Georgia’s Broadband Availability Map shows areas lacking broadband service in light yellow. (courtesy Georgia Broadband Office)
ATLANTA – The federal government should give Georgia and other states more time to submit corrections to new maps that show where broadband service does not reach, Georgia’s congressional delegation urged in a letter Wednesday.
At stake is how the federal government allocates $42.5 billion in funding earmarked for bolstering broadband in the infrastructure spending bill Congress passed last year.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has launched an effort to more accurately map where broadband is not available. The agency is allowing state governments – and ordinary Americans – to submit corrections to the map.
“We believe that federal programs to support broadband expansion must start with accurate broadband mapping,” the Georgia politicians, led by Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Rep. Rick Allen, R-Augusta, wrote Wednesday in a letter to the FCC.
The letter contends the FCC’s deadline of Jan. 13 for submitting corrections is too soon. It asks the commission to extend the deadline by at least 60 days so Georgia, and others, can ensure the maps are accurate.
“We are concerned that this timeline … is too short for states to submit a thorough challenge petition in the correct and comprehensive manner as determined by the FCC,” the letter notes. The federal government released the full data set in November.
More than 1 million Georgians lack access to broadband, according to some estimates.
If the FCC does not extend the deadline, up to 220,000 areas that lack broadband, most of them in rural parts of Georgia, could be missing from the federal map, the letter states. That could reduce the amount of federal funding the state gets to build out its broadband infrastructure.
Georgia emerged as a national leader in accurately mapping the broadband shortage in 2020 when it published its own broadband-shortage maps, which showed the problem is more extensive than the federal maps indicated.
“Georgia has been a leader when it comes to these maps,” said Will Rinehart, senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah 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’s tax credit for video game developers is paying off for the state’s economy, according to an audit released this week.
The General Assembly created the video game tax credit in 2005 as part of a broader tax credit for film and TV productions. Eligible game developers receive a 20% income tax credit plus an additional 10% if they add the Georgia Entertainment Logo to their game, like the extra credit filmmakers get for displaying the Georgia Peach logo at the end of their movies.
An average of 34 video game projects used the tax credit each year from 2017 to 2021, according to a report the Center for Business Analytics and Economic Research at Georgia Southern University prepared for the state Department of Audits and Accounts.
While game developers used $26 million in tax credits during that period, their projects generated $389.5 million in economic output. Companies using the credit also paid $7.4 million in state taxes and $5.6 million in local taxes during those years.
“Based on discussions with industry leaders, this tax credit is used to retain businesses and jobs in Georgia rather than attract new companies,” the audit stated. “The credit has played a role in developing successful companies that are creating new technologies that are strengthening Georgia’s IT and entertainment industries.”
The credit is capped at $12.5 million per year, while no individual company can receive more than $1.5 million in credits during a single year.
To qualify for the credit, companies must maintain a physical location in Georgia, maintain an annual payroll of at least $250,000 for in-state workers, and report a gross income of less than $100 million.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – With the coronavirus pandemic at last under control, election-year politics dominated Georgia this year. Voters reelected a Republican governor and a Democratic U.S. senator in a wave of ticket-splitting that drew national attention. Here’s a look at the top Georgia stories of 2022:
January 7 – The father-and-son murderers of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick in 2020 are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The case led the General Assembly to pass a hate-crimes bill and overhaul Georgia’s 19th-century citizens arrest law.
January 10 – The Georgia Bulldogs win college football’s national championship, defeating the University of Alabama 33-18 in Indianapolis.
March 1 – The University System of Georgia Board of Regents votes to hire former two-term Gov. Sonny Perdue to become the system’s 14th chancellor. Perdue takes up the post in April.
April 4 – The Republican-controlled General Assembly completes the 2022 legislative session, highlighted by the passage of bills overhauling the delivery of mental-health services in Georgia, allowing Georgians to carry concealed firearms without a permit and cutting state income taxes by $1 billion.
May 20 – Hyundai Motor Group announces plans to build an electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Bryan Couty near Savannah. Expected to create 8,100 jobs, it’s the largest economic development project in Georgia history.
May 24 – Gov. Brian Kemp trounces former U.S. Sen. David Perdue by 50 points in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Democrat Stacey Abrams wins her party’s nomination for governor unopposed.
