by Ty Tagami | Apr 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Across Georgia last November, voters heartily threw their support behind an amendment to the state constitution that sought to slow the escalation of property taxes.
Two out of three voters favored Constitutional Amendment 1, which allowed communities to decide whether the annual rise in their property tax values should be linked to the generally lower rate of inflation.
And then, not much happened.
Although most cities and counties opted into the tax slowdown, most school districts did not. And education is generally the lion’s share of a local property tax bill.
So, lawmakers decided to give it another go. House Bill 92, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law immediately after the General Assembly sent it to his desk on April 1, gives cities, counties and school systems until the end of this month to reconsider the offer to tighten their own purse strings.
The measure is “designed to protect homeowners from exceedingly high property tax assessments,” the chief sponsor of the bill, state Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire, said in February during the first of several legislative votes. “It would, I think, hopefully give the locals some more time to understand the value of allowing taxpayers to keep more of their money.”
The House of Representatives went 173-1 for the bill. It was initially controversial in the Senate, but amendments led to similar enthusiasm there. The Senate version passed the House unanimously in late March.
As the bill was winding through the legislature, local elected officials were already declining the offer. As of mid-March, according to the most recent available information from the Secretary of State’s office, 71% of the state’s 180 school districts had opted out.
About a quarter of the state’s 537 towns and cities joined those school systems, and just over a third of the 159 counties did.
Schools are far less likely to voluntarily slow down their tax revenue increases for a simple reason: education is expensive, especially when enrollment is growing.
And, unlike cities and counties, there is a limit on how high school systems can raise their tax rate.
Some clarity is needed here.
A rising property tax bill is driven by two mechanisms.
First, there is the property tax rate, which is expressed in “mills,” with one mill resulting in a tax bill of $1 for each $1,000 in assessed property value. School boards, city councils and county commissions set their own millage rate. And they often get criticized when they raise it, creating potential difficulty at re-election time.
Second, is the property value. That’s set by county appraisers who value each property based on sales of similar properties nearby.
That is the part of the tax bill that lawmakers want to link to the rate of inflation. Especially in growing areas, property values tend to rise faster than the inflation rate.
Their constitutional amendment targeted the portion of the tax bill that is driven by property values by increasing the value of a property “homestead,” which is basically a tax discount for owner-occupied homes, by the amount of any increase in the official valuation, minus inflation.
Confused?
So was Allen Fort, the longtime superintendent of the Taliaferro County School District, the smallest system in Georgia.
“It’s far more complicated than it should have been,” he said.
People don’t understand the mechanism, he said, and they don’t understand the implications for schools.
When Gwinnett County Public Schools, the state’s largest system, opted out, it published this explanation on its website. It would have meant a loss of $35 million in the 2025-26 fiscal year and more than $100 million over the next three years.
There is another complicating factor for Georgia school systems: most are legally limited to a maximum tax rate of 20 mills.
Typically, 90% of the costs go to paying teachers and other staff. The state sets student-teacher ratios, so more students mean more teachers — and more costs.
More households paying more taxes should theoretically cover that rising cost. But they generally don’t.
That is because houses with children in them typically cost communities far more in educational services than those houses pay in taxes. Arresting the increase of their share of the tax base would simply force schools to raise their millage rates, but then they would hit that cap.
And in many places, industries get big tax abatements to build new factories and other facilities, so they’re not paying either.
So, John Zauner wonders, who would pay for education if school boards opted in to the legislature’s scheme and basically froze their future revenue stream?
Lawmakers are just playing a political game, shifting the attention of frustrated taxpayers from themselves to their local school board members, said Zauner, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association.
“Their issue as legislators is to say, ‘I’m going to provide you tax relief,’ and that’s a great issue to get some votes on,” he said.
The constitutional amendment was as popular in Coweta County as it was in the rest of the state, passing by wide margins in every voting precinct.
The county government then opted in to the new inflation rate tax limit, but the school system opted out.
The school district’s property tax rate is already above 15 mills, explained Evan Horton, the Coweta County School System superintendent.
“You get to that 20-mill cap and there are no more levers to push,” Horton said. “Once you get to the cap, it could prove very difficult to do the things that you need to do.”
Cities and counties generally don’t face the same millage rate limit as schools. Lawmakers also gave them the ability to raise their sales tax rate to recoup some of the dollars lost to the inflation-linked homestead exemptions. Lawmakers did not give that sales tax increase to schools.
So far, only a couple of counties have asked their voters to approve a higher sales tax, said Dante Handel, who works on governmental affairs for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia.
Handel, who has tracked this property tax plan for more than a year and has produced an in-depth analysis and explanation for the public, expects more cities and counties to follow suit in November.
