Rep. Todd Jones, R-South Forsyth, sponsored a bill in the House that would prohibit government agencies from requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination to access government facilities or services.
ATLANTA – The state House of Representatives gave final passage Thursday to legislation that would prohibit government agencies from requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination to access government facilities or services.
Last year, the General Assembly enacted a measure barring the use of a person’s COVID vaccine status to prevent access to government facilities, services or licenses. The law included an automatic repeal date of June 30, 2023.
The bill passed Thursday removes the repeal date, making the provision a permanent part of Georgia law. The bill passed the Republican-controlled chamber by a 99-69 nearly party line vote.
Senate Bill 1 continues a long debate about what role COVID vaccinations should play in public life in Georgia after they first began to be administered in December 2020.
“SB 1 is a simple bill. It extends in perpetuity the current law as it relates to the COVID-19 vaccination status by removing the sunset clause,” said Rep. Todd Jones, R-South Forsyth.
“The current law prevents government and all of its subdivisions, agencies and authorities from discriminating against citizens and denying services based on COVID vaccination status. I believe in [Georgians’] freedom and their liberty. I expect them to take all proper precautions just like they did before 2020.”
House Democrats opposed the measure, arguing the bill politicizes what should be a public health matter and expressing concerns about how it limits local control.
“This bill aims to eliminate the ability for government agencies, including public schools, to require COVID vaccination ‘as a condition of providing any service or access to any facility’,” said Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek. “The harms posed by bills like this are not abstract. … Bills like this tie our hands with respect to the response we can provide.”
“I thought local control was a huge thing,” added Rep. Shelly Hutchinson, D-Snellville. “When does local control matter?”
The Georgia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes the measure, according to a letter the organization’s leaders sent to the Senate Health and Human Services Committee last month.
“Permanently prohibiting schools from requiring vaccination could severely hinder our ability to combat the pandemic,” states the letter, which is signed by the group’s president, Dr. Angela Highbaugh-Battle, and legislative chairwoman Dr. Melinda Willingham.
“A permanent ban sets a dangerous precedent which may lead to erosion of the current vaccine requirements for school attendance for other diseases.”
Georgia has had 2.4 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 35,153 deaths, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health. Only 59% of Georgians are fully vaccinated with both COVID vaccine doses.
The bill now moves to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate overwhelmingly passed a $32.4 billion fiscal 2024 state budget Thursday that includes $2,000 pay raises for teachers and most state employees and $6,000 increases for state law enforcement officers.
The Senate spending plan, which passed 51-1, leans more heavily toward the budget recommendations Gov. Brian Kemp submitted to the General Assembly in January than the version of the budget the Georgia House of Representatives passed two weeks ago.
Senators restored a $106 million cut the House had made to Georgia’s Medicaid program with funds taken from the University System of Georgia.
The Senate is requesting the system’s Board of Regents to replace that money with carry-over funds from previous budgets. The university system has $504 million in carry-over funds, said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, citing a financial report released last fall.
The Senate also reverted to Kemp’s proposal to fully fund Georgia’s HOPE Scholarships program for the first time since the Great Recession. The House budget calls for funding 95% of tuition coverage for most HOPE scholars, reserving 100% only for students with high school grade-point averages of 3.5 or higher.
Tillery said the money for the $6,000 raises would come by reducing funding of state trooper schools.
“There is a learning curve as people exit training school,” he said. “If we can hang on and keep our already trained staff, there’s a savings long term.”
The Senate budget adds $40 million to the governor’s budget plan to address mental health staffing and facility needs.
Senators agreed with the House version of the budget to fund a one-time benefit of $500 for state retirees at a cost of $26.7 million.
As is customary, senators added some capital projects to the budget’s $600 million bond package. The list includes $7 million for construction of a military science building on the Dahlonega campus of the University of North Georgia; $6 million to design and construct a dental school building at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro; $6 million to expand the Hugh M. Gillis Medical Building at Southeastern Technical College in Vidalia; and $4 million to renovate and expand the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s medical examiner office in Bibb County.
