by Ty Tagami | Aug 20, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Facing renewed pressure over his business dealings as he runs for Georgia governor, Republican Rick Jackson pledged to end his healthcare contracting with the state by Dec. 31 if he wins the election against Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Appearing at an Atlanta barbershop with a handful of supporters Thursday, Jackson also pledged to cut taxes and the state budget during an event billed as a partial reveal of his affordability agenda.
If elected, he said he would eliminate state taxes on the electricity and natural gas delivered to residences. He said he would gradually cut the state income tax in half and also eliminate the state income tax on tips, building on the limited exemption passed into law by the General Assembly this year. He said he would sign onto a federal tax credit program that reimburses taxpayers for donations toward private school scholarships as Gov. Brian Kemp did earlier this year. And he said that sudden spikes in gasoline prices caused by international conflicts, natural disasters or other emergencies would trigger eliminations of the state motor fuel tax for at least 60 days.
“Government should not collect a windfall when families are being hit [by an] emergency,” said Jackson, speaking at a lectern at Tommy’s Barbershop in Atlanta.
“Earn More. Pay Less,” said a sign affixed to the lectern.
Jackson said he knew about economic distress, having been raised by an alcoholic mother who waited tables for a living. He said he had never met his father and had been on welfare at one point, according to a live video of the event provided through a partnership with C-SPAN.
Jackson pledged to freeze the rising home valuations that are driving up property tax bills.
Property taxes fund local governments and schools rather than the state, but Jackson also said he would cut billions from the state budget, as well.
“There’s not a business in the world that I can’t cut 10% out of,” he said. “You can find waste everywhere.”
He said he would balance the cuts with increased revenue from economic growth and by updating software at state agencies to reduce waste.
“If I can’t do it, it can’t be done, but I’m going to get it done,” said Jackson, who founded and runs Jackson Healthcare, a staffing and workforce company based in Alpharetta.
Jackson has grown his business into a financial juggernaut that allowed him to pour more than $100 million of his own money into his campaign.
Some of that wealth came from doing business with the state.
The Bottoms campaign pointed to reporting Tuesday by 11Alive that said a subsidiary of Jackson’s company had renewed a multimillion-dollar contract to provide health services to a state agency. The contract signed by Jackson expires next summer, 11Alive reported, six months into the term of the next governor.
“Rick Jackson promised to unwind his state contracts at the same time he was cutting a secret new deal to make millions of dollars off of taxpayers into 2027,” the Bottoms campaign said in a statement the next day.
On Thursday, Jackson said that legally there was nothing stopping him from holding a contract with a state agency as long as he did not work for that agency. But he said any outstanding contracts could and would be canceled should he win the election. He said he wanted to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 19, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia’s longtime Republican state school superintendent is touting his experience to fend off his Democratic challenger, who calls herself a change agent.
Lydia Powell, an assistant high school principal in Henry County, wants to unseat Richard Woods, saying test scores indicate that schools need new leadership.
Woods, a former high school history teacher, is in his twelfth year in office, having served three terms alongside two governors. He said he needs more time to improve student performance.
As leader of the Georgia Department of Education, the state superintendent monitors academic performance and ensures school districts follow the law while spending state and federal funding that passes through the agency.
Woods and Powell answered questions from an expert panel convened by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education last week in Atlanta.
The urgent issues they discussed included the teacher workforce, state funding and literacy, the latter being a focus of state lawmakers.
This spring, Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Georgia Early Literacy Act into law. It requires new curricula and training with a focus on the phonics-based teaching methods that have been credited with accelerating reading skills in other Southern states.
The legislation also added $70 million to the formula that drives state education spending, enough to hire a classroom literacy coach in more than 1,300 schools serving kindergarten through third grade.
Woods took some of the credit, saying he had previously advised the Legislature to spend the money.
“Several years ago, I said, ‘We need reading coaches in the state of Georgia.’ The General Assembly decided to wait, and I’m glad they finally followed up with the plan,” Woods said, adding that he had already sent some literacy coaches to the lowest-performing schools using a limited fund controlled by the education department.
