The boards of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) and the Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority Thursday named Jannine Miller executive director of the two agencies. The two votes came one day after the State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA) board appointed Miller to head that agency.
Gov. Brian Kemp nominated Miller for the three posts last month. Miller, currently director of planning for the state Department of Transportation (DOT), will succeed Chris Tomlinson as head of the three agencies.
“Jannine Miller is a great public servant who has distinguished herself as a leader in the field of transportation and infrastructure on both the state and national levels,” said Kemp, who besides being governor chairs the SRTA board. “She will bring an innovative approach and a deep knowledge of the issues facing commuters and those who move Georgia-made products through and beyond Georgia as she steps into this new role.”
Before joining the DOT, Miller served as senior advisor to then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Prior to that, she built a lengthy track record with the state, including an earlier stint at the helm of GRTA and at the head of the Georgia Department of Economic Development’s Center for Innovation and Logistics.
“Jannine Miller is no stranger to the GRTA board,” Sonny Deriso, chairman of the GRTA board, said Thursday. “The board is pleased to have the opportunity to work with Jannine again and have a leader with institutional knowledge and experience with GRTA’s work that also includes a vision for its future.”
Miller holds a Master of Business Administration degree in global commerce from Georgia Tech, as well as a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Science degree in community nutrition from Georgia State University.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia Power Chairman, President and CEO Chris Womack will take over leadership of the utility’s parent, Southern Co., later this year, Atlanta-based Southern announced Thursday.
Womack, 64, will succeed Tom Fanning, Southern’s current chairman, president, and CEO, at the end of March following Southern’s annual stockholders meeting. Fanning, 65, will become executive chairman of Southern’s Board of Directors.
“Tom has guided Southern Company through a period of significant change,” said David Grain, Southern’s lead independent director. “Under his oversight, Southern Company has delivered substantial value to stockholders and increased the dividend annually, while safeguarding the interests of employees, the communities in which the system operates and the entire spectrum of the company’s stakeholders.”
Womack has led Georgia Power for nearly two years, since the retirement of Paul Bowers, the utility’s former chairman, president, and CEO. Before that, Womack was executive vice president and president of external affairs at Southern Co.
The Greenville, Ala., native began his career with Southern in 1988.
“Chris’ leadership, vision and integrity during his career with Southern Company have uniquely prepared him to guide Southern Company into a new era,” Fanning said. “With our recent progress at Plant Vogtle and continued conversion of our operations towards net-zero emissions, I believe that now is an ideal time to transition to new leadership.”
Womack is preparing to take the reins at Southern Company as Georgia Power works to bring into service the first of two new nuclear reactors being built at Plant Vogtle south of Augusta. The unit is scheduled to begin operations in March after years of delays and cost overruns.
The Vogtle reactors are the first new nuclear units to be built in the United States in more than 30 years.
“It is an important time in our industry as the energy landscape continues to rapidly evolve and customers’ needs continue to change,” Womack said. “Southern Company is at the forefront of that evolution.”
Womack will be succeeded at Georgia Power by Kim Greene, 56, currently chairman, president, and CEO of Southern subsidiary Southern Company Gas.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The Statesboro area has landed a second automotive parts manufacturer in recent months.
Ecoplastic Corp. will build a new automotive parts plant in Bulloch County, a $205 million investment that will create 456 jobs, Gov. Brian Kemp announced Thursday. The plant will supply the huge Hyundai electric vehicle manufacturing facility being built near Savannah.
“We’re proud to welcome Ecoplastic to our growing ecosystem of manufacturers, logistics professionals, suppliers, and more, building on the record-breaking jobs and investments that are on their way to the Peach State,” Kemp said. “This great company … will find a welcoming community of hardworking Georgians and close proximity to our ports system.”
Established in 1984, Ecoplastic produces plastic automobile parts for original equipment manufacturers and other suppliers, including bumpers, consoles, trims, and plastic molds.
The Korean company expects to begin operations by October of next year and will be filling positions in human resources, finance, parts development, quality control, facility maintenance, injection, and paint production. More information on jobs with Ecoplastic is available at www.eco-plastic.com.
The Georgia Department of Economic Development worked with the Development Authority of Bulloch County, the Georgia Ports Authority, Georgia EMC, and the Technical College System of Georgia to land the project.
Two months ago, auto parts manufacturer Joon Georgia announced it will invest $317 million in a new manufacturing plant in Bulloch County that will create 630 jobs. That made it the new Hyundai EV plant’s first confirmed supplier.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Nearly 300 state employees erroneously received unemployment benefits totaling $6.7 million and averaging $23,700 per employee during the last two pandemic years, the Georgia Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported Wednesday.