July 20 – The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upholds Georgia’s “heartbeat” bill banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The General Assembly passed the law in 2019, but it didn’t take effect until the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
Sept. 26 – The state signs an agreement with water supply systems in Gwinnett, Hall, and Forsyth counties guaranteeing water from Lake Lanier through 2050. The deal closes the chapter on a major portion of the tri-state “water wars” between, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama dating back to the 1990s.
November 8 – Republican Gov. Brian Kemp wins a second term, defeating Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock lands in a runoff with GOP challenger Herschel Walker.
November 16 – Georgia House Speaker David Ralston dies at age 68 after an extended illness. Two days earlier, the House Republican Caucus had nominated House Majority Leader Jon Burns, R-Newington, to succeed the ailing Ralston as speaker.
December 6 – Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock wins a full six-year term in the Senate after completing the late Sen. Johnny Isakson’s unexpired term. Warnock defeats Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Legislation U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., introduced last year aimed at curbing opioid abuse in rural America was signed into law Tuesday by President Joe Biden.
The Senate passed the Rural Opioid Abuse Prevention Act late last year, but the U.S. House of Representatives didn’t follow suit until this month.
The bipartisan bill, cosponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, will steer federal dollars toward rural communities experiencing a high number of opioid overdoses.
“Like so many Georgians, I’ve lost friends to the opioid epidemic,” Ossoff said Tuesday. “My bipartisan law will fund efforts to prevent and treat addiction and save lives. I brought Republicans and Democrats together to address the opioid crisis,”
“Today’s signing of the Rural Opioid Abuse Prevention Act is a critical step forward in our ongoing effort to curb the opioid crisis,” Grassley added. “This new law will help communities in Iowa and across the country handle any surge in opioid overdoses and prevent more Americans from falling victim to addiction.”
The legislation will identify current gaps in opioid abuse prevention, treatment, and recovery services for rural Americans caught up in opioid addiction through a new pilot program. Funding will go to rural areas to help implement community response initiatives focused on reducing opioid overdose deaths.
The bill was sponsored in the House by U.S. Reps. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., and Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – An agreement reached by email constitutes a valid contract the state must uphold, even if that means delaying the execution of a person on death row, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday.
The email was an agreement between defense lawyers and the state Attorney General’s office that capital cases would not move forward during the COVID pandemic unless certain conditions were met.
One result was a delay in the execution of Virgil Presnell Jr., the longest-serving person on Georgia’s death row. Presnell was sentenced to death in 1976 after convictions on murder, rape, and kidnapping charges.
In April of last year, a deputy attorney general and Presnell’s lawyers agreed – via email – that no executions could take place until six months after three conditions related to the COVID pandemic were met. Vaccines had to be readily available to the public, the state Department of Corrections must have resumed its normal visitation rules, and the COVID-19 statewide judicial emergency order must have been lifted.
The Attorney General’s office moved ahead and set Presnell’s execution for May of this year but provided only two days’ advance notice to his lawyers. They sued the state for breach of contract, arguing Georgia had violated its agreement, that the conditions had not all been met, and that six months had not elapsed.
Lawyers for the state argued the state cannot be sued because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which bars lawsuits against the state government without its consent. A Fulton County court judge sided with Presnell and his lawyers and blocked the state from moving ahead with the execution.
The state then appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, arguing the attorneys’ email agreement was not a written contract that could override the sovereign immunity doctrine.
The state Supreme Court unanimously sided with Presnell and his lawyers on Tuesday, finding the email agreement was a valid contract that the state violated by scheduling the execution.
“[T]he state has not cited a single case, nor are we aware of one, in which our appellate courts have adopted a per se rule that emails cannot create a written contract sufficient to waive sovereign immunity,” Justice Carla Wong McMillian wrote. “To the contrary, the great weight of authority has indicated that, as a general matter, emails may constitute written contracts.”
“Though it may prove inconvenient, uncomfortable, or undesirable to the state … everyone should be able to count on the state to honor its word,” Justice Charles Bethel added in a concurring opinion. “The state should keep its promises because the people of Georgia, who are the very source of the state’s sovereignty, are owed a government that honors its commitments.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
The state Public Service Commission held firm Tuesday on a 5,000-customer cap on Georgia Power’s rooftop solar program.
