendments was language identifying those hostile nations. The Senate version targeted North Korea, Iran, China and Russia.
The House changed that to whichever countries were designated by the U.S. commerce secretary.
Rep. James Burchett, R-Waycross, the majority whip, said the current countries on that list are those four, plus Cuba and “and the Venezuelan politician Nicolas Maduro.”
Violations could lead to a $10,000 fine, or as much as $200,000 for “willful” or repeat violations.
The only Republican to raise concerns was Rep. Mike Cameron, R-Rossville, who went on to vote for the bill.
He said a company in his district asked questions because it is owned by a former subsidiary of General Electric that was sold to a Chinese conglomerate. He said another major company asked about constitutional issues.
Democrats said they agreed that the countries on Burchett’s list were a risk. But they also offered critiques that have become common with similar legislation in other states.
They said SB 177 could violate constitutional protections for speech, it could conflict with federal law containing similar requirements, and it would add bureaucracy, perhaps discouraging companies from locating in Georgia.
“It creates heavy compliance costs,” said Rep. Long Tran, D-Dunwoody.
Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn, noted that House members were issued laptops by the Chinese company Lenovo, and she wondered if Amazon shoppers could be implicated.
Others said exemptions in the registration requirement seemed political.
SB 177 exempts TikTok per a September executive order by President Donald Trump. It also exempts trade associations and advocacy organizations founded before Jan. 2, 1950, leading one Democrat to note that the National Rifle Association, founded in the 19th century, would not have to comply.
Rep. Gabriel Sanchez, D-Smyrna, said the legislation was a distraction.
“If you want to talk about foreign influence, how about the fact that Israel, along with the military industrial complex, just dragged us into an unnecessary war that no one wants and no one voted for,” he said.
Several states have adopted legislation like SB 177 and at least a half dozen more are considering it this year, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit-Law headquartered in Washington, D.C.
The group noted that such legislation had been rejected or allowed to die in more than a dozen states.
Some of the concerns raised in the past include lack of foreign policy expertise at the state level, and a patchwork of schemes among the states that could undermine U.S. foreign policy and complicate compliance for organizations.
“It is still unclear how states will enforce these types of laws,” the organization said in an analysis last summer, “but for now they create a regulatory minefield for nonprofits and others.”
SB 177 now returns to the Senate for agreement to the House changes. Should the Senate agree, the bill would head to the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature. He vetoed a similar Senate bill in 2024 involving foreign adversary political contributions, noting they were already prohibited under federal law.
ATLANTA — Four words added to legislation that targets mugshot mills have free speech advocates worried the public could lose access to videos that hold police accountable for their conduct.
Legislation that started in Georgia’s Senate as a solution to the reputational harm caused when booking photographs circulate online after charges are dismissed has evolved into a much broader measure.
Senate Bill 482, supported by sheriffs across Georgia, pits personal privacy of the accused against the public’s right to examine government use of force.
Blake Feldman, senior policy counsel with the Southern Center for Human Rights, said it raises a red flag when “a law enforcement agency that wields incredible authority to stop and detain people and discharge firearms at people” seeks to withhold footage from body-worn cameras.
He and advocates for free speech and for newsgathering operations, including broadcasters and the newspaper industry, argued that the requirements would pose a barrier to such access.
The legislation started as a requirement for anyone who wants a mugshot to obtain it in person, with a notarized statement that they would comply with existing law intended to protect people in those images.
In 2013, Georgia made it illegal for websites that publish mugshots to make subjects who were not convicted pay to take their picture down.
But that law did not solve the problem, so the next year Rep. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, pushed through a law requiring operators to promise in writing that they would abide by the takedown requirements.
That still didn’t fix the problem.
So, this year Strickland, now a state senator, introduced SB 482, intending to make it harder to get mugshots in the first place.
Along the way, he added the four words to his bill that have the free speech advocates concerned: “or law enforcement video.”
Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, on the Senate floor in the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Friday, March 6, 2026, the day his legislation to restrict access to mugshots and law enforcement videos passed to the state House. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
Not only would news organizations have to drive across the state to get an official copy of a police video from a far-flung community, but they arguably could be forced to identify everyone in the video they are seeking, said Sarah Brewerton-Palmer, a lawyer with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
“In order to get this footage, you have to name everybody who’s in it,” she said. But there could be bystanders in a video of an altercation between police and a suspect, she said, “and before you see it, you don’t know who those people are.”
Brewerton-Palmer said bodycam videos of a shooting by police during a protest would effectively become exempt from the state open records act.
She and others are less concerned about the proposed restrictions on releasing mugshots because of the way their enduring presence online has upended the lives of innocent people.