He said the decision for local governments comes down to whether they want to shift the burden of taxation from owner-occupied homes to other types of property owners.
“It’ll hit second homes. It will hit the apartments. The question then is whether or not those apartment owners are going to have that additional tax burden shift down to the renters — most likely they will,” he said. “Then it’ll also shift some of that burden to the industrial and commercial properties. So, it’s a policy decision about whether or not you want to reward the folks who have long-term roots in your community.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 17, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A federal judge in Atlanta is weighing whether to order the government to restore the immigration status of 133 current or former college students, 26 of them in Georgia, who recently received word that it had been revoked.
Judge Victoria M. Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia said she would issue a ruling on a temporary restraining order “pretty soon” after an attorney for the students and recent graduates said in a hearing Thursday that his clients had learned that their status under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program had been revoked. He said the revocations were apparently for no legal reason, with notice coming typically by email from their consulates or from their universities.
The attorney, Charles Kuck, said the loss of student visitor status means they cannot attend school, work, or return to the United States if they leave the country or are deported.
Kuck said none of his clients — who attend schools including Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Emory University, and Kennesaw State University — had committed offenses, such as a violent crime, that merit revocation. Some had misdemeanors or traffic violations, including one with a DUI conviction a dozen years ago, Kuck said, but he said those are not legal reasons to revoke their visiting student status.
He told the judge he suspected the government used artificial intelligence to identify his clients and then acted on the results whether or not revocation was merited.
“The right thing to do here is to put the kids back where they were and then let us figure this out,” Kuck said.
A lawyer for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia said there was no evidence of permanent harm to Kuck’s clients, and that a restraining order would “interfere with the executive’s right to control immigration,” meaning President Donald Trump’s efforts to expel certain immigrants. But he said a “narrow” restraining order would be acceptable.
Kuck said his clients had locked themselves in their homes, fearful of arrest and deportation. A Georgia Tech student who recently earned a Ph.D. had to decline a job offer as a professor due to a traffic violation.
The students spent significant sums on tuition for degrees they may not get if their status is not restored, he said, adding that the stress had been overwhelming.
“Two nights ago, one of our clients tried to commit suicide,” Kuck said.
Judge Calvert scheduled a follow-up hearing to consider a preliminary injunction on April 24, with a ruling on a temporary restraining order possible by midnight Friday. She said she needed time to analyze the case “carefully and thoughtfully” because other courts might follow her lead.
Kuck estimated that as many as 4,000 students in the country had their student visitor status similarly revoked, noting that several other federal judges had already issued temporary restraining orders.
During a press conference after the hearing, a representative from CAIR Georgia accused the government of targeting students from “disfavored” nations. Other advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, asserted that the government is fueled by anti-immigrant fervor gripping the nation.
Kuck said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, administers the student visitor program and that he just wants the agency to “follow the law, just as ICE requires our clients to follow the law.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 16, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The Georgia Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in cases that could decide in the near term whether large waterfront houses can be built on a sleepy island while in the long term reverberating far from the coast.
The dispute is over the preservation of the Gullah-Geechee way of life lived in small bungalows on Sapelo Island, where officials in McIntosh County have voted to allow the construction of larger houses.
But it’s also about whether Georgians everywhere can overrule their local governments on what is often a hotly contested topic: zoning.
The justices heard arguments in three cases Wednesday, but two are ancillary, concerning the local probate court judge who agreed to let voters hold a referendum to potentially overturn the county zoning decision.
The core case, Bailey et al. v. McInstosh County, asks whether the Georgia Constitution grants counties exclusive authority over zoning and, thus, immunity from referendums.
For the residents of Sapelo Island, it boils down to whether they can keep a longstanding zoning ordinance that restricts homes to a maximum of 1,400 square feet. They want to maintain a local culture that stretches back to the period when slavery ended for ancestors who then became small landowners and built modest houses.
The McIntosh County Commission voted to eliminate that size limit. Sapelo residents responded by securing approval from the probate court judge for a referendum on whether to restore the restriction. A superior court judge agreed to a county petition to halt the referendum but also paused enforcement of the zoning law pending the outcome of this appeal to the high court.
The state Supreme Court opened the door to challenging local government decisions by referendum two years ago by deciding that voters in Camden County could use one to prevent the purchase of land for a spaceport. The facility would have lobbed commercial rockets over the Cumberland Island National Seashore, prompting concerns about the health of the coastal marsh and about the quality of life for nearby residents.
In the McIntosh County case, the justices are tasked with deciding whether their authorization of that Camden County referendum also applies to zoning decisions.
To answer that question, they’ll have to interpret ambiguity in the state constitution.