ATLANTA – The state Public Service Commission (PSC) approved a $1.8 billion rate increase requested by Georgia Power Tuesday that embraced most of an agreement between the agency’s staff and the company presented last week.
Commissioners slightly lowered the upper limit on profits Georgia Power will be allowed to keep and sweetened incentives to be offered to encourage the development of solar energy and the deployment of electric vehicle charging stations. But the PSC stopped short of more far-reaching changes proposed by Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald, who provided the lone opposition in Tuesday’s 4-1 vote.
The $1.8 billion rate hike – down from Georgia Power’s original request of $2.9 billion – will raise the average residential customer’s bill by $3.60 per month starting Jan. 1. That’s down significantly from the $14.90 monthly increase customers would have seen next year under the original front-loaded three-year request the company proposed in June.
Instead, customer rates will go up by 4.5% in 2024 and again in 2025 under the agreement between Georgia Power and the PSC’s Public Interest Advocacy Staff.
The commission set the return on equity (ROE) for the utility at the staff-recommended level of 10.5%, down from the 11% the company sought.
But commission Chair Tricia Pridemore amended the upper limit of the “earnings band” – the range within which the utility can earn profits for its shareholders without sharing them with customers – to 11.9%, slightly below the 12% Georgia Power requested and currently receives. The PSC staff had recommended reducing the upper limit to 11.5%.
“In the current environment of increasing interest rates and record inflation, it is important to hold the company close to current band levels in order to maintain the company’s financial integrity and the efficiency incentives to ultimately benefit customers,” Pridemore said.
The commission defeated an alternative amendment McDonald proposed to follow the staff’s suggestion and set the upper limit of the earnings band at 11.5%.
“All those revenues inside the band go to the company, not the ratepayer,” McDonald said.
The commission did approve one customer-friendly amendment Pridemore introduced increasing the percentage of revenues the company brings in above the earnings band that are refunded directly to ratepayers from the 10% contained in the agreement to 40%.
Commissioner Fitz Johnson proposed an amendment to provide 65% of the $81 million Georgia Power had sought for EV charging stations. The agreement had cut that allocation to just 10% of the original request.
The PSC also passed another Johnson amendment to charge residential customers participating in Georgia Power’s community solar program $24 for every “block” of power generated and charge commercial customers $25 per block. That’s less than Georgia Power wanted but more than the PSC staff recommended.
“Pricing at this level will allow participating customers the opportunity to support the development of clean energy as well as the opportunity to realize fuel savings,” Johnson said.
Finally, the PSC approved an amendment proposed by Commissioner Jason Shaw to increase payments to participants in Georgia Power’s rooftop solar program for the electricity they generate beyond what they use.
“This change will improve the economics of rooftop solar for [participating] customers and encourage the adoption of more solar in Georgia,” Shaw said.
However, the commission did not lift the current 5,000-customer cap on the utility’s pilot rooftop solar program, which solar industry advocates have complained threatens the financial health of their business.
Environmental groups also criticized the PSC for not expanding the rooftop solar program, particularly when Georgia Power customers will face a series of other rate increases over the next couple of years.
“Georgia Power customers should brace themselves because electric bills are on the rise,” said Jill Kysor, senior attorney in the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Georgia office. “Customers need more options to control escalating costs, like access to rooftop solar. By failing to expand [that] program, the commission missed an opportunity to let folks lower bills and to create new local Georgia jobs.”
Chris Womack, Georgia Power’s chairman, president, and CEO, said in September the company expects to file a request in February for unrecovered fuel costs to account for the volatility of the energy market resulting from factors including rising natural gas prices and the impacts of the war in Ukraine.
The utility also will be looking to the PSC to recover the costs of bringing into service the two new nuclear reactors being built at Plant Vogtle.
Womack said Tuesday the commission’s decision struck a good balance between Georgia Power’s needs and those of its customers.
“Since the start of the rate request process, we asked the PSC to set rates at a level that supports the essential, critical investments needed to meet our state’s evolving energy needs,” he said. “Today’s decision does that while also balancing affordability needs for customers.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