At a Feb. 18 Senate committee hearing on Strickland’s bill, a representative from the Georgia Justice Project, which helps people reintegrate into their communities after tangling with the criminal justice system, said it remains a common issue among their clients.
It was at that hearing where videos entered the conversation.
(The Georgia Press Association was among the news organizations that raised concerns. Capitol Beat is a project of the association.)
Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman, president of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, told senators on the committee that his colleagues across the state complain about bulk requests for mugshots and videos that are then exploited for profit.
Ashley Henson, the sheriff in Paulding County, said the accused who have their cases dismissed go on to get “destroyed” on social media. He said that when he tried to intervene to ask for removal of material, the publishing organization did not respond.
“Monetization of someone else’s misery is not right,” Henson said. “We are not here to give these YouTubers content.”
Strickland said in an interview that he was moved to action against mugshot mills by a teacher who noticed her students passing around her booking picture of her. The charges against her had been dropped, so she had contacted the publisher and paid to take it down, he said. But then the photo popped up on another site.
Strickland described it as a “whack-a-mole” problem.
Publishers were not honoring the takedown requests they had submitted in writing per the 2014 law. And even when they did, out-of-state or even international actors beyond the reach of Georgia law enforcement were republishing them.
“Once the image is there, it’s there forever,” he said.
So, now he is proposing to restrict supply by forcing those who want mugshots — and police videos — to request them in person. Requiring requesters to identify the subjects in those images would cut down on the number of bulk requests, which tend to be by profiteers, he said.
At that February committee hearing, he agreed with another senator who said the public could still obtain pictures and videos, they just had to “go through the legwork” to get them.
The committee passed SB 482 unanimously, sending it to the Senate floor, where it also passed unanimously on March 6, and now awaits hearings in the House.
The Senate floor vote occurred on “crossover” day, the deadline to move bills from the Senate to the House and vice versa. It is an exceptionally rushed time during any legislative session, when mountains of legislation are getting votes, giving lawmakers little time to read the language.
Democrats backed the measure without question, except for one raised about an unrelated part of the bill. That might have been due to the backing by Democrats. They had voted it out of committee, and two had co-signed it back when Strickland had introduced it — before he added those four words about videos.
Reached by phone, one of those two co-sponsors, Sen. Kenya Wicks, D-Fayette, said she was unaware of the new language.
“I don’t think I can comment because there are a lot of amendments to this bill,” said Wicks, who voted for SB 482 with the other Democrats when it reached the full Senate.
Strickland said he is willing to work with advocates to address their concerns, perhaps by changing his bill to require that those seeking a video must identify only the officer who took it or the time and location where it was shot.
But it is unclear whether a compromise can be reached, at least on the video language.
Brewerton-Palmer said she sympathized with Strickland’s concerns. The internet and, now artificial intelligence, have stripped away privacy, she said.
But the public’s right to know outweighs that harm, she said. “There needs to be a thumb on the scales in favor of access.”
Feldman said his organization supports the new restrictions that Strickland wants to impose for access to mugshots, but he said applying those same obstacles to the release of law enforcement videos would be an indirect way to erode the state open records law, something his organization opposes because of the erosion of transparency around police encounters with the public.
ATLANTA — The Georgia House completed its work on the budget that will control state spending for the fiscal year starting in July, sending a $38.5 billion spending plan to the Senate Tuesday.
House Bill 974 proposes a 2% increase over the current budget approved this time last year, although lawmakers increased the remaining portion of this year’s spending significantly — to $43.7 billion — in the amended current-year budget that Gov. Brian Kemp signed in early March.
Similar changes are probably in store for the new proposal this time next year. Until then, priorities include funding for education, health care, prisons and poverty, with a nod to problems caused by feral hogs.
Public schools are again consuming more than a third of the budget. The $14.9 billion allocated to elementary, middle and high schools was driven up $14.5 million by the state education funding formula, which considers enrollment and teacher pay grades based on qualifications and experience.
Add in billions for colleges, universities and technical schools, and education takes close to half the state budget. The University System of Georgia, for instance, got a $218 million increase in formula-driven state funding due to nearly 5% enrollment growth.
One of the House’s biggest priorities this year is literacy in the early grades, with $60 million added to the budget for reading interventions through third grade.
There is money for teacher training and for eye and hearing exams on school campuses. There is money for curricula and testing.
The biggest cost is for more than 1,300 classroom literacy coaches.
The House budgeted $31.2 million, which works out to about $24,000 per coach. The experienced educators required for the role earn at least two to three times that amount, and lawmakers know it. But it is difficult to estimate in advance how many will get hired over the next year, and at what pay grade. So House leaders said they expect to add money in the next amended budget a year from now.
