by Ty Tagami | Apr 15, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue announced Wednesday that he will retire from his job overseeing the state’s 25 public colleges and universities, ending a career that spanned more than four decades, from service on a local zoning board to the cabinet of President Donald Trump, with two terms as governor in between.
“As I prepare to retire, I’m grateful for our presidents, faculty and staff, our students
and the many communities that make up this remarkable system,” Perdue said in a statement. He did not give a definitive date, saying he would leave the post after a national search finds a successor.
Just over four years ago, on April 1, 2022, Perdue assumed leadership of a higher education system that now has a $12.1 billion budget, with 54,000 employees and 382,000 students.
Enrollment has grown during his tenure.
“Under his leadership, the system has seen record enrollment, modernized campuses and advanced medical education, including the launch of UGA’s new School of Medicine,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement, adding that Perdue’s time leading the University System of Georgia “has solidified a legacy of impact that will continue for generations to come.”
A native of Perry, Perdue attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Georgia, earning a veterinarian medical degree. He flew in the U.S. Air Force and owned an agricultural business.
He started his political career in the 1980s, on the Houston County Planning and Zoning Board, before making his way to the state Senate in 1991. He chaired the Senate Higher Education Committee and rose to the top rung for a senator as President Pro Tem.
In 2003, he made history by becoming the first Republican to occupy the Georgia governor’s office since Reconstruction, serving the maximum two terms. Trump, in his first term as president, then tapped Perdue as the 31st U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
After his pivot to chancellor, Perdue focused on affordability, eliminating a fee that saved students hundreds of dollars a year. He also restrained tuition growth, with students on average paying less now than in 2017 when adjusted for inflation, according to the system.
On Tuesday, the system Board of Regents raised tuition by 1% for in-state students and by 3% for out-of-state students.
Despite Perdue’s attention to affordability, critics noted that Georgia higher education remained out of reach for many from low-income households.
Georgia was among just two states without a comprehensive scholarship program based on financial need.
Lawmakers finally addressed that this year, budgeting $325 million as seed money toward a need-based program to be called the DREAMS Scholarship Endowment Fund. They placed the program under the control of the Georgia Student Finance Authority, but the idea started as a small fund in the University System of Georgia Foundation, under the leadership of Perdue.
The national search for Perdue’s successor will be conducted by a committee of the Board of Regents, with help from a consultant and from former Chancellor Stephen R. Portch and former Georgia State University President Mark Becker.
After they find a successor, Perdue, who has served as a foster parent with his wife, Mary, will have more time to spend with their four children, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 14, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Tuition will rise 1% for Georgia students attending one of the state’s public colleges or universities, the state Board of Regents decided Tuesday.
The regents also increased tuition 3% for out-of-state students attending one of the University System of Georgia campuses.
“With enrollment at record levels, we’re focused on limiting new financial hurdles and delivering real value on every campus,” Chancellor Sonny Perdue said in a statement. “Today’s decision reinforces that commitment.”
Tuition covers only a portion of instructional costs, with the state paying for 57%, according to the university system. It said students pay, on average, less in tuition now than in 2017 when adjusted for inflation.
The system also said the Georgia General Assembly’s new budget for fiscal year 2027 includes a $34.2 million “reduction” in enrollment-driven state funding. The budget, which awaits the signature of Gov. Brian Kemp, increased the state funding for teaching to $3.5 billion, up nearly $229.5 million from the budget approved last year.
The Senate initially sought to roll that back by $123.5 million, but settled on a $34.2 million reduction in negotiations with the state House.
The Senate’s reduction was aimed at online courses, which leaders in that chamber said should cost the state less than in-person classes.
Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said on the Senate floor on April 2 that the Senate’s move had been framed publicly as a cutback.
“Only in government can more money next year than this year be called a cut,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 13, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Georgia Democrat aiming to win the primary race for governor fired a broadside against a competitor Monday because of his previous support for a ban on abortion, one of the most contentious topics of the era and a galvanizing issue for many female voters.
Jason Esteves, who resigned from his state Senate seat in Atlanta last year to run for governor, said in an online event with reporters that if elected governor he would work to repeal Georgia’s 2019 law banning abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically six weeks into a pregnancy.
The law penalizes doctors who disobey, leading to cases in which pregnant women were refused treatment.
“Republicans have made it less safe for people to have babies,” Esteves said.
He did not say the name of one of his opponents in the primary, Geoff Duncan, who was a Republican and the Georgia lieutenant governor when that law passed.
Esteves, instead, let his former colleague in the Senate, Minority Whip Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, target “Republicans like Duncan,” who “passed Georgia’s horrific abortion ban, which has led to the deaths of black women.”
