by Ty Tagami | Oct 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia’s net tax collections rose by 1.9% last month compared to September of last year, the state Department of Revenue reported Tuesday.
The state collected $3.27 billion in September, up $60.3 million over the same month a year ago.
Monthly individual income tax receipts rose 3.2% over September 2024 as tax refunds fell 16.2% and withholding payments rose 1.7%.
Other categories were up too, the sales and use tax by 2.9% and the corporate income tax by 7.6%. Motor fuel taxes gained 1.8% and tag and title fees rose 20.8%.
The title ad valorem tax, a small category that brought in $71.7 million for the month, fell 8.5% compared to a year ago.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Local health departments are giving COVID-19 shots while supplies last, with more vaccine expected to arrive next week.
The Georgia Department of Public Health began vaccinating after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new COVID-19 immunization recommendations Monday.
The CDC is recommending that most adults get vaccinated, especially those 65 and older and those who have never been vaccinated. Parents of children at least 6 months old should discuss vaccination with a healthcare provider, the federal agency said.
No prescription is required, but local health department nurses or other providers will counsel patients on the risks and benefits of vaccination, the Department of Public Health said.
Most major insurance companies will cover the cost of immunization, but the state is advising people to check with their insurers. Vaccination is covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
Local health departments can assist those without insurance, the state said.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Public health services save Georgia money and heartache, but funding has failed to keep up with costs and recent federal cutbacks put the state at a crossroads, lawmakers heard from advocates and experts Tuesday.
Expiring federal dollars from the COVID-19 pandemic, clawbacks of federal grants and now the Congressional budget shutdown have affected all public health programs, including Georgia’s, said Kelly Hughes, a health policy expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“This is just a time of uncertainty and instability,” she said.
Georgia has nearly doubled state tax dollars allocated per capita to public health during the past dozen years, but federal contributions have lagged, resulting in a net decline, said Leah Chan, a health policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. She said Georgia’s per person spending fell to $74 this year, from $97 in 2012.
Rural areas are more likely to suffer because small, local governments are less able to plug funding gaps. Hospitals could close, the lawmakers heard, and public health workers could become increasingly rare.
The House study committee on public health funding was established in April through legislation sponsored by a half dozen Republicans. House Resolution 847 says public health has been underfunded and more money may be needed to ensure a “sustainable” infrastructure.
“Georgia’s health security and financial well-being depend on a growing, fully funded state and local public health system,” the enabling resolution says.
It passed unanimously.
The lawmakers on the resulting committee heard more or less what their resolution had anticipated: programs for vaccination, lead abatement, tobacco cessation, substance abuse prevention, HIV prevention, and maternal and child health care save society far more in preventable health care expenses than they cost.
They also increase communal welfare and wealth, said Jessica Schwind from Georgia Southern University.
“You have an increase in academic achievement, increase in workforce productivity, higher tax revenue generation because you have people working, reduced criminal justice costs, stronger economic development,” said Schwind, an assistant professor of epidemiology. “When you take care of the individual, that has profound impacts on the community.”
Several members of the committee had co-sponsored the resolution that authorized their meetings. There was only one Democrat assigned and present. The rest were Republicans, two of them among the most influential lawmakers in the General Assembly.
Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, leads the House Appropriations Committee, which oversees the chamber’s budget-writing duties.
Rep. Butch Parrish, R-Swainsboro, chairs the House Rules Committee (as well as the Special Committee on Healthcare), and effectively decides which bills make it to floor of the chamber for a vote by all representatives.
Neither indicated what they would do next. The committee chair, Rep. Darlene Taylor, R-Thomasville, did not either as she ended their third and final meeting. Their committee has a Dec. 1 deadline to issue any recommendations.
The April resolution the trio had co-sponsored sounded a lot like Schwind’s presentation.
“Increases in public health spending have been shown to reduce preventable deaths,” it says, “and healthier communities support stronger economies.”
by Ty Tagami | Oct 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Data centers gulp massive amounts of power, and that insatiable thirst is driving new production and distribution of natural gas supply, experts said at a legislative hearing Monday.
A special House subcommittee heard from industry insiders involved in the sourcing and supply of the finite fossil fuel.
“The need for electricity is growing tremendously, and natural gas is a large component of that,” said Josh Browning, a vice president with Williams Companies, Inc., which has 33,000 miles of gas pipeline in two dozen states, with a transcontinental line bisecting Georgia.
Data centers are a huge driver, but the electrification of transportation and heating are also pushing demand for natural gas, Browning said.
Power plants burn the gas to create electricity, but that is far less efficient than consuming it directly, for instance with a gas stove or a water heater, said Scott Tolleson of the Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia. Electrical conversion wastes two-thirds of the energy in natural gas, he said.
Meanwhile, the United States has at least a century’s worth of natural gas supply in the ground, accessible by techniques such as fracking, Tolleson said.