House and Senate negotiators next will form a joint conference committee to negotiate a final version of the budget before lawmakers adjourn the 2023 session next week.
ATLANTA – Legislation aimed at moving ahead with Georgia’s long-delayed medical marijuana program cleared a state Senate committee Thursday but with significant changes from a bill the Georgia House passed early this month.
The version of House Bill 196 House lawmakers approved March 6 called for increasing the number of medical cannabis production licenses the state awards to 15, up from the current six. That would have let nine companies that filed lawsuits after they were denied licenses a new opportunity to compete.
But the Senate Regulated Industries Committee scrapped that provision from the bill after representatives of two companies already awarded licenses to grow marijuana in Georgia and convert the leafy crop to low-THC cannabis oil testified they will be able to provide more than enough oil to Georgia patients registered with the state to receive the drug.
Officials with Botanical Sciences LLC and Trulieve Georgia are currently ramping up their operations in Glennville and Adel, respectively, and plan to have cannabis oil available no later than June.
“It looks like we have enough capacity for up to 1 million patients already, and we only have 26,000 to 27,000 patients on the list,” committee Chairman Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, said Thursday.
The House bill introduced by state Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, also got pushback for essentially promising the nine companies that went to court after they lost bids for licenses that they would get licenses if they agreed to drop their lawsuits. Powell argued that otherwise the companies could tie up the medical cannabis program in court for years, forcing patients in dire need of the drug to go without it.
“We are not just statutorily going to award licenses to protesters that lost,” Cowsert said.
The Senate committee did respond to Powell’s criticism of the Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission, the state agency created in 2019 to oversee the state’s medical marijuana program. The commission has come under fire for delays first in awarding licenses and subsequently for a licensing process that prompted so many lawsuits.
A House committee passed separate legislation this week abolishing the commission and turning over responsibility for medical cannabis to the Georgia Department of Agriculture.
However, the Senate committee stopped short of getting rid of the commission. The bill the panel passed Thursday instead instructs the agriculture department to examine how the commission has handled its duties and make recommendations by Dec. 1 that may or may not include abolishing it.
The bill now heads to the Senate Rules Committee to schedule a floor vote next week. With key differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation, a joint conference committee likely will be needed to try to reach a compromise by Wednesday, when the General Assembly adjourns for the year.
ATLANTA – Legislation to overhaul the system used to compensate the wrongfully convicted in Georgia cleared a state Senate subcommittee Wednesday.
House Bill 364, which the Georgia House of Representatives passed early this month, would replace the current requirement that the wrongfully convicted find a legislative sponsor for a compensation resolution and instead turn over compensation decisions to a panel of experts.
“Every person who has been wrongfully convicted has to have a resolution filed and go through the whole gantlet of the legislative process,” state Rep. Scott Holcomb, D-Atlanta, the bill’s chief sponsor, said of the current process for gaining compensation.
“I think it will prevent any potential mistakes, of us getting it wrong, by having a panel of experts. We’re trying to make sure we get it right.”
Holcomb’s bill would create a five-member panel of experts in the criminal justice system, including a judge, retired judge, or retired justice; a district attorney, a criminal defense lawyer; and two attorneys, forensic experts, or law professors with expertise in wrongful convictions.
Georgians who have been exonerated of a crime for which they were wrongfully convicted could submit compensation claims to the panel, which would determine whether compensation is warranted and recommend an amount of compensation.
Holcomb told members of the Senate Appropriations Compensation Subcommittee such a process would prevent political considerations from potentially derailing a compensation award.
“Having your liberty taken away for 10, 15, or 20 years, not being able to be with your loved ones or have the opportunity to invest in yourself … I don’t want it to be subject to the politics we sometimes have here. This puts guardrails in place to make sure we make the right call.”
The original House bill set the range of compensation for the wrongfully convicted at $50,000 to $100,000 for each year of incarceration. The subcommittee approved an amendment Wednesday offered by Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, raising the compensation range to between $60,000 and $120,000.
The bill moves next for consideration by the full Senate Appropriations Committee.
