by Ty Tagami | Sep 16, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp joined other political leaders near Social Circle Tuesday to turn shovels at a ceremonial groundbreaking for the future Rivian electric automobile plant.
The government-subsidized project is expected to create 7,500 jobs by 2030, after construction begins in earnest next year and the first vehicle rolls off the line in 2028.
The company says it will eventually make 400,000 automobiles a year there.
Rivian paused construction last year but then inked a $6 billion loan with the U.S. Department of Energy and announced plans to move ahead in January.
Georgia taxpayers had already purchased and prepared the land that the state is leasing to the company through a quasi-governmental third party.
The unusual transaction was a way around local zoning that restricts the 2,000-acre property to agricultural uses.
Nearby landowners sued in Morgan County Superior Court, hoping to force the project through the normal zoning process.
But the state intervened and moved to compel the plaintiffs to pay its legal costs, asserting the lawsuit was frivolous.
A judge ruled for the nearby landowners last week, saying they raised an unanswered question about whether the state could bypass local zoning for a for-profit project.
One of the landowners, Alan Jenkins, held a protest sign at the edge of the property as Kemp and the others were digging.
Georgia “fouled” legacy farmland to prepare the land for the company, said Jenkins, whose sign called for protecting the local watershed.
“Rivian, a touted green company, is taking advantage of the state having done the dirty work for them,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Sep 16, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday shut the door on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference case against Donald Trump and his supporters.
The high court, in a 4-3 vote, declined to consider Willis’ appeal after the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified her from prosecuting conspiracy charges against Trump and eight others. The appeals court found an appearance of impropriety in her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she had assigned to the case.
Three of the judges in the Supreme Court majority concurred that the Willis case was so unique that her appeal was “a poor vehicle” for establishing precedent on when to disqualify a prosecutor for misconduct. (Two of the nine justices did not vote in Tuesday’s decision.)
The state Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council could take over the cases, as it did in a related one involving Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Willis had targeted Jones along with Trump and the other co-defendants, but a judge disqualified her from that investigation. A special prosecutor took up the Jones investigation and decided not to prosecute him.
The court decision sidelining Willis from investigating Jones came after she hosted a fundraiser for a Democrat who was running against Jones for lieutenant governor.
Jones is now running to be the Republican nominee for Governor, with Trump’s endorsement. Jones accused Willis of weaponizing the justice system for political gain.
“The Supreme Court just shut Fani Willis down. Her political circus is OVER,” Jones’ campaign said in a statement. “Today justice is served for Georgia, and justice is served for President Trump.”
Jones and fellow Republicans are now pursuing Willis, setting up a Senate committee to investigate her investigation of election interference.
by Ty Tagami | Sep 16, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s former Republican lieutenant governor, is running for governor as a Democrat, putting financial security and political moderation at the center of his campaign.
Duncan says in a brief YouTube video that he wants “to make Georgia the front line of Democracy and a backstop against extremism.”
He puts President Donald Trump in the extremist camp.
Duncan has been jabbing at Trump for years, attracting the president’s ire by rejecting his assertions that he had won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
In 2021, Duncan published the book, “GOP 2.0,” which urged a pivot from Trump’s brand of politics.
Since then, he has shared his anti-Trump message as a commentator on CNN and as a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In January, after he had endorsed Kamala Harris’ failed campaign for president, the Georgia Republican Party expelled him.
“By his pattern of conduct, Duncan has forfeited any claim to being even a nominal ‘Republican,’ ” the state GOP’s executive committee wrote in a resolution that was passed unanimously by its members.
In his YouTube announcement, which appeared on the platform Monday, Duncan welcomes attacks from Trump, calling them “a badge of honor.”
Duncan also focuses on family finances. He says he wants to help moms who cannot return to work because of skyrocketing child care costs and families that must choose between paying for medicine and food.
He will be contesting three leading Democrats for that party’s nomination: Jason Esteves, who announced last week that he was stepping down from his Atlanta-based state senate seat to focus on his campaign; former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; and Michael Thurmond, who has been elected statewide as labor commissioner, has served in the General Assembly, and recently ended his second four-year term as the elected CEO of DeKalb County.
Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary will face the winner of the Republican nomination, where state Attorney General Chris Carr is campaigning against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was recently endorsed by Trump.
by Ty Tagami | Sep 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A half dozen landowners who filed a lawsuit that might have halted development of the massive Rivian auto plant near Social Circle do not have to pay some of the legal costs spent by the state to defend the project.