“I gave the General Assembly a number. They said, ‘That’s way too much,'” he said. “But lo and behold that’s about the number that they funded this year with coaches.”
Powell has been in education for a quarter century and is an adjunct professor in educational leadership at Thomas University, according to her biography on the website of Hampton High School, where she is assistant principal. She said she would improve third-grade literacy rates by expanding access to state-funded prekindergarten.
She pointed to English language arts scores from the 2024-25 Milestones tests that showed 35% of third-grade students scored at least proficient, meaning 65% did not. “We’re asking teachers to continue to remediate,” she said. “We can make some changes at that preschool level” to help them.
Georgia pre-K is not under the superintendent’s purview. Rather, it is administered by the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, whose commissioner is appointed by the governor.
But superintendents can use their position to try to influence the governor and lawmakers on policy, such as expansion of pre-K.
Another area that requires collaboration across government is the recruitment and retention of skilled teachers.
Woods said at least three times during the event at The Gathering Spot that he would bolster teaching ranks by pushing to increase pay for veteran teachers. A cap on the automatic annual state-funded pay raises for teachers takes effect after their 21st year.
Rural schools tend to have more difficulty hiring teachers, so Powell said the state should help those rural communities pay for recruitment incentives, such as housing subsidies and childcare.
Powell also said she would push lawmakers to give more funding to schools with high concentrations of poverty, adding that she would make her presence known at the state Capitol.
“You have to be loud, you have to be obnoxious,” she said.
Woods said his lobbying style had already proven effective. He noted the numerous failed attempts over the years to overhaul the state’s education funding formula, largely unchanged since the 1980s. So, he said he advocated for smaller changes, working with lawmakers and the governor this year to increase funding for transportation.
The fiscal year 2027 budget includes $38.5 million for new school buses.
Woods said his longevity in office has allowed him to cultivate valuable relationships, including with former superintendents from other states who, he said, now work at the U.S. Department of Education and will pick up the phone when he calls.
Powell pointed to performance measures, including test scores.
“We talk about being the number one place to do business, but we’re ranked one of the lowest to educate children, and I want to be the change agent in that work. I’ve seen too many students be left behind, too many families continue to go through those cycles of poverty,” she said. “Our eighth-grade math scores have gone down once again, and I know that we can make changes to that.”
Woods said he had assembled a “great team” at the education department and that he wanted more time to build on that.
He said a strong foundation in math and reading is “not negotiable” but pushed back against critics who say Georgia is underperforming.
Woods said eighth-grade math scores “were down a little bit” but overall scores rose.
Indeed, scores on the math Milestones tests reached record highs last school year in fourth through sixth grades and in high school algebra. The increases came after the education department implemented new math standards during the 2023-24 school year.
Only eighth-grade students scored lower, with their proficiency rate falling by 1 percentage point to 46%.
But the gains came despite relatively low overall performance.
Students are placed in one of four categories based on their scores, from distinguished at the top to proficient, developing and beginning.
The highest percentage of students who scored proficient or distinguished in math was in fourth grade, at 50%. That means half were not proficient.
Woods said the percentage of third graders reading on grade level was higher than the 35% that lawmakers and others, including his opponent, have pointed to. The state education board adopted a more targeted score, called a Lexile measure, that is extracted from some Milestones test answers.
Based on that measure, 65% of third-grade students can read at or above grade level, he said.
“Yes, there does need to be change as you’ve heard today, but working together, we can make that — instead of just a dream — we can make that a reality,” he said.
In that way, both Powell and Woods are campaigning as change agents.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 18, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Police at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport have ended a controversial drug interdiction program that involved stopping travelers on jet bridges, taking their tickets and searching their luggage, according to the organization that sued on behalf of two entertainers subjected to the encounters.
