by Ty Tagami | Mar 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A Georgia Senate committee advanced legislation Wednesday that would double the amount of money that families of teachers and other public school employees would receive when their loved ones are killed at school.
House Bill 105 would double to $150,000 the compensation for victims of violence “in the line of duty,” putting it in parity with the indemnification for police officers killed on the job.
It is an acknowledgement of the increasing risk of death in schools, such as the mass shooting last fall at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, said Sen. Bo Hatchett, R-Cornelia, who presented the bill to the Senate Education and Youth Committee.
“Through this legislation, our state will be able to better support families who have lost loved ones in their service of our children. We live in a scarry world and unfortunately this is a necessity,” Hatchett said. “We hope and pray it’s never used, but if and when it’s needed, it’s there.”
The measure by Rep. Will Wade, R-Dawsonville, would increase the $75,000 indemnification established in 2000, a year after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, which at the time was seen as a shocking and extreme development.
The payout would cover any school employee killed while working at school.
The compensation to families of police officers was raised from $100,000 in 2017 to the current $150,000. The money comes from a trust fund of about $3 million.
HB 105 would not increase the $75,000 payout to school employees who are permanently disabled by a shooter or other assailant at school.
The measure passed the House of Representatives 168-0 last month and passed the Senate committee by a unanimous vote. It now goes to the Senate Rules Committee before a possible vote by the full Senate.
by Dave Williams | Mar 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The Georgia House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed Gov. Brian Kemp’s $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 state budget Tuesday, a spending plan that prioritizes prisons and education.
The budget, which cleared the House 171-4, is smaller than the record $40.5 billion fiscal 2025 mid-year budget lawmakers passed last week, which used $2.7 billion of the state’s $16 billion surplus. The 2026 spending plan, which takes effect July 1, does not count on surplus funding, a recognition that economic headwinds likely lie ahead.
“Things are tight,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, told his legislative colleagues before Tuesday’s vote. “The needs are great, and many worthy causes are competing for the same limited resources.”
The 2026 budget includes $250 million in new spending on Georgia prisons, the subject of a federal audit last fall that criticized the prison system for failing to protect inmates from violence. To reduce the ratio of inmates to correctional officers, the spending plan authorizes hiring more than 700 guards, while providing pay raises to the current correctional staff.
The House version of the budget added $98 million in education spending above the spending recommendations Kemp presented to the General Assembly in January. Most of that increase would go toward student safety and mental health in the wake of last September’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County.
“School safety and mental health go hand in hand,” Hatchett said.
The budget provides $62 million for a new program called “Student Support Services.” Of that total, $19.6 million would go to hire mental health counselors for middle schools and high schools, and $28 million would go to school districts to help low-income students.
The spending plan also includes $10.8 million to hire 116 literacy coaches. Georgia students’ poor reading scores have prompted the legislature in recent years to emphasize improving literacy.
With such a large budget surplus, Kemp and the General Assembly were able to authorize a series of building projects in the current budget to be financed with cash rather than the usual practice of borrowing the money. The fiscal ’26 budget continues that practice for $545 million in projects, but the House spending plans calls for funding an additional $321 million in building projects through bonds.
The budget now moves to the state Senate.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Legislation that would regulate an alternative method for disposing of the dead is moving through the Georgia General Assembly, leaving astonished lawmakers in its wake.
“You’re blowing my mind here today because I didn’t know this was allowed,” said Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, chairman of a committee that heard Senate Bill 241 last month.
The measure seeks regulations for “organic human reduction facilities.”
It was brought to the legislature by Sen. Rick Williams, R-Milledgeville, who is in the funeral home business.
“It’s just human composting,” he said.
After testimony about how composting works, including technical details such as the proper temperature and duration to turn a body into soil, the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee unanimously approved SB 241.
“This committee never ceases to amaze me,” said Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, just before the vote. “Me either,” Cowsert said.
The bill then passed the full Senate 51-1 last week.
On Monday, it took a brief spin through a subcommittee in the House of Representatives, which sent it to the House Regulated Industries Committee in another unanimous vote.