The sharpest attack came from Shanette Williams, whose daughter Amber Nicole Thurman, died after doctors, hesitant about the new law, delayed removing remnants of her fetus after she self-aborted with pills.
“The only thing I see when we talk about Geoff Duncan is him standing behind the governor of the state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp, as he signs the bill into law. I see Geoff Duncan smiling and clapping as if this was the right thing to do,” Williams said. “How is it that you can run for governor after you were a part of murdering my child?”
Duncan said in a statement that he had reversed his views on abortion, saying part of his path of switching to the Democratic party “was understanding the devastating situations that women experience and doing the work to learn as much as I can to make it right. I was wrong to believe a room full of legislators knew more than millions of women.”
He said that as governor he would try to overturn the abortion ban and issue an executive order clarifying that “doctors can practice medicine without fear of persecution.”
Although Duncan’s primary opponents might want to disown him as a Democrat, some in the party have embraced him.
Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, has publicly backed Duncan’s campaign, saying Republicans privately admit to her that the abortion ban was a mistake but refuse to say it publicly.
To reverse the ban, a Democrat must win the governor’s mansion, she said in a social media post Friday.
“Among my top priorities is repealing Georgia’s six week abortion ban and finally expanding Medicaid in this state,” wrote Au, a medical doctor. “We can’t do any of that if we don’t win. That’s why I’m supporting Geoff.”
Esteves had raised more campaign funding than any of the other Democrats in the race as of the last reporting period in February. He was just ahead of former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. He brought in double what Duncan did and three times as much as Michael Thurmond, a former DeKalb County CEO and school superintendent who won statewide races for labor commissioner three times starting in the late 1990s.
Yet Esteves has been trailing them in independent polls. He was so far back in a recent one, at 3.7%, that 11 Alive excluded him from a live debate scheduled for Wednesday among those other three.
Bottoms had a more than 20 percentage point lead over Duncan in the independent Emerson College Poll, and Duncan was a bit ahead of Thurmond.
The Esteves campaign pushed back, pointing to a poll last month, a few weeks after the independent one used by 11 Alive, that showed Esteves moving to second place with 14% but still behind Bottoms at 32%. It was paid for by a Democrat for Secretary of State. An Esteves campaign spokeswoman said she did not know why that candidate, Penny Brown Reynolds, paid for a gubernatorial poll. Before those two polls, a University of Georgia poll last fall had Esteves in fourth place with 3%.
Still, Esteves chose to target Duncan rather than Bottoms.
It was not the first time. During a televised gubernatorial forum at a Savannah church in January, Esteves criticized Duncan for his past support for the abortion ban.
Tharon Johnson, a Democratic strategist, said Esteves probably sees this line of attack as a way to boost his own name recognition at Duncan’s expense, in recognition of how toxic the abortion ban is among female Democratic voters.
“He’s also making this an important issue that will be discussed for the remainder of this Democratic nomination,” Johnson said of the May 19 primary election. “Other people have been saying it. Jason has just been the one that has been quadrupling down on it.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 10, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia lawmakers went home in a flurry of ripped paper, as is the custom at the end of the 40-day legislative session.
The shreds floating through the House and Senate included some of the 2,241 bills introduced during the biennial assembly that started last year, plus more than 3,000 resolutions.
Here is a highlight of some bills that passed, and failed, when the legislators finally decided to leave the Gold Dome after midnight on April 3, about an hour past “Sine Die,” the last scheduled day of the legislative session.
Some bills found bipartisan support while others were pushed through by the Republican majorities in each chamber. Gov. Brian Kemp has already signed a couple of measures, but most of them await his pen.
Consumers
The federal government will stop making pennies because the metal costs more than they are worth. House Bill 1112 would require that cash transactions are rounded to the nearest nickel.
Another bill sought to move the state east on the time zone map, out to the Atlantic. House Bill 154 would have kept clocks on the same standard year-round; no more bouncing back and forth by an hour. It did not pass.
Culture
The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk inspired the passage of Senate Bill 552, which would make it illegal for public schools that allow student meetings on campus to discriminate based on political or ideological content.
Other ideologically driven measures triggered many hours of partisan debate and failed to pass.
Senate Bill 74 sought to strip librarians of their criminal immunity from a law that makes it illegal to give “harmful” books and other material to minors.
Senate Bill 499 and House Bill 1324 would have ensured gun silencers remained legal in Georgia. Republicans contended silencers protect hunters’ hearing. Democrats asserted they make it harder to locate school shooters. “This body surely is aware that earplugs exist,” Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, said on the House floor when Democrats voted the bill down, assisted by the absence of 11 Republicans.)
