by Ty Tagami | Aug 21, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Smoking kills, but many still do it, and a small group of Georgia lawmakers want to help people kick the habit and discourage others from starting.
A big challenge for a bipartisan panel in the state House of Representatives: their main proposal is a tax increase, and tax increases are not popular in an election year. Their proposed legislation would come up for a vote in 2026, observed the chairwoman, Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, at the last of three hearings for the House study committee on smoking and vaping Thursday.
Committee members are considering other ideas, too, such as requiring ingredient disclosures on the packaging of vaping products and banning flavors. They also discussed increasing the $10 licensing fee for vape shops to suppress their numbers. (In Georgia, it costs $10 for a tobacco sales licensing fee and another $10 to sell tobacco vape products.)
“There are more vape shops now in Georgia than Chick-fil-A and Starbucks combined,” said Dr. Daniel Miller, a thoracic surgeon at the Medical College of Georgia who offered a buffet of statistics at Thursday’s hearing. “They pop up anywhere for $10. It’s incredible how they’ve exploded. It’s because it doesn’t cost anything.”
Miller said vaping products contain 25 times more nicotine than cigarettes, making them highly addictive for children.
It is illegal to sell tobacco products to children, but observers complained about lax enforcement. One in five middle school students and one in four high school students vape, Miller said, adding that one in three college students do, as well.
Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, said he floated a sales tax increase to the chairman and members of the House Ways & Means Committee, which holds jurisdiction over taxes.
He also disclosed at the hearing that his wife’s sister, a smoker since the 1970s, had died Wednesday.
“It touches a lot of families,” said Stephens, a long-time advocate for increased tobacco taxes.
Back in June, as the committee was getting underway, Stephens said the likelihood of federal budget cuts might decrease resistance to higher taxes on products like tobacco.
Georgia has one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the nation, the committee heard in June.
At 37 cents a pack, it is well below the national average of $1.97. Only Missouri, at 17 cents, charges less.
“Sometimes the pocketbook and the squeeze changes minds,” Stephens said in an interview that month, adding that the tax revenue could offset health-care costs that would be borne by Georgians in the event of federal cuts, which subsequently became a reality when President Donald Trump signed his “Big Beautiful Bill” into law in July.
“If you smoke long enough and hard enough,” Stephens said, “you’re going to get sick, and somebody’s got to pay for it.”
By then, federal actions were already having an impact, something anti-smoking advocates noted Thursday, saying Georgia should restore $2.1 million to the Tobacco Use Prevention Program.
The Georgia Department of Public Health shuttered the program in May due to federal cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention though the state agency said “core” tobacco and vaping prevention and cessation programs were still operating.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 20, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Anticipating federal cutbacks or funding freezes, Georgia lawmakers held a hearing Wednesday to explore a redesign of the state’s public health system, which protects residents from diseases and offers preventative health care in some places.
The state’s public health districts operate under the Department of Public Health. Most of the staff work for local government, but the amount counties must contribute has not changed in 50 years. Nearly $403 million of the $922.5 million budget for public health comes from the state while almost $465 million is provided by the federal government.
Some expect the administration of President Donald Trump to issue more “block grants” with less oversight, giving states an opportunity to redesign their systems for health services, such as dental hygiene, and for the tracking and the prevention of diseases, such as syphilis.
“These changes at the federal level are giving us an opportunity to really reimagine what public health can be,” state Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey said.
But cuts in services may have to accompany that flexibility as the federal government pushes more costs to the local level. So Rep. Butch Parrish, R-Swainsboro, asked Toomey to assess which programs merit funding from the state if federal dollars wane.
“We can help some, but I don’t think we can make up all of those dollars,” said Parrish, chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee.
“I think there can really be some challenges out there, and I know that y’all will be up to it,” said Parrish, who represents a district south of Augusta. He was among several lawmakers on the panel who expressed concern that rural areas get fewer services than urban areas.
A funding freeze could be less than two months away given Congress’ challenges in passing a timely budget, said Carolyn Mullin with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Her group predicts a “high likelihood” of a government shutdown Oct. 1. If that does happen, she said, federal payments for public health could be frozen, pushing costs to the states.
That would further stress an already stressed public health system in Georgia.
The House Study Committee on Evaluating Funding for Public Health was created by a House resolution that said “public health has historically been underfunded.”
Rep. Darlene Taylor, R-Thomasville, who chairs the study committee and has a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, will hold two more hearings this year.
“We are all waiting to see final outcomes and what Congress does,” she said.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Centers that offer services to people experiencing addiction could face more regulation in Georgia, as lawmakers investigate how they operate and whether they are effective enough.
“There are rehab centers all over the state of Georgia that are not meeting the standard that we feel should be there,” state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, chairman of the Senate Study Committee on Recovery Residences, said Monday during the panel’s first meeting at the state Capitol.
Robertson and a handful of his Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle concurred that there is work to be done.
They heard from Dr. James Craig, a medical doctor and addiction specialist, during a three-hour meeting that explored the genetic and environmental links to substance abuse.
Craig said society treats addiction like an ethical or moral failing, yet it is a medical condition, marked by physical changes in the brain that stem from exposure to the stress hormone cortisol and other causes beyond a person’s control. A war on drugs would reduce the scope of addiction about as well as a war on candy bar sales would reduce the prevalence of diabetes, he said.
“The vast majority of people that are entering the penal system right now, the vast majority, meet diagnostic criterion for the disease of addiction, which is something that, at least as an addictionologist, I see as a massive human rights violation,” he said. “We’re putting people with a mental illness in a cage.”
Craig said treatment facilities too often return patients to their communities well before they have control over their addiction, whether to alcohol, a drug or something else. It can take a year or more to return the brain’s chemistry to a normal baseline, yet these programs typically last a month, he said.
Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, R-Marietta, said residential treatment facilities are not regulated by the state. That is a concern for the retired orthopedic surgeon.
“The problem right now is we don’t even know where all these things are,” she said. “We don’t even know who’s running them.”
Sen. Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, said the General Assembly has the power to require “fair labeling” of treatment facilities.
“It shouldn’t just be based on Yelp reviews,” said Jackson, the Senate’s minority whip.
Robertson, the Senate’s majority whip, said the General Assembly regulates too much but that this is “life and death” and too many of these facilities “have been run terribly,” so the issue merits a closer look.
Representatives of the facilities were not present to defend themselves, but Robertson said their leaders will be invited to the next hearing, which has not been scheduled. The hearings will eventually include the insurance industry and affected families, he said.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
MADISON — A judge in Morgan County could set a precedent by forcing Georgia property owners who sued to halt development of a massive state-backed auto factory near their properties to pay for the other side’s legal costs.
The case involves the proposed Rivian electric automobile plant on a rural stretch near Social Circle off Interstate 20. Lawyers for Georgia and for a related quasi-governmental entity made their half-million-dollar demand in the local superior court Wednesday.
A half dozen local landowners sued the county in a bid to force compliance with local zoning.
They have been fighting a losing battle, in no small part due to the state’s unparalleled power as an entity that enjoys “sovereign immunity” from local ordinances, including zoning requirements.
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 Rivian.
Opponents of the plant say the state and authority are trying to silence dissent by going after the landowners’ pocketbooks for $344,000 in legal costs. Plant proponents say the state and the authority are trying to protect taxpayer dollars from frivolous lawsuits.
Near the end of the three-hour hearing, Morgan Superior Court Judge Stephen Bradley could not say when he would rule, let alone how. But he was sure of one thing: a ruling against the defendants would set a precedent in Georgia.
“I found no cases in which the state, as sovereign, obtained payment from citizens” for opposing a state action, he said.
Georgia law allows defendants, in this case the state and the authority, to recover legal fees from plaintiffs who file frivolous lawsuits. This suit was clearly frivolous because the state is not subject to local zoning and the plaintiffs knew that all along, said Charles E. Peeler, a lawyer contracted to represent the state.
“The motive is to delay, harass and stop the project,” he said.
Judge Bradley issued an initial ruling against the landowners several years ago, declining their request for a temporary restraining order on development of the Rivian project because, in his view, they had low odds of winning. The state Court of Appeals did not overrule him on that, and the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
But John A. Christy, who is representing the landowners in their lawsuit, said it remains an open question whether sovereign immunity applies when the state leases land to a developer. He told the judge that he had ruled that there was a “low probability of success,” not “no probability.”
Christy said the state was trying to “weaponize” the law that allows defendants to recoup attorney fees in frivolous cases, and he said a ruling against his clients would have “a chilling effect” on others considering a court fight against the state.
Bradley must rule not only on whether the plaintiffs must pay but also on how much.
The hearing featured attorneys for the state and for the authority taking the witness stand to explain their fees.
Peeler said his firm offered the state a “significant discount” by charging $625 an hour, which is nearly half his own hourly rate and well below the $1,400 an hour billed by another member of his firm who once served on the Georgia Supreme Court.
The state also got a good deal from recent hires at his firm, he said. A 2024 University of Georgia law school graduate and a 2023 Emory law grad both bill at more than $625 an hour, he said, eliciting a gasp from a woman seated near the front of the courtroom. “Lord have mercy,” she said.
Although Bradley did not indicate how he would rule, he did push back against an attorney for the authority, who had said the case was obviously frivolous from the start.
“I don’t know if I completely agree with you,” Bradley said, observing that the authority joined the lawsuit as a defendant for a reason. “If the result was so obvious, why did the JDA bother to intervene?”
Blake McCormack, chairman of the Morgan County Commission, said after the hearing that it would be a “travesty” if the judge made the plaintiffs pay; it would mean the “state used their tax dollars to fight against them,” he said.
He was shocked by the attorneys’ hourly fees.
“I’m not sure there are rocket scientists that deserve $1,400 per hour,” McCormack said. “That is crazy.”
An agent for the authority shared a statement by its board that ran in a local newspaper. “Citizens have the right to voice concerns,” the opinion piece said, “but when the legal system is weaponized to block a perfectly legal project, that is not a legitimate exercise of that right.”
Meanwhile, the Rivian project has been delayed.
The company paused development last year, then in January announced it had secured a $6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. Rivian said construction will begin in 2026, with its R2 and R3 models rolling out of the plant in 2028.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A fifth state lawmaker has joined the campaign to become Georgia’s next lieutenant governor, with Rep. David Clark, R-Buford, announcing his candidacy Tuesday.
“I’ve been tested in combat and in the Capitol,” the Green Beret, who served in Afghanistan, says in an online ad, which begins with a voiceover about “a world on fire” that needs warriors, not politicians.
Clark’s announcement came one day after state Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, announced his own candidacy, becoming the third Republican state senator who has declared an intent to succeed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running for governor.
Clark and Tillery hit similar talking points in their announcements, from cutting taxes and illegal immigration to transgender issues. Two previously announced senators, both former members of the chamber’s Republican leadership — Sens. John F. Kennedy of Macon and Steve Gooch of Dahlonega — are also running on platforms aimed to appeal to President Donald Trump’s MAGA base.
Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, is also campaigning to be Georgia’s next lieutenant governor, the officer who presides over the Senate and fills in for the governor when absent. McLaurin, the lone Democratic lawmaker in the race, was a near-daily critic of Trump and his economic policies and defiance of court orders when the General Assembly met this year.