A spokesman for the Policing Project at NYU School of Law said Tuesday that the Clayton County Police Department had agreed to settle the lawsuit by entertainers Eric André and Clayton English, with the dismissal was filed Friday in federal court.
“It’s a major victory that Clayton County has confirmed that it has ended this program and is now taking steps to prevent this type of abuse from happening in the future,” André said in a statement.
English said he was wronged and that he decided to sue so it wouldn’t happen to other people. “We held Clayton County accountable, and now the county has confirmed that the program is gone and new protections are in place to protect travelers’ rights,” he said in a statement.
Clayton agreed to an undisclosed sum as part of its settlement with the entertainers, according to the Policing Project.
An officer who answered the Clayton County Police Department’s media line around noon had no immediate comment.
Barry Friedman, founder and faculty director of the Policing Project, said in a statement that the entertainers were victims of racial profiling.
“The data we have shows our clients and many others were singled out for unconstitutional stops because of their race,” he said. “This happens often when officers are encouraged to stop individuals, receive inadequate training, and have too much discretion.”
The Policing Project reports on its website that during the relevant period 56% of stopped passengers were Black while 8% of all passengers were Black.
André and English sued in late 2022 after they were each stopped in separate but nearly identical circumstances several months apart.
A federal district court judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding no constitutional violations. But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision last year, finding that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged violations of their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable government search and seizure.
That decision will guide courts and police within the 11th U.S. Circuit, which includes Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
“They clarified the rules on how to determine if someone has been seized at an airport,” said Nancy Glass, litigation director at the Policing Project. “So, I think it’s fair to characterize that as a landmark decision that’s going to have a lot of influence down the line on how police act and how courts rule.”
She said the decision could also influence courts across the country.
Although the legality of a search and seizure depends on the specific circumstances, Glass said this decision narrowed what the courts will deem as acceptable.
As part of the settlement, Clayton police agreed to equip officers at the airport with body cameras and to give them training on the constitutional limits governing police encounters at airports, according to the Policing Project.
The Policing Project and lead counsel Jones Day represented the two entertainers, with Canfield Law LLC and Krevolin & Horst LLC serving as co-counsel.
The case also attracted amicus briefs from conservative and liberal groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Cato Institute. The plaintiffs also found support from well-known entertainers, such as Tyler Perry and Jamie Foxx.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 17, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp on Monday suspended all seven members of the Dublin school board over financial mismanagement.
State law authorizes the governor to remove school boards that put their district’s accreditation at risk.
The private agency Cognia downgraded the Dublin City School District’s accreditation to one step from full loss last spring.
Then, last week, the Georgia Board of Education held a hearing at which state officials presented evidence about “persistent deficits” in the city system’s finances.
The problems were so severe that the district missed payment deadlines to the state for staff health insurance. The state Department of
Community Health notified the state Department of Education last summer that the Dublin schools had not paid any employer contributions to the State Health Benefit Plan for fiscal year 2025, totaling $5.6 million.
And in March, the Georgia Department of Labor notified the school system that it owed $435,798.32 in unpaid taxes, interest, penalties, and costs.
Officials also reported that Dublin schools failed to submit complete audits for four years in a row.
The state board recommended on Wednesday that Kemp suspend the Dublin board members.
Kemp can appoint temporary replacements. He empaneled a committee to recommend nominees.
Matt Donaldson, the education board member who represents the area, will chair the nominating committee. Two others are state lawmakers who represent the area: Sen. Larry Walker, III, R-Perry, the president pro tempore; and Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, House appropriations chairman. The final two members are former Dublin Mayor Phil Best and local resident Edwin May.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 14, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Florida man will spend 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in connection with a Ponzi scheme that bilked more than 2,000 investors out of about $380 million.
U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson sentenced Todd Burkhalter, 55, to the maximum allowed in federal court in Atlanta Friday after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in January.
Two of his associates had already been sentenced in connection with the scam, which Marlo Graham, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Atlanta, described as likely the largest Ponzi scheme in Georgia history.