In a letter to David Dove, Gov. Brian Kemp’s executive counsel, Inspector General Mike McAfee wrote that data obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor and the State Accounting Office (SAO) tentatively identified more than 280 full-time state employees who erroneously received unemployment insurance payments in 2020 and 2021.
The OIG has conducted about two dozen interviews with employees from across state government, nearly all of whom have been terminated, McAfee wrote.
“As Governor Kemp’s administration is acutely aware, the nearly $6 trillion in emergency spending authorized by the federal government to combat the COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges in oversight and accountability,” the inspector general wrote.
“An unfortunate side effect was ‘one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people,’ ” the letter continued, quoting from articles The New York Times and Washington Post published last year.
“Offices of inspectors general and other investigative agencies across the country continue to struggle with the sheer volume of incoming referrals. Unfortunately, this office can confirm that Georgia’s state workforce was not immune.”
The difficulties the Georgia Department of Labor faced processing a deluge of applications for unemployment benefits at the height of the pandemic have been well documented. State lawmakers were inundated with complaints from constituents over a lack of response from the labor department and subsequent delays in receiving benefits.
In 2021, the General Assembly passed legislation to create the position of chief labor officer inside the labor department who would report directly to the governor. However, Kemp vetoed the bill because the powers it would have given the new position would have put it in conflict with the constitutional authority of Georgia’s elected commissioner of labor.
While the OIG has referred cases of erroneous unemployment payments to the state Attorney General’s office for prosecution, the agency conceded it doesn’t have the resources to investigate every case.
To cope with such a large potential caseload, the letter recommends the General Assembly consider legislation extending the statute of limitations for prosecuting pandemic-related fraud and granting the OIG subpoena authority.
The inspector general also suggested the Georgia Department of Labor and SAO coordinate quarterly to make sure state employees have not submitted inaccurate or false applications for unemployment benefits.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s sales tax exemption on inputs used in manufacturing is a loser in the strict sense of its net impact on state and local tax revenues, according to a new audit.
However, the tax break more than pays for itself in terms of investment and jobs created in the state’s manufacturing businesses, the Center for Business Analytics and Economic Research at Georgia Southern University concluded in a report commissioned by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.
The General Assembly eliminated the state sales tax on energy used in manufacturing a decade ago, adding it to other exemptions on production inputs already in state law, including equipment, industrial materials and packaging supplies.
The tax exemption on all of those manufacturing inputs cost state and local governments almost $6 billion in tax revenues on average during each of the last five fiscal years, according to the audit. After accounting for the increase in taxes generated by economic activity related to manufacturing, the net cost of the exemptions totaled $2.7 billion per year, the report found.
But those numbers pale in comparison to the $122.5 billion in average annual economic output generated during the five-year survey period by businesses that used the sales tax exemption.
The audit found that additional economic activity supported 171,125 jobs directly with an average salary of $77,450 per year, and 424,333 jobs in total with an average annual salary of $68,909.
“The total net tax revenue only tells part of the impact of this sales tax exemption,” the report stated. “From an economic development standpoint, without the sales tax exemption, 2% to 25% of the overall economic impact would not have been retained by or relocated to Georgia over the analyzed time frame.
“Using the data from the ‘but-for’ analysis, there would be 3,423 to 42,781 fewer direct jobs in Georgia. The loss of these direct jobs would have reduced total employment by 8,487 or 106,083.”
The audit also concluded the manufacturing sales tax exemption helps the state avoid the “pyramiding” of sales taxes paid by the customers who buy manufactured products. Manufacturers typically pass on the costs of the sales taxes they pay to consumers.
Since pyramiding of sales taxes drives up the costs of products, Georgia manufacturers forced to pass on the cost of taxes could lose sales to competitors in other states that use sales tax exemptions to keep the price of their products lower, the report found.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp announced a new round of grants Wednesday that will send more than $235 million in federal pandemic relief funds to broadband projects in 28 Georgia counties.
When combined with significant local matches, nearly $455 million will be used to serve more than 76,000 locations across the state, many in rural communities most in need of high-speed internet access.
“Georgia is again leading the nation in identifying where the digital divide is the deepest and acting on that knowledge to improve service,” Kemp said. “These projects announced today will go a long way to helping Georgians in some of the most unserved and underserved parts of the state become better connected.”
The 29 grants range in size from $18.4 million going to Spectrum Southeast in Madison County in Northeast Georgia to almost $3 million headed to locations served by Comcast Cable Communications in Hancock County near Milledgeville.
The winning internet service providers applied for grants after the governor announced this round of funding last August.
The grant awards announced Wednesday follow an earlier round of funding last February of $408 million in pandemic relief aid. Together, the two rounds of funding are aimed at serving about 200,000 of the remaining 455,000 unserved locations in Georgia.
The state plans to open another round of grant funding for the five eligible counties that have not received grants thus far: Calhoun, Echols, Johnson, Miller, and Webster counties.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