ATLANTA – Georgia Senate budget writers approved a $32.4 billion fiscal 2024 state budget late Tuesday that restores the full funding of HOPE scholarships Gov. Brian Kemp recommended in January.
The state House of Representatives reduced HOPE funding in the version of the budget it adopted two weeks ago from 100% of tuition coverage to 95% for all but the highest achieving HOPE scholars, those with high school grade-point averages of 3.5 or better. The House budget redirected the savings toward health benefits for public pre-kindergarten teachers.
The lottery-funded HOPE program provided full tuition coverage until 2011, when then-Gov. Nathan Deal pushed through cuts prompted by both the Great Recession and growing student demand for scholarships. The coverage has been increased gradually since then and reached 90% this year.
The Senate Appropriations Committee also put its stamp of approval on Kemp’s request to fully fund the Quality Basic Education K-12 student funding formula for the second year in a row.
The 2024 budget, which takes effect July 1, also would provide $2,000 pay raises to teachers and most state employees, with $6,000 raises earmarked for state law enforcement officers, including those serving with the Georgia State Patrol, Capitol Police , Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the state Department of Natural Resources.
Senate budget writers determined that the state’s law enforcement officers have seen their duties increase the most among state employees during the last couple of years, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, said Tuesday.
The committee also boosted funding for an initiative aimed at ending the practice of “hoteling” foster children. Tillery said 14 of Georgia’s foster kids are currently being housed in hospital emergency rooms.
“That is not the highest care,” he said. “That is not the highest and best use of our funds.”
The Senate committee also added more than $40 million to the budget to increase staffing in the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities and gave the Technical College System of Georgia more money for its commercial truck drivers and nursing programs, two fields suffering particularly acute workforce shortages.
The panel earmarked $26.75 million in one-time benefits for state retirees and $11 million for a new program providing transit service outside of metro Atlanta.
The budget heads next to the Senate Rules Committee to schedule a vote of the full Senate.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s banks are in a strong position in the wake of the failure of two large American banks this month, the deputy commissioner of the state agency that oversees banks said Tuesday.
“The state of banking overall in this country is very strong, and that’s especially the case in the state of Georgia,” Bo Fears of the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance told the state Senate’s banking committee.
The problems that caused the collapse of Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) do not plague Georgia banks, Fears said, pointing to three major distinctions between the failed banks and Georgia’s banks.
First, SVB and Signature’s business was heavily concentrated in the high-tech industry. The banks were focused on serving fintech (financial technology) companies, venture capitalists who supported fintech, and cryptocurrency companies, Fears said.
“In Georgia, we don’t have that concentration,” he said. “We’re much more diversified. I’m unaware of any Georgia state-chartered bank that even banks a crypto-company.”
Second, 90% or more of SVB and Signature Bank’s deposits were uninsured, Fears said. No Georgia bank comes close to approaching that very high level of uninsured deposits, he said.
Third, like most banks, SVB and Signature were heavily invested in securities.
“When the interest rates were relatively flat, that was fine,” Fears said. “But within the last year, when there have been the interest rate raises, that’s created unrealized losses – so essentially paper losses in the bond portfolio.”
Just before its collapse, SVB liquidated a large portion of its security portfolio and the losses were realized – to the tune of about $1.8 billion. Public notice of those losses helped fuel the run on the bank and its failure soon thereafter.
Most banks have unrealized losses on their securities portfolio, like SVB did, Fears noted. But those losses – unlike in the case of SVB – continue to remain unrealized.
“Our [Georgia] banks have done a very good job of accounting for that interest rate risk by hedges or other mechanisms, so they don’t have that same exposure,” Fears told the committee.
In addition, since the two banks’ collapse, the Federal Reserve has established a program to provide the face value of securities rather than the lower market amount if a bank needs the securities as collateral in order to prevent an SVB-like situation from happening again.
That new program provides further guarantees that other banks do not face the same risks SVB and Signature did, Fears said.
“This is very different than the [2008] recession,” he said. “I’m very confident in the safety and the strength of the banking system in the state of Georgia.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