Burkhalter, who is from St. Petersburg, Fla., founded and led a Georgia-based financial advisory group called Drive Planning LLC.
He and his associates used the firm to defraud investors between September 2020 and June 2024, according to a federal charging document filed in January.
“Burkhalter operated a massive Ponzi scheme in which investor funds were being used to finance a luxury lifestyle, pay off other Drive Planning investors, and make commission payments to Drive Planning’s agents,” said the document, a criminal information filed on Jan. 21 that accused Burkhalter of one count of wire fraud.
Drive Planning offered two investment vehicles purportedly backed by wholly owned real estate. The firm claimed that the plans used investor money to make secured loans to developers, with promises of substantial returns.
The biggest such vehicle, the Real Estate Acceleration Loan, promised quarterly returns of 10%, according to the federal court filing.
The firm had loaned less than $2 million to one well-known developer and then leveraged that to tell investors it had an enduring relationship with the developer, the charging document says.
Upon discovering this, the developer, who is not identified, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drive Planning in June 2023 and then sued two months later.
Burkhalter and his firm failed to disclose this to investors. Instead, they used money from one investor to pay off the next, encouraging people to deplete their children’s college funds, take early retirement account distributions and borrow money at high interest rates to invest in Drive Planning, Theodore S. Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement Friday.
“Todd Burkhalter lured investors to send millions of dollars to Drive Planning for investments that he knew didn’t actually exist,” Hertzberg said.
The act that landed Burkhalter in prison was clicking send on an email on Nov. 28, 2022.
The wire fraud charge involved a message from Burkhalter to the owner of a Maryland-based financial services company in which Burkhalter mischaracterized his firm’s relationship with that developer, claiming that there existed “wholly owned real estate which serves as a collateral.”
Before he was caught, Burkhalter skimmed enough to finance a lavish lifestyle. According to the criminal charging document, he used at least $2 million of his investors’ funds to buy a yacht called Stillwater, which he renamed Live More.
He also used more than $2 million in investor money to buy a $4.2 million condominium in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He chartered private jets and luxury cars, bought a motorcoach for about $614,000, two Land Rovers for nearly a quarter million dollars, and at least $320,000 in clothing, jewelry and beauty treatments.
As part of his sentence, Burkhalter was ordered to repay his victims nearly $234 million.
The court appointed a receiver to try to recover funds and sell assets to repay victims, according to Hertzberg’s office.
Earlier this week, Judge Johnson sentenced two Drive Planning employees: David Bradford, 53, of Peachtree Corners; and Julie Edwards, 59, of Cumming.
Bradford, the chief operating officer, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and the judge sentenced him to four years and three months in prison. He was ordered to pay $4.3 million to victims.
Edwards, the chief administrative officer, pleaded guilty to laundering proceeds from the Ponzi scheme and will serve two years in prison. She was ordered to pay $630,000 to victims.
All three were also sentenced to three years of supervised release after completing their prison terms, which will be served without possibility of parole.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 13, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — With healthcare costs continuing to rise, the issue could prove to be a potent one in Georgia’s upcoming election for governor.
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms has made it a core part of her campaign, blaming Republicans for refusing to accept Medicaid expansion as a solution.
Rick Jackson, her Republican opponent, agrees that rising costs are a problem, but he argues that increased access to commercial insurance is the solution.
A new survey of about 1,000 likely voters by the University of Georgia complicates the narrative.
Conducted in June for the Georgia Health Initiative, the survey found that more than 90% of Democrats and Republicans who responded had health insurance coverage.
Yet concerns about rising costs crossed party lines, with 54% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans saying they were very or somewhat worried about being able to afford their monthly premiums over the next year.
“Republicans on average, compared to Democrats or independents, tended to be slightly less worried about various healthcare-related costs,” said M.V. Hood III, the political science professor in charge of the survey. But he said he found remarkable similarity regardless of party affiliation. GOP respondents “weren’t quite up at the same level as Democrats or independents, but you’re still talking about a very sizable number of people here.”