The House also killed Senate Bill 175, which sought to protect Confederate monuments.
Education
House Bill 1193 seeks to improve the teaching of reading in kindergarten through third grades. The heart of the measure would give schools $70 million a year to put 1,313 literacy coaches into classrooms.
Teenage students got a bill that aims to help them, but in a different way: House Bill 1009 would ban cellphones in public high schools starting in the 2027-28 school year. The devices were roundly criticized as an academic distraction.
College students got Senate Bill 556, an omnibus education measure that snuck across the finish line the evening of April 2 (technically the final legislative day though lawmakers kept voting past midnight). The House commandeered the bill, which was about something else (a common tactic when time is running out) and stuffed it with other language, including a $325 million need-based scholarship program that had been in a different bill that did not pass.
House Bill 328 would increase the $120 million annual cap on tax breaks for donors to one of the state’s K-12 private school tuition subsidy programs. The Senate had sought to nearly double it to $225 million but settled for $150 million.
Senate Bill 513 would have suspended the driver’s licenses of chronically absent high school students had it passed.
Elections
House Bill 369 would require Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties to hold nonpartisan elections for county commissioner, district attorney, and other county offices. Democrats blasted it as a GOP attempt to cling to power in areas with a waning Republican electorate. Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell, countered that “the reason we’re doing this is because of that strong consolidated government, in order to make it safer.”
Republicans were able to agree on that bill, but could not converge on a solution to their self-imposed deadline to stop using QR codes to tally election results at polling places. Those will become illegal July 1, raising doubts among election officials about the conduct of the midterm elections Nov. 3.
Health
Pharmacists would be authorized to dispense contraceptives to women without a doctor’s prescription under House Bill 1138. Lawmakers also approved increasing the strength of THC dosages prescribed to patients, passing Senate Bill 220.
Housing
About one in four Georgians live in a condominium or home governed by an association that has the authority to levy fees and fines and then foreclose when owners do not pay. Senate Bill 406 would curb that power. Lawmakers decided not to counteract another housing force: corporate owners of rental homes. Senate Bill 463 died in the House in the last days of the legislative session.
Insurance
House Bill 1344 would increase fines on wayward insurance companies while cracking down on uninsured motorists and on fraud. There were numerous other provisions in the omnibus insurance measure that grew from a study committee last year and was a priority of House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington.
House Bill 506 would protect those with health insurance from outsized ambulance bills.
Policing
Senate Bill 443 would increase the fine for blocking a road during a protest to $5,000 and expose protesters to lawsuits. Senate Bill 443 would help de-escalate police encounters with people in vehicles who have autism by providing training and creating identifying license plates.
Senate Bill 542 would make it illegal for clergy to have sexual contact with people taking their counsel, much like existing law that prohibits such contact when there is a power imbalance. That law forbids sexual encounters between school employees and students, parole officers and their charges, hospital employees and patients, psychotherapists and their clients, police and those they arrest, and correctional officers and inmates with a disability.
House Bill 1409 would modernize the Georgia law that requires people who interact with children to report suspected child abuse. It would require the Division of Family and Children Services to establish a secure website for reporting. It would also make claims of sexual harassment or discrimination against a member of the General Assembly a public record if they were made after Jan. 1, 2019. Various Republican senators tried to attach what came to be known as the “Epstein amendment” to a half dozen bills. The update to the mandated reporter law became a vehicle for passage.
House Bill 1187 would end secrets around sexual abuse lawsuits. Trey’s Law was named after an Atlanta-area resident who was sexually abused at a Missouri camp along with other victims. Trey Carlock settled a lawsuit against the camp, but a nondisclosure agreement prevented him from talking about what happened to him. He died by suicide. The measure would prohibit settlements that contain such agreements.
Taxes
House Bill 463 would gradually reduce the income tax rate to 3.99% (from the current 5.19%). Senate Bill 33 would restrain increases in the taxable valuations of owner-occupied homes. It would also allow let counties implement a penny sales tax, with the proceeds used to subsidize homeowner property taxes.
Cities and counties can keep raising their tax rates as much as needed, but schools cannot and could have to start laying off teachersin a few years if Kemp lets the measure become law, their advocates say.
Both bills passed the General Assembly after midnight on April 3, hasty alternatives fashioned by Republicans after they failed to pass their top tax priorities. Senate Republicans had wanted to abolish income taxes. House Republicans had hoped to eliminate homeowner property taxes.
