by Dave Williams | Apr 21, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed two tort reform bills Monday that supporters say should reverse a pattern of excessive jury awards they hold responsible for rising liability insurance premiums that are hurting Georgia businesses’ bottom lines.
Overhauling the civil litigation process in Georgia was the Republican governor’s top priority for the recently concluded 2025 General Assembly session.
“These two bills level the playing field in Georgia’s courtrooms and ensure our business environment remains the best in the nation,” Kemp said during a signing ceremony at the state Capitol.
Senate Bill 68, which House Speaker Jon Burns called the most comprehensive lawsuit reform in Georgia in nearly two decades, deals with issues involving trial procedure, including when plaintiff lawyers can argue for non-economic damages, when discovery can begin, and when lawyers on either side can request dismissal of a case.
But the legislation’s most controversial provision put new limits on “premises liability,” which governs when plaintiffs can sue business owners after suffering injuries during the commission of a crime by a third party outside the owner’s control.
To get enough legislative Republicans on board to pass the bill, the House amended the Senate measure to carve out victims of sex trafficking and their lawyers from the bill.
The Republican-backed Senate Bill 68 cleared both legislative chambers largely along party lines, with Democrats arguing it goes so far in shielding businesses from liability that it effectively will deny victims their day in court.
Kemp pushed back on that argument Monday.
“If you are wronged, you deserve to be made whole and can be,” he said. “This legislation protects that very right.”
The second tort reform measure, Senate Bill 69, is much more narrowly drawn and enjoyed bipartisan support, at least in the state Senate. It focuses on a growing number of lawsuits being financed by third parties where financiers who are not a party to a case pay the costs of pursuing litigation in exchange for a portion of any judgement a plaintiff is awarded.
Rather than abolish third-party financing, the bill puts in guardrails to protect plaintiffs entering into such arrangements. It passed the Senate unanimously but drew 42 “no” votes in the 180-member House.
Business groups praised the governor for getting behind tort reform this year, as did the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a a think tank that advocates free-market approaches to public-policy issues.
“These new laws will bring much-needed fairness and transparency to a system that has become costly and unpredictable,” said Kyle Wingfield, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. “Georgia has long been recognized as the best state in the nation to do business, and these reforms will help ensure it remains that way.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 21, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A federal judge is giving the U.S. government a Tuesday evening deadline to reinstate the immigration status of 133 current and former college students who would have had to cease attending classes and holding jobs after they lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program status for no apparent reason.
A lawyer for the students and recent graduates argued at a hearing last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia that they faced irreparable harm, including deportation and the risk of not earning degrees they had paid for.
Meanwhile, a lawyer for the office of Acting U.S. Attorney Richard S. Moultrie, Jr., argued the government would face irreparable harm if the judge ordered that the students’ status be reinstated, because it would “interfere with the executive’s right to control immigration,” meaning President Donald Trump.
Judge Victoria Marie Calvert sided with the students, issuing a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration late Friday and requiring that the students’ status under the visitor program be restored by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The balance of harm weighs with the plaintiffs, she wrote in her order, as they risked losing their lawful status, their access to education, and their future career prospects. She noted that Assistant U.S. Attorney R. David Powell had asserted in a hearing Thursday that the revocation of the students’ visitor status did not necessarily reflect whether they had lawful nonimmigrant status. So restoring their status would have no effect on the government’s control over immigration, she wrote in her order.
The students’ lawyer, Charles Kuck, had said in court that his clients were not told why their status was revoked, and he asked for the restraining order to provide time to seek clarity with the government.
Calvert agreed, writing that “there is substantial public interest in ensuring government agencies abide by federal laws.”
The judge has scheduled another hearing for Thursday, when both sides will argue over whether the judge should next issue a preliminary injunction on the students’ status.
Akiva Freidlin, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, hailed the temporary restraining order as a rebuke against the way Trump has implemented his immigration policies.
“The Constitution protects everyone on American soil, so the Trump administration cannot ignore due process to unjustifiably threaten students with the loss of immigration status, and arrest and deportation,” she said. “We believe this ruling shows the students are likely to prevail on their claims and we are pleased the court ordered the government to halt its unlawful actions while the lawsuit continues.”
by Dave Williams | Apr 21, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – State Sen. Jason Esteves announced Monday that he will run for governor next year.
The Atlanta Democrat was elected to the Senate in 2022 and is serving his second term under the Gold Dome. Before that, he spent nearly a decade as a member of the Board of Education for Atlanta Public Schools.
Esteves has made education, health care, and housing his top priorities in the Senate.
“As extreme politicians in Georgia push (President Donald) Trump’s reckless agenda and rig the system for special interests, Georgians pay the price,” Esteves said Monday in a prepared statement. “Now more than ever, we need to tackle the high cost of living, improve access to health care, protect women’s reproductive freedom, lower housing costs, and invest in schools across the state.”
Esteves is the first Democrat to enter the 2026 race to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Marietta, formed an exploratory committee last month to consider mounting a bid for governor. However, she announced several weeks later that she would suspend her campaign in order to care for husband, who is recovering from cancer surgery.
In the Republican side, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr launched his campaign for governor late last year. Other potential candidates for the GOP nod include Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
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 Dave Williams | Apr 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Three cities and two local economic development authorities will receive more than $11 million in grants to help finance infrastructure improvements needed to service new housing.
The latest grant recipients through the state’s Rural Workforce Housing Initiative include the cities of Cairo, Hagan, and Swainsboro, the Douglas Coffee County Industrial Authority, and the Augusta Economic Development Authority.
Gov. Brian Kemp launched the program early in 2023. The grants are overseen by the state Department of Community Affairs’ OneGeorgia Authority.
“Georgia is experiencing rapid growth in communities across the state,” Kemp said Thursday. “With that growth comes a need to provide infrastructure for those filling the record-breaking number of jobs.”
Four of the five grants are for $2.5 million each. The city of Cairo will use the money to build road, water, and sewer infrastructure to support 180 new single-family homes on a 45-acre site.
Another $2.5 million grant will go to the city of Swainsboro for road, water, and sewer projects needed for a planned 47-unit subdivision.
The Douglas Coffee County Industrial Authority will build street, drainage, water, and sewer improvements to support 67 new homes on a 36-acre tract. The Augusta Economic Development Authority will build road, water, and sewer projects to support the construction of 55 single-family homes on 11.5 acres.
The fifth grant of just more than $1 million will go to the city of Hagan to help pay for street, drainage, water, and sewer infrastructure needed to build 29 single-family homes on six acres.
In each case, the cities and local utilities will contribute financially toward the various projects.
The General Assembly initially funded the program with $35.7 million, and subsequently added another $84 million in three installments.
“Housing Georgia’s talented workforce is crucial for the state’s continued economic growth and prosperity,” said Christopher Nunn, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. “The OneGeorgia Authority remains committed to helping communities with a vision implement their intentional workforce housing solutions.”
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.”