“This is a massive downpayment on a historic investment,” said Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The on ramp to literacy begins before kindergarten, so the House added $10 million for after school care for pre-kindergarten students, and $700,000 for another 25 pre-kindergarten classrooms. The House also moved money around in a way that “frees up” another $10 million in federal funds to add 1,288 students to the pre-k financial assistance program.
The budget “represents the House’s dedication to championing Georgia’s students, children, families and communities in every corner of our great state,” Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said in a statement after the House sent the budget to the Senate by a 159-4 vote.
Among the items he highlighted, besides literacy and pre-k, was $5 million to expand student mental health services and $10 million more toward rural airport aid.
Hatchett said one of his favorite line items was an additional $11.8 million for the Medicaid dental program to raise reimbursement rates and encourage more dentists to serve recipients.
Providing medical care is a challenge, particularly in rural areas. So expanding service has been a priority for lawmakers. To that end, the budget adds $18.2 million for graduate medical education, with $4.7 million toward 147 new primary care slots.
It also puts another $101 million toward prisons, a third of it to hire more correctional officers to reduce the ratio with inmates down from the current 1-12.
And it adds $11 million for 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.
There is also another $2 million to draw federal matching funds for a new summer food program for kids in poverty called SUN Bucks.
Feral hogs will not like this budget.
It contains $500,000 for a Department of Natural Resources hog management pilot program and another $400,000 for a hog eradication incentive program.
Hatchett explained that line item on the House floor Tuesday.
“Feral hogs are wreaking havoc statewide,” he said, “causing millions of dollars of damage to crops and farms each year.”
ATLANTA — One thing that Georgia’s House and Senate can agree on after finishing the first round of this year’s legislative session is that the state income tax rate should continue falling.
Friday was the deadline for lawmakers to vote out the bills they were most serious about, moving them from the House to the Senate and vice versa.
The Senate had already sent legislation to the House last month that would cut the income tax rate to 3.99%.
On Friday, the House kicked a bill to the Senate with the same tax rate reduction and with an increase to the standard deduction that was similar to what was in the Senate bill.
Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire, the architect of the House measure, said it would cost the state $600 million in the first full year of implementation.
Democrats ridiculed the Republican plan, asserting that two-thirds of the tax cut would go to the wealthiest fifth of the population while leaving less money for services, such as education. Most Georgians might see a few hundred dollars while the rich would get thousands, said Rep. Sam Park, D-Lawrenceville, the House minority whip.
“We must stop these tax cuts for the rich if we want to lift all Georgians up.”
Republicans flipped the logic.
Rep. Chuck Martin, R-Alpharetta, said that if the top 20% would get two-thirds of the benefit, then they are paying that same proportion of the income tax now.
“The math goes both ways,” he said.
House Bill 880 then passed 102-69.
It would reduce the income tax rate a tenth of a percentage point per year, conditioned upon continued growth in state revenue, until the rate reached 3.99%.
The current income tax rate is 5.19%. But, last month, state representatives passed passed House Bill 1001, which would drop it to 4.99% retroactive to the start of this year. If the Senate embraces both, then it would take a decade to reach 3.99%.
HB 880 would simultaneously increase the standard deduction. It is $12,000 for a single filer now and would increase $600 a year until reaching $18,000 in a decade. These numbers would double for married couples filing jointly.
This approach differs only by degrees from Senate Bill 477 passed by senators early last month. Their approach would reduce the rate to 3.99% much sooner, by 2028. It would raise the standard deduction a little less, to $16,000 for individuals and $32,000 for married couples.
That 3.99% rate was the Senate’s second priority, the first being Senate Bill 476 to increase the standard deduction to $50,000 for individuals and $100,000 for couples.
To make both options palatable, the Senate handed the House what Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, the designer of the two Senate bills, described as an “olive branch.”
He scooped out the contents of two unrelated measures the House had sent the Senate last year and, like a baker filling a donut with custard, squeezed in the language from the two Senate bills. House Bill 463 mirrors SB 477, and House Bill 134 copies SB 476.
So, now the House has two bills that would reduce the income tax rate to 3.99% — one that just reached the Senate and another that just got lobbed back from there.
Either by chance or design (probably the latter), HB 463 — the bill the Senate gutted before tossing it back to the House filled with a 3.99% income tax rate— was originally authored by Blackmon. He is the same state representative who rallied House Republicans to send HB 880, for a 3.99% tax rate, to the Senate on Friday.
There are bragging rights on the campaign trail for getting bills passed, and all seats are up for election this year.
Tillery, when he was asked about HB 880 versus HB 463 outside the Capitol Monday, echoed a line that is often attributed to Harry S. Truman.
“There’s no limit on what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit,” said Tillery, who is running for lieutenant governor and has spoken quite a bit about the Senate Republicans’ tax cutting agenda. “I don’t care who gets the credit.”