Kemp had asked to reduce the income tax rate to 4.99%, but the Legislature did not pass House Bill 1001, introduced by an ally of the governor.
But workers in Georgia are guaranteed an income tax rebate: Kemp signed House Bill 1000 into law last month when he also signed House Bill 1199 suspending the excise tax on gasoline. HB 1000 will give individual filers $250, heads of household $375 and married couples $500. The 33 cent a gallon gas tax will be in place until Georgians go to the polls on May 19 to vote in the midterm primary election. The amended budget through June, which Kemp has signed, also included $850 million for homeowner property tax rebates.
Transportation
That amended budget, House Bill 973, also included nearly $2 billion to improve I-75 south of Atlanta and state Route 316 connecting Metro Atlanta to Athens.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 9, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Among the more popular bills to pass out of the Georgia General Assembly last week was a measure that would make it more difficult for homeowners’ associations to foreclose on members’ homes over disputes about money.
Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, told fellow lawmakers during hearings on the bill that he had heard numerous anecdotes about associations that had abused their authority to levy fines, piling up bills that had led to liens on homes and then to foreclosure.
“You might have a rogue board member or a bad management company that wants a neighbor out or they want to try to get possession of that property,” he said at a hearing last month. “And they start fining and feeing people.”
Senate Bill 406 passed the Senate unanimously and it passed the state House by an overwhelming bipartisan margin. If Gov. Brian Kemp allows it to become law, it will put guardrails around the associations’ authority to fine residents and place liens against their properties.
It would require associations to register annually with the Georgia Secretary of State if they plan to collect fines and fees. It would limit the types of debt that associations could use to place a lien on a property. It would double the current $2,000 debt threshold for filing a lien provided owners are not in arrears for at least a year. It would require associations to upload certain records to the state and open their financial books to members. And it would establish a hearing process for disputes to be overseen by the Secretary of State.
Caroline Simmons has been in a long-running dispute with her Decatur-area condominium association over the cost of new water meters. She asserted that the meters were not needed and that the board had failed to follow protocol to contract for them. She then sued.
SB 406 would give her an alternative to the courts.
“It means I have someplace other than the court to go to be able to rectify everything that I believe that the board is doing in violation of not only our declaration but of Georgia law,” Simmons said in an interview this week.
She was among several homeowners who testified about aggressive association behavior at that hearing with Brass last month.
One man described a battle over the pavers he placed in the mud to give his pregnant wife safe passage through the yard. He said the association levied thousands of dollars in fines after ordering them removed.
Another man said he had spent $25,000 dealing with water runoff from a neighbor’s property. The association did not like the work he had done, which led to a costly legal fight. He called the associations “judge, jury and executioner.”
A real estate agent described how an owner was at risk of losing his home because he failed to respond to an association order to repaint his front door.
She said the man had been busy tending to his dying wife.
At a prior hearing in February, a representative for the associations argued that there was no need for SB 406. Julie Howard, a lawyer who said she was a volunteer for the Community Associations Institute, said there are over 11,300 associations for condominiums and homes in Georgia, representing over 2.5 million people — about a quarter of the state.
She said residents voluntarily chose to live under those associations and that Brass was hearing from a relatively small number with complaints. She said there were already processes to hold boards accountable, including board elections.
“We don’t think it’s good law to make law based on a few rogue actors,” Howard said.
But Brass said the existing processes had failed to protect the people who had come to him, and he described the protections in SB 406 as modest, with minimal burden on the associations. All they must do is spend $100 a year to register with the Secretary of State and upload some of their records, he said. He said the legislation scratches the surface of the problems but establishes a framework for additional regulation in the future.
Homeowners’ associations are effectively small cities, and require oversight, he said in an interview Thursday.
“I was trying to rein in the bad associations without punishing the good ones,” he said. “And I think that was as close as we could get it, for now anyway.”
by Ty Tagami | Apr 8, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When Georgia lawmakers went home on Friday, they left the state on a collision course with their own self-imposed deadline to change the way residents vote.
In 2024, they banned the use of QR codes to tally election results starting July 1. Despite lengthy hearings on the problem before the legislative session last year and during it this winter, they walked away without establishing a replacement system.
Election officials are equipped to use hand-marked ballots instead, but they say that system is only for isolated emergencies and they question the reliability for statewide use during the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
“We shouldn’t plan to have an emergency in November,” said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County and the president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration & Election Officials.
Beyond the logistics, the use of the backup system outside of an emergency may not be legal.
State law says election officials must let voters use an electronic ballot-marking system like the one in use now unless conditions make that “impossible” or “impracticable.”