The presentation Monday was brief after Rep. Jason Ridley, R-Chatsworth, who was leading the Regulatory Subcommittee, introduced Williams by quipping that he would be presenting his “Breaking Bad bill.” Ridley was referring to a television series from more than a decade ago in which a lot of characters die unnaturally.
Despite the wisecracks around SB 241, the bill is deadly serious. Operators would need to be licensed and inspected, and they would have to use the proper equipment, Williams said. Georgia has no rules around composting the dead, he said, adding that he wants to avoid a repeat of what happened in Noble, Ga.
That’s where authorities discovered a grisly scene in 2002: 339 bodies — or their parts — scattered around the grounds of the Tri-State Crematory in various stages of decomposition. A more recent example comes from Colorado, where nearly 200 bodies were found decaying at the Return to Nature Funeral Home last year, in a maggot-infested building with bodily fluids several inches deep.
The ghoulish nature of SB 241 troubled Sen. Frank Ginn at that February Senate committee hearing.
“It’s really scary,” the Republican from Danielsville said, adding, “I remember you brought the bill a year or two ago about dissolving people.”
Ginn wanted to know what happens to the composted remains, and Williams said the family can take possession of them, just like with the ashes that result from cremation.
As with cremains, relatives can have their loved one’s material mixed with paints used to create a portrait, Williams said, or they can have a company add the ashes or soil to shotgun shells, then scatter the remains across a dove field on opening day of dove season.
“You can send them to a pyrotechnics place and have them stuffed into fireworks, or you can scatter them, you can keep them, whatever you want to do with them,” Williams said.
The byproduct of properly composted bodies is perfectly sanitary and safe, he said. Testimony from one person who’d visited a proper composting facility said it smelled like a feed store.
The graphic detail prompted gallows humor.
“You all know how you get a song stuck in your head some days and it just won’t go out?” Cowsert asked. “I got dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones in my head.” (It was a reference to an early 20th century song by The Delta Rhythm Boys.)
“Well,” Williams shot back, “how about Randy Travis’ Diggin up Bones?”
by Ty Tagami | Mar 10, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Drivers in Georgia would be able to leave home without their wallet, so long as they bring their smartphone, if legislation that seeks to require police to accept a digital version of drivers’ licenses becomes law.
House Bill 296 passed the Georgia House of Representatives by a wide bipartisan majority last week, and on Monday a Senate committee hit the accelerator on the bill.
“I think it’s a great and smart use of technology,” said Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell, chairman of the Senate Public Safety Committee, which voted unanimously to move HB 296 to the Senate Rules Committee to schedule a possible vote by the full Senate.
A similar measure passed the House last year with broad support but stalled in the Senate. A Senate committee passed the measure, but it never got a vote on the Senate floor.
Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, the chief sponsor of HB 296, said about 450,000 Georgians are already using an official Georgia drivers’ license in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. So far though, the identification is only accepted by the Transportation Security Administration at airports.
HB 296 wouldn’t expand the use beyond police officers in traffic stops. It doesn’t mention using digital identification at bars to confirm age, for instance, and it specifically excludes their use in polling places.
That last element about polling places was absent from last year’s version, House Bill 1001. The polling place exclusion in this year’s version may make lawmakers more comfortable with the idea, given the concerns about election security in recent years.
The only holdup at this point is ensuring that all police officers have a smartphone equipped to validate a digital license. The validation works by tapping phones, like in the supermarket checkout line. Officers don’t want to have to carry a driver’s phone back to their cruiser to verify identity, Gaines said, so a device they can carry to the driver’s side door is key.
The technology already exists.
“Any officer with an iPhone can now just scan a driver’s license and verify that information,” Gaines said.
The bill includes a requirement that law enforcement agencies equip their officers with the necessary devices by July 2027, though Gaines said that date could be pushed back if agencies encounter problems.
The legislation also says officers could not search a driver’s phone for other information simply because the driver handed it over for license verification. And it clarifies that drivers could still use a traditional analog license during a stop.
Gaines advised drivers to carry both even if this measure becomes law.
by Dave Williams | Mar 10, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia House budget writers approved Gov. Brian Kemp’s $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 budget Monday, a spending plan that emphasizes the needs of the state prison system.