Lawyers hired by Georgia and by a local development authority asked a judge in Morgan County to make the landowners pay for the taxpayer dollars Georgia paid them, arguing that the plaintiffs had brought a frivolous lawsuit.
But the judge ruled against the state, determining that the suit was an earnest attempt to determine whether Georgia officials had the authority to waive local land use rules for a private development project on public land.
The state bypassed the agricultural zoning for the 2,000-acre property by purchasing it, then leasing it to the Joint Development Authority for Morgan and nearby counties, which in turn leased it to electric automaker Rivian.
Nearby landowners sued, asking whether a for-profit corporation that makes automobiles on public land was a “governmental purpose” that would trigger legal immunity.
The court decision means the landowners do not have to pay the state’s legal costs of $338,000 in the Morgan County lawsuit.
“It would have been financially devastating for these people,” one of the landowners’ attorneys, John Christy, said Monday.
The state has filed a similar motion in a related case in Fulton County, where it is seeking to recover another $203,000 in legal costs, Christy said.
The state could push forward with its motion for legal costs in the Fulton County case and it could appeal the Morgan County decision.
A spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Economic Development did not answer questions about the state’s next legal steps, responding instead with a statement about the Rivian project.
Rivian will soon break ground on its plant construction, said the joint statement with the local development authority. This “marks the beginning of a generational project that will bring long-term economic opportunity” to the region and the state, the statement said.
The courts have consistently sided with the state and the local authority, the statement added, “and this ruling doesn’t change the status of the Rivian project.”
Christy thinks the judge issued a “well-reasoned and thoughtful” order that will discourage an appeal by the state and to dismissal of the Fulton County demand for legal costs.
“I think that any appeal would be frivolous,” he said. “I think the standard on appeal would be very high.”
Morgan County Superior Court Judge Stephen Bradley wrote in an 11-page order filed Friday that the state’s claim about a frivolous lawsuit was undermined by its own actions.
The state voluntarily joined the case as a defendant, hiring a large team of lawyers, the judge wrote. This signaled an expectation for “a much more pitched battle in the case,” he added.
Bradley also noted that a lawyer for the local development authority — a co-defendant in the case — had displayed apparent “misgivings” about whether the state’s sovereign immunity would transfer to the Rivian project.
The authority’s lawyer had explained in court that she was withdrawing applications for a change in local restrictions because it would have required 34 public hearings, the judge wrote, adding that he interpreted this as a tacit admission that the law governing the matter was unclear.
“Neither the first nor the second suit filed by the plaintiffs were based on bad faith or were short of justiciable issue,” Bradley wrote, explaining why he sided against the state in what he said was an unprecedented case. “The issues presented concerning governmental land use regulations and public immunity, specifically focusing on the basis of that immunity — particularly the potential use of sovereign immunity to shield a private, for-profit corporation — raise new and unanswered questions of law.”
Bradley wrote that the way the government has handled the property in this transaction seems “clearly designed to circumvent resistance from local voices opposing the Rivian Project.”
by Ty Tagami | Sep 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — It was another boom year for Georgia, as businesses continued flocking to the state, burnishing its record as the No. 1 place to do business.
A record-breaking $26.3 billion flowed into the Peach State for the fiscal year that ended June 30, as companies expanded or established new locations. That is according to the office of Gov. Brian Kemp, which said the growth will translate to 23,300 new private-sector jobs over the next few years.
Area Development magazine has consistently ranked Georgia as the top state for business.
Kemp credited the state Department of Economic Development with fostering an attractive business environment. The state has supplied over $18 million to help rural communities prepare new industrial sites through its Rural Site Development Initiative, Kemp’s office said. There are now more than 70 certified sites.
Kemp said the effort “will pay off for generations.”
Company expansions at existing locations were the major driver, with 77% of the growth occurring outside metro Atlanta. But the 10-county Atlanta region remains a business hub, hosting major companies such as Duracell and Mercedes-Benz.
International investment was a major reason for the continued growth, with more than 6,500 jobs coming from expansions or new locations at companies from countries such as the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Canada.
State lawmakers pledged to continue collaborating with the Kemp administration, crediting the state’s ports, railways, energy systems and other infrastructure — and higher education.
“We continue to invest in workforce programs to ensure a steady talent pipeline with our existing industry partners,” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones said. “These investments and initiatives will ensure we have a workforce that is growing and able to meet skillsets for jobs of today and tomorrow.”