The Legislature has not defined those words, but election officials have been interpreting them to mean situations like a power outage or a computer bootup failure.
The State Election Board, which interprets election-related law, considered amending its rules in a way that would have effectively allowed the paper-based backup systems to be used in other kinds of emergencies, like a legal one.
Critics, including President Donald Trump, contend Georgia’s voting system violates federal and state law.
Reasons range from lack of required secrecy — the touchscreen kiosks voters use to enter their selections are barely private — to the inability of voters to confirm that their vote was accurately recorded by the “Quick Response” (QR) code on the ballot they turn in after making their selections.
The computer system spits out a record of the vote on paper, in human readable text as required by law. But the system relies on an included translation into a machine-readable data format — the QR code — to tabulate the official tally.
The state election board declined to write a definition of “impossible” or “impracticable” into its rules. During a vote in December, the members tied 2-2, with two Republicans in favor and a Democrat and a Republican opposed. The Republican who voted against the measure said it was the Legislature’s duty to define the words it had written into law.
With the legislative session over, it is too late for lawmakers to do that before this year’s midterm elections, unless Gov. Brian Kemp calls them back to the Capitol for a special session.
But lawmakers failed to address the issue during their legislative session last year and during the three months that they were in Atlanta this year.
“If they couldn’t do it in two years, how are they going to do it in a few weeks? I have no confidence left in the legislators that are trying to decide what to do with elections,” said Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County.
She said she is worried about the midterms like never before in her 18-year career.
The current computerized system automatically deals with a logistical headache in polling places where people converge from different neighborhoods represented by different combinations of districts for city council, county commission, school board, the Legislature and Congress.
There are 90 ballot “styles” in Cherokee alone, she said, with as many as five at one of her precincts.
Dover said her biggest fear is that a poll worker accidentally gives a voter the wrong paper ballot. She said the odds of that go up as her veteran poll workers, many in their mid-70s, throw up their hands and say they are done with the job due to the uncertainty and risk. She said some have expressed concern about prosecution by a State Election Board that has become more zealous about election integrity since Trump lost the presidency in 2020.
The prospect of November “is a little bit frightening,” Dover said.
Marilyn Marks, one of the many advocates for the use of hand-marked paper ballots, said such fears are overblown.
Marks is sympathetic with election officials’ concerns about being blamed for screwing up an election conducted with hand-marked paper ballots, but she said the bigger risk is that Trump uses questions about the legality of Georgia’s current system to seize voting machines after the November elections.
They would get blamed for issuing the wrong ballot, acknowledged Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, adding that they think they would be held blameless if the computerized system they were directed to use were deemed to be illegal.
“That’s kind of looking at things a little too myopically,” she said.
Marks said poll workers are already trained to pivot to paper in an emergency, so it is not a stretch to imagine them pulling off an entire election without the computerized voting machines. Election directors would just have to pre-print ballots and get them organized, she said. Counties with more ballot styles could also use on-demand printers, she added.
About 4 million Georgians voted in the last midterm elections, in November 2022.
“I have a lot of concerns about how heavy this lift is going to be for us,” said Kirk, the leader of the association for elections officials.
He said he has implemented new voting systems many times in his career. It takes a year to do it right, he said, and he and his colleagues will have less than half a year after the primary runoff elections in June.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do our absolute best to try and serve our communities,” he said.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger oversees elections in Georgia.
He told lawmakers it would cost about $66 million to swap out election systems with three years remaining under the contract with the current vendor.
Some lawmakers said that was an exaggerated amount, and the General Assembly did not put it in the budget.
Even so, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said Raffensperger, who will appear on May 19 Republican primary election ballots as a candidate for governor, is confident that the state is ready for November.
“Georgia’s election directors will be ready to run an election, period,” the spokesman said in a text message.
The spokesman did not elaborate on why the office was so sanguine, but in November Raffensperger wrote a letter to the two state representatives leading a Blue Ribbon study committee on election procedures.
Raffensperger wrote that his office had successfully conducted a pilot program authorized by the Legislature to use optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to tally votes. The “double blind” count of the human-readable ballot printouts from the electronic ballot-marking devices produced 100% accurate results, Raffensperger told them.
In other words, the OCR count had matched the QR count.
Raffensperger concluded that the General Assembly should authorize and fund this method as a way around the 2024 ban, since that law only made the use of QR codes illegal for tabulation of the official vote. He said it would only cost $300,000 “and would save taxpayers $60 million or more for the cost of new system components.”
So, the Legislature left a loophole in 2024, and if the state opts to use it, voters will not notice anything different when they go to the polls in November.
