by Dave Williams | May 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Federal disaster relief for Georgia farmers who suffered losses from Hurricane Helene should begin to flow before the end of this month, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Tuesday.
Congress approved $21 billion in assistance last December to help farmers recover from the disastrous impacts of Helene, which rampaged through a large swath of South, Middle, and eastern Georgia last September, as well as other natural disasters across the country. But the money has been slow in coming.
“Time is of the essence,” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., told Rollins Tuesday during a hearing conducted by a Senate subcommittee.
Rollins said she has visited Georgia peanut farmers since taking office in February.
“I’ve seen the devastation firsthand,” she said. “It is heartbreaking to witness it.”
Rollins said she expects a portal that will process grant applications submitted by farmers will open within the next few weeks.
“When we open that portal, hopefully it moves almost immediately,” she said.
Helene wreaked at least $5.5 billion in damage to Georgia’s agriculture and timber industries alone. Along with the $21 billion in federal disaster assistance put up by Congress, Georgia lawmakers set aside $867 million in the fiscal 2025 midyear state budget for response and recovery efforts.
by Ty Tagami | May 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – As a generation of teachers retire and their burned-out younger colleagues quit sooner, complaining about the workload and the pay, public schools have struggled to keep their classrooms staffed.
Georgia lawmakers thought they had found a solution, passing House Bill 385 three years ago. It allowed retired teachers with 30 years of service to return to the classroom with full pay and pension from the Teachers Retirement System (TRS), provided they sat on the sidelines for one year.
The newly deepened bench helped, but not much, a new state audit has found.
The number of retirees who returned to the classroom represented less than 1% of the state’s teacher workforce, said “Retired Teachers Return to Work,” a report by the Georgia Department of Audits & Accounts.
“HB 385 has had a minimal effect on the continued need for teachers and on TRS,” the performance audit said. “The number of full-time retirees employed each year (approximately 350) is substantially smaller than the statewide teacher population.”
One reason, said the report, is that requirements for 30 years of service and the one-year timeout are more restrictive than similar laws in many other states.
Georgia lawmakers adopted the one-year timeout because they didn’t want to encourage teachers to retire earlier, since that could have exacerbated turnover.
But school systems told the auditors that a waiting period longer than a semester caused retirees to find jobs elsewhere, for instance at private schools, or to get a taste of retirement and decide they didn’t want to work anymore.
With HB 385 expiring next summer, lawmakers started rethinking their plan. They proposed a slightly different approach during this recent legislative session.
Georgia public schools were short 5,300 teachers as of December. Senate Bill 150, sponsored by Sen. Billy Hickman, R-Statesboro, chairman of the Senate Education and Youth Committee, would allow former teachers to return to the classroom 60 days after they retire following 25 years of service.
Lawmakers did not advance the bill, but the Senate Retirement Committee did refer it for a cost analysis. It will still be in play when lawmakers return in January for the next session of the General Assembly.
by Dave Williams | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp announced Monday that he will not run for the U.S. Senate next year, turning down a Republican nomination that was his for the taking and throwing the race against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff wide open.
In a post on social media, the two-term GOP governor said friends, supporters, and Republican leaders across the country have encouraged him in recent weeks to challenge Ossoff.
“After those discussions, I have decided that being on the ballot next year is not the right decision for me and my family,” Kemp wrote. “I spoke with President Trump and Senate leadership earlier today and expressed my commitment to work alongside them to ensure we have a strong Republican nominee who can win next November, and ultimately be a conservative voice in the U.S. Senate who will put hardworking Georgians first.”
Kemp has been widely considered the potential Republican nominee with by far the best chance of defeating Ossoff. Other possible GOP hopefuls have been waiting in the wings to see what Kemp will do before deciding whether to enter the race.
Ossoff was elected to a six-year term in the Senate in a January 2021 runoff, defeating incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue. In light of Kemp’s reelection win in 2022 and Trump’s victory in Georgia last year, Ossoff has been considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate this election cycle.
Democrats jumped on the news as a major setback for the Republican Party.
“Brian Kemp’s decision to not run for Senate in 2026 is yet another embarrassing Republican Senate recruitment failure as they face a building midterm backlash where every GOP candidate will be forced to answer for Trump’s harmful agenda,” said Maeve Coyle, spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Senate Republicans’ toxic agenda and recruitment failures put their majority at risk in 2026.”
Republicans had been counting on a Kemp victory in Georgia to help build the party’s majority in the Senate, where the GOP holds 53 of the 100 seats.