That worried Rep. Don Parson’s, R-Marietta, chairman of the House committee on Energy, Utilities & Telecommunications.
“Well, 100 years that wouldn’t get it,” he said. “All this investment and relying on natural gas, I mean, if it’s only a hundred … .”
Tolleson reiterated that the estimate is a minimum, noting potential reserves in Georgia. (He showed a slide that indicated natural gas could be locked in rock under the northwest and southwest corners of the state.)
“I wouldn’t say only a hundred years,” he said. “I’d say at least a hundred years.”
Scott Hunnewell offered a potentially limitless energy supply. He is vice president of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new nuclear power program. He showed a slide indicating that renewable energy consumes far more land for each megawatt of power produced. A nuclear plant is hundreds of times more efficient in that sense than solar power, his slide indicated.
To replace the energy that the United States consumes in the form of fossil fuels, one would have to cover all of Tennessee with solar panels, Hunnewell said. “No roads, no rivers, no trees, nothing. Just solar panels.”
A fundamental weakness for solar is the intermittent nature of its source: the sun. To maintain consistent supply from a state’s worth of solar panels, one would need way more land, Hunnewell added.
“You’d have to cover about eight times the size of the state of Tennessee with batteries and solar panels,” he said. “And even then, that would get you about five days. If the sun didn’t shine on that sixth day, you’d have no power.”
The TVA is not building more coal plants or hydroelectric facilities, Hunnewell said. Solar and wind power will have a role, he said, but nuclear and natural gas will be the “backbone” of the authority’s future power supply. (His slide indicated that nuclear power production is 58 times more land efficient than natural gas production.)
These industry insiders said data centers will be driving a lot of future demand.
A mission of the quasi-governmental TVA is to produce the power needed for economic prosperity. Data centers may produce an initial flurry of jobs during construction, Hunnewell said, but each facility might produce around 20 sustained jobs thereafter — far fewer than a traditional manufacturing or industrial site that consumes a lot of power.
The TVA has not had to turn away customers, but the “signals” for energy consumption by “AI data centers” suggest that could happen, he said. “We’ll say ‘no’ to a data center before we will some industrial or manufacturing facility. We would much rather have an industry in there that is hiring 600 people” on a continuous basis, he said.
Tolleson, of the Municipal Gas Authority, said a data center can consume as much power each day as 350,000 hot water heaters, and new centers are difficult to anticipate and accommodate.
“When a data center comes in and says, ‘I want as much gas as you’ve ever seen in one setting,’ we aren’t planning for that,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 3, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will finally testify to a special committee of the Georgia Senate after rebuffing their demands for more than a year, the committee’s leader said Friday.
After refusing to appear last year and fighting a committee subpoena in court, Willis will comply with a new subpoena to be issued by the Senate Special Committee on Investigations to appear on Nov. 13, said its chairman, Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens.
It will be an opportunity for Republican lawmakers to ask her about the election interference case she brought against President Donald Trump and his allies.
Cowsert said she agreed to testify to a limited scope of questioning that he could not disclose.
Willis’ office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Republicans have been vilifying Willis ever since she pursued the case, but Cowsert said his committee members want neither to persecute nor humiliate her.
They just want her advice on legislation to regulate prosecutorial misconduct, he said.
Willis was dislodged from her Trump prosecution after the state Supreme Court declined in September to consider her appeal of a Georgia Court of Appeals order disqualifying her from prosecuting conspiracy charges against Trump and eight others.
The appeals court had found an appearance of impropriety in her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she had assigned to the case.
Republicans have raised questions about her use of taxpayer dollars in hiring him.
“She can’t continue to create this impression that the laws don’t apply to her — that she’s being an obstructionist,” Cowsert said.
Sen. Harold Jones, II, D-Augusta, one of two Democrats on the eight-member committee, welcomed Willis’ testimony. It will be an opportunity to give her side of the story, said Jones, who is the Senate minority leader.
Despite her agreement to testify, the state Supreme Court will still hear oral arguments Nov. 4 in the dispute over the original subpoena, Cowsert said.
Cowsert’s committee also got an update from a new commission established by the General Assembly to investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Investigators with the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission have considered 36 complaints filed in 2024 and 86 so far this year. None merited promotion to a hearing panel, said Ian Heap, the commission executive director.
The details of cases are not public unless they merit formal charges, so Heap could not answer Cowsert’s question about whether the commission had considered allegations against Willis.
Cowsert said after the hearing that he merely wanted to know if her Nov. 13 testimony to his committee might be constrained by concerns about self-incrimination connected with any commission investigation.
Cowsert said Heap’s report on the escalation in the number of complaints — there were only seven in 2023 — was new information to him. He wondered whether it indicated many prosecutors were misbehaving and the public now has a vehicle to complain — or whether the complaints were merely frivolous.
Jones focused on Heap’s disclosure that all the complaints so far were deemed meritless and on the relevance of the law that created the commission.
“I think that kind of shows that the law was not needed,” he said.