“The referendum power applies to zoning ordinances because all potentially relevant legislative power for counties to pass ordinances, resolutions, and regulations emanates from the home rule section of the constitution,” said Philip M. Thompson, the attorney for the referendum proponents.
But Ken E. Jarrard, the attorney arguing for the county, said the state constitution grants counties special power over zoning that is separate from the constitutional basis for other local authority.
“The power of zoning and the home rule power are absolutely different, and there’s a reason that they are different,” he said. “It’s on purpose, it’s borne out in the evolution of the constitution.”
The paragraph of the constitution that is in question:
“The governing authority of each county and of each municipality may adopt plans and may exercise the power of zoning. This authorization shall not prohibit the General Assembly from enacting general laws establishing procedures for the exercise of such power.”
Does that mean the state’s authority to intervene in local zoning matters is limited to procedure? And what is meant by home rule anyway?
“Generally speaking, anyone who uses the phrase ‘home rule’ generally isn’t entirely sure what they mean by that,” Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson quipped midway through Thompson’s presentation, eliciting guffaws in the courtroom.
Thompson, who’d used the term at least a dozen times by then, responded in kind, drawing a laugh from Peterson:
“Counsel at the podium included your honor.”
The high court did not make an immediate decision in the case. Rulings typically come one to five months after oral arguments.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Federal law enforcement officials announced a major drug bust Tuesday, seizing more than 100 pounds of fentanyl and arresting 22.
The takedown involved two Mexican drug cartels, but two kingpins remain on the loose.
The federal government has issued a cumulative $8 million reward for information leading to the capture of Johnny Hurtado Olascoaga, known as “Pez,” and his brother Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga, who goes by “Fresa.” They are both believed to be in Mexico, said Michael Herskowitz, who oversees narcotics and dangerous drug prosecutions for the U.S. Attorneys’ Office for the Northern District of Georgia.
“It is our hope that these multi-million dollar rewards will encourage people to come forward with what they know” about the brothers, he said, “both here in the United States and in cities and towns in Mexico.”
Some of the arrests involved a money-wiring operation in Gwinnett County that authorities said was sending drug proceeds to Mexico in small sums that would minimize attention. The practice, called “smurfing,” involves transactions below $10,000, a threshold for federal reporting.
Jae W. Chung, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta division, said the amount of fentanyl seized — 47 kilograms — would probably sell for around $1.5 million on the street and that it was enough to kill at least 23 million people. That’s more than two times the number of people in Georgia. (Two milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage, according to the DEA.)
“For Atlanta DEA, that’s probably the single largest seizure,” he said.
Chung said the investigation had been ongoing for years.
Herskowitz said the U.S. State Department had labeled the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which helped with the investigation.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Nearly 200 years of legal precedent should not apply to a 20-year-old man who wants to carry a gun, his lawyer argued before the Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Thomas Stephens, who turns 21 next year, was denied a license to carry a handgun in public when he applied for one in Lumpkin County. He sued, and his case made it to the high court, which heard arguments by his lawyer and by the state attorney general’s office. The state contends in a legal brief that the restrictions on adults under age 21 are “baked into the Georgia Constitution.”
Stephens’ lawsuit goes to the heart of one of the most contentious issues in America today: how to interpret gun rights under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It says, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” An introductory phrase has been a complicating factor, saying that a “well regulated Militia” is needed to secure a free state.
Georgia’s constitution elaborates by saying that the legislature “shall have power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne.”
A lawyer from Attorney General Chris Carr’s office argued that the state’s age-based limitations date back to the Civil War era, when he said those under 21 were not subject to militia service.
“The court should stick with the analysis that it’s applied for 180 years,” said Zachary A. Mullinax, an assistant attorney general. “I don’t think that there is any historical evidence that an 18-year-old had the right to carry a handgun in public.”
But Stephens’ lawyer made the case that Georgia’s restrictions are rooted in a time before courts began applying a higher standard on government intrusion into personal liberties.
The state Supreme Court has based its decisions on a “reasonable” exercise of government power to limit access to guns, said John R. Monroe, the Dawsonville attorney representing Stephens.
That was before the World War II era, when the U.S. Supreme Court first developed a higher standard of “strict scrutiny” and began requiring that burdens on fundamental rights be justified by a “compelling” state interest, Monroe said. “Strict scrutiny should be applied to this case because it’s a fundamental right for people to keep and bear arms.”
It’s unclear how the state’s high court will rule. The justices peppered both lawyers with questions, although Justice Andrew A. Pinson told Monroe early in the hearing that he had an “uphill battle” to make his case. That is due to the history of Georgia’s restrictions on gun rights, Pinson said, “which we’ve said arguably is now baked into our constitutional language given that it was enacted and then we ratified new constitutions with that same language.”