Without Kemp in the race, Ossoff looks like a strong candidate for a second term. The Democrat’s campaign raised more than $11 million during the first quarter of this year, the most ever raised by a Senate incumbent in the first three months of an off-year.
by Ty Tagami | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The lawyer who secured the legal visitor status for 133 international students in federal court last week is seeking to expand his lawsuit to potentially include thousands of plaintiffs.
Charles Kuck filed a motion late last week seeking permission to roll his case into a class action lawsuit. It seeks to add Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a defendant, “challenging the legality of Secretary Rubio to coordinate the mass revocation of student visas without notice.”
The motion added that “Congress delegated the authority to revoke ‘a visa,’ but it could not delegate the authority to revoke all visas at one fell swoop.”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia issued a preliminary injunction in favor of Kuck and his clients, extending the temporary restraining order she had already issued against the administration of President Donald Trump.
The original lawsuit, which named U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as lead defendant, argued that the federal government had unlawfully revoked the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) authority for those 133 current and former students, stripping them of the right to work and barring them from re-entering the country if they happened to leave.
Calvert’s order required U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to restore the visitor status of the 27 foreign nationals who were attending a Georgia college or university or doing post-graduate work. It also required ICE to do the same for 106 similar plaintiffs in other states.
Calvert determined that Kuck’s clients had a good chance of winning their case by proving that the government had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” way against them. She also agreed with Kuck’s request to bundle the cases of the 106 plaintiffs outside the Northern District of Georgia with those within the district to reduce legal costs and the workload on the court system.
Kuck is using similar logic to expand his case to class action status.
A 204-page exhibit to his new motion, which was filed on Thursday, said 4,000 to 8,000 students had their visitor status terminated since March 24, “without due process, without notice, and in violation of the regulations.” It said a class action “is now the only avenue to keep from wasting judicial resources and the protection of the class members’ rights.”
It accused the government of unlawfully subjecting foreign student visitors to the risk of incarceration and deportation.
by Dave Williams | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia’s rural hospitals tax credit program is continuing to prove popular with Georgians who want to help financially struggling hospitals across the state in return for a tax break.
Taxpayers contributed $74.3 million to eligible rural hospitals last year, nearly reaching the $75 million statewide cap on the program, the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts reported Monday. Thirty-four of the 54 eligible hospitals received more than $1 million each, while 11 took in less than $500,000.
The General Assembly launched the tax credit program in 2017, allowing taxpayers to reduce their state income tax liability by the amounts they donate. The money goes to hospitals in counties with populations of 50,000 or fewer.
Taxpayers can designate a specific hospital to receive their contribution or, if one is not designated, a hospital is selected based on a ranking of need. Last year, the neediest hospital was Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Dahlonega.
Hospitals reported that most of the money they received in 2023 through the program was spent on capital projects or regular operating expenses.
The legislature originally funded the program with an annual statewide cap of $60 million, which was increased to $75 million in 2023. Lawmakers raised the cap again this year to $100 million, effective with the tax year beginning next January.
However, the cap on individual hospitals remains at $4 million.
The audit concluded that the Georgia Department of Community Health and state Department of Revenue have improved the process for administering the program over the years and generally complied with state law.
by Dave Williams | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – State Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, announced Monday that he will run for lieutenant governor next year, promising a campaign focused on fighting President Donald Trump’s agenda.
McLaurin, a lawyer, was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2018 before moving over to the state Senate in 2022. This year, he has railed on the Senate floor almost daily against Trump’s economic policies and defiance of the rule of law.
“One hundred days in, the Trump administration is tanking the economy and ignoring court orders,” McLaurin said. “But the Republicans running the state of Georgia are silent about Trump’s needless tariffs and his violations of Americans’ basic legal rights. Instead, Georgia Republicans spent the 2025 legislative session sucking up to Trump and trying to copy his destructive ‘DOGE’ approach to government.
“Georgia should be putting up every obstacle possible to Trump’s authoritarian agenda at the state level. And while we’re at it, the Georgia legislative should be passing widely popular policies that Republicans have been blocking for years: Medicaid expansion, restorative of reproductive freedom, common-sense gun safety legislation, and more.”
McLaurin scheduled a 3 p.m. news conference Monday at the Port of Savannah to announce his candidacy and highlight the expected impacts of Trump’s tariffs on supply chains.
He also released a list of endorsements he has received, including the names of seven state senators, 15 members of the Georgia House of Representatives, and several local elected officials.
McLaurin is the only Democratic candidate thus far to enter the race to succeed Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is widely expected to run for governor.