The budget, which takes effect July 1, builds on the mid-year budget the General Assembly adopted last week, which added $345 million in new spending on prisons. The fiscal ’26 spending plan antes up another $250 million for a prison system that was blasted in a federal audit last fall for failing to protect inmates from widespread violence.
“It (is) a historic infusion of cash, highlighting the sense of urgency,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, told committee members before Monday’s vote.
The $250 million increase for prisons includes $125 million Kemp recommended to the legislature in January and $125 million added by the House. The money would go to hire more correctional officers to lower the ratio of inmates to staff, give those officers a pay raise, and provide temporary space for inmates inside new modular units to make way for repairs and renovations at existing prisons.
Education is another main driver in the fiscal ’26 budget, with the House adding $98 million to the governor’s spending recommendations. Of that total, $60 million would go toward student support services, including $20 million in grants to hire mental-health counselors for Georgia middle schools and $28 million to support students from low-income families.
Another $25 million would go toward school safety initiatives, which already received a major boost in the $40.5 billion mid-year budget. The House also earmarked $10 million to hire more literacy coaches.
Other big-ticket items include $32 million in increased reimbursement fees for health-care providers serving Medicaid patients and $8.3 million to bolster the state’s graduate medical education program.
The full House is expected to take up the budget later this week.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
Marijuana has been a major topic in the Georgia Senate this legislative session, with three bills passing the chamber just ahead of the deadline Thursday to keep them in play this year.
Two of the measures, Senate Bill 33 and Senate Bill 254, seek to restrict what’s legally available at convenience stores and smoke shops.
The third, Senate Bill 220, would expand and modify access to medical marijuana.
That measure by Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, would increase the allowed legal concentration of cannabidiol in dispensed medical cannabis tenfold, to 50%, while reducing the amount of medical cannabis one can legally possess by the same factor, to two ounces.
The net result is a higher concentration of cannabidiol per dose with the same total limit on possession. Cannabidiol is the non-psychoactive ingredient associated with the relief of pain and other symptoms of disease.
Brass, chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee, said he had concerns about the health effects of vaping, which is a popular way of consuming the substance, but he said he was balancing that against patients’ need for immediate relief.
“They may need this medicine to work a little bit faster than one hour or two hours,” he said.
SB 220 would also add cancer and Lupus to conditions for which medical cannabis can be prescribed, and it would strike the current requirement that other allowable conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, be severe or end stage. And it would allow pharmacies to dispense medical cannabis to parents and the designated caregivers for adults.
All of this was too much for some of Brass’s fellow Republicans.
Sen. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, said long-term marijuana use has a “massive” impact on health and brain function.
“The density of marijuana we’re talking about here is about getting people stoned,” he said.
Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, the Senate majority whip, called medical marijuana a “gateway drug.”
SB 220 still passed 39-17, with help from Democrats.
Another measure, SB 33, faced minimal resistance. The bill by Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, R-Marietta, would add certain “intoxicating cannabinoids” to current regulation of the sale of Delta-9.
That substance is legally available at convenience stores and smoke shops when the THC concentration is below 0.3%.
SB 33 would add Delta-8, Delta-10 and Delta 11 to that cap as well as to the mandate for random state inspections of consumable hemp products.
Kirkpatrick, an orthopedic hand surgeon, said her bill would increase consumer safety. She said there are producers in China and elsewhere who may be polluting their product with industrial solvents, heavy metals and other contaminants.
“It’s a consumer protection bill that is not intended to impact processors that are already testing and labeling their products appropriately,” Kirkpatrick said.
The measure passed 50-6.
A third measure, Senate Bill 254, brought chaos to the Senate floor after a major amendment.
The bill originally intended to limit the amount of THC (the ingredient that causes a high) in consumable hemp products, such as gummies, tinctures and drinks.
But an amendment on the Senate floor introduced a ban on the sale of all beverages containing THC.
The measure passed 42-14, with Democrats and Republicans on both sides.
All three bills are now awaiting action by the state House of Representatives, which has until April 4 to act on them during this legislative session.