Nearly three-quarters of Democrats and more than two-thirds of independents said healthcare in Georgia was not very affordable or not affordable at all. Fewer Republicans, but still just shy of half, felt the same.
Nearly half of Democrats and a quarter of Republicans said they had skipped or delayed care in the past year due to the cost.
Democrats were more exposed to the cost of private insurance — either through an employer or a personal policy, with a fifth of them on Medicare versus nearly a third of Republicans.
A minimal number of respondents, 2.5% of Republicans and less than 8% of Democrats, said their primary coverage was through Medicaid, the federal and state program that gives many low-income Americans access to healthcare.
That may be why affordability outranked healthcare as a major issue, with inflation and the cost of living being the top concern for respondents from both parties, followed by the economy and jobs.
Healthcare ranked third for Democrats, with 13% saying it was the single most important issue facing Georgia today. It ranked eighth for Republicans, with only 3% considering the issue that significant.
In short, ensuring access to healthcare for all is a bigger issue for Democrats, who were twice as likely as Republicans, at 86% to 43%, to say they thought it was very important for Georgia’s next governor to focus on it.
That may be why Bottoms portrayed healthcare in Georgia as a crisis while speaking at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce event last week. Her solution is to expand access to Medicaid. The federal government would cover 90% of the cost, but the state would have to pay for the rest.
That would hit the state budget. But everyone, not just the poor, feels the consequences when hospitals close or when emergency rooms are overrun by people using them in lieu of a primary care physician they cannot afford without insurance, Bottoms told the businesspeople assembled at The Classic Center in Athens.
She blamed Georgia’s Republican-led refusal to expand Medicaid for the closures of nine rural hospitals. “It’s not a Republican, independent, Democratic issue,” she said. “This is an issue that’s impacting the strength of our state.”
Bottoms also told the crowd that she had heard from small business owners this year about the rising cost of premiums to provide health insurance to their employees after the Republican-controlled Congress let enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expire.
Talking to reporters later, she leveraged the issue to attack Jackson, who built his personal wealth through the healthcare staffing company he created.
“I’m not mad about him being a billionaire,” Bottoms said of Jackson. “God hasn’t seen fit to make me one yet. But what I am mad about is that he’s got a healthcare company and he doesn’t want to expand Medicaid.”
Jackson pushed back, telling reporters at that same event that he had the inside knowledge required to reduce healthcare costs.
“I will guarantee you that we will have the most cost-effective healthcare plan because I know how it works inside out,” Jackson said. “I know what people do to game the system.”
Rather than standard Medicaid expansion, he said he would pursue a federal grant to implement what he called “an intelligent Medicaid expansion.” He said he would establish training programs that would give Medicaid recipients the skills to land a job providing insurance.
“I’m not going to measure our state by how many people are on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m going to measure how many people are on commercial insurance. And the way to do that is reduce the cost of commercial insurance.”
That plan may face headwinds if these newly employable workers wind up at a small company.
Firms with 50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees may see a median 14% increase in premiums in 2027, according to an analysis released last week by KFF, which reviewed federal data about preliminary rate filings by insurers across the country.
The nonprofit also reported that the number of people enrolled in the fully-insured small-group market fell by 41% between 2013 and 2024, down to 10 million.
Democrats and Republicans aligned on one nagging issue in the UGA survey: the lack of transparency in healthcare pricing.
At least 80% of partisans from both sides of the aisle said it was very or somewhat important for the next governor to make information about the cost of healthcare services more available.
Cindy Zeldin, a vice president with the Georgia Health Initiative, said focus groups conducted alongside the UGA survey indicate that people want to know in advance how much they will be billed for a medical service.
“That can really heighten the stress when you don’t know what you’re going to be charged,” she said. “That seems to be a stressor for people across the board.”
Hood, of UGA, speculated that consensus on the issue stems from the lack of an explicit price tag for demanding price transparency, unlike the public funding required to increase access to healthcare coverage.
