ATLANTA — Among Gov. Brian Kemp’s $300 million worth of vetoes this week were money for reforestation, land conservation, historic building restoration, the arts and live performances and short-line railroads.
The reason he gave in most instances: “The General Assembly failed to account for this loss of revenue in the appropriations process, instead prioritizing general taxpayer relief.”
He had called for a reduction of the state income tax to 4.99% from 5.19% this year, building that into the budget. But the General Assembly went further.
House Bill 463 not only drops the rate to 4.99% this year but will continue dropping it an eighth of a percentage point each year for eight years, if state revenues continue to grow.
The new law, which Kemp supported despite the impact on the budget, also increased standard deductions. They rise 25% this year and are scheduled to go up an eighth as much each year over the next eight years. The law also waived some overtime pay and cash tips and increased the amount of retirement income excluded from taxation for Georgians 65 and older.
All of this affected the budget lawmakers passed for the fiscal year that starts in July. They wanted to spend at least $1 billion more than the state is expecting to collect.
So on Tuesday Kemp used his line-item veto authority to cut $300 million in new spending.
“We had to do a little fine-tuning to make sure that we can pay for all those tax cuts,” he said before he signed the 156-page budgeton Tuesday.
Kemp’s budget team expects increasing revenue collections to close some part of the rest of the gap. If not, Georgia’s next governor and Legislature will have to balance the budget with cuts or by spending down some of the billions in remaining reserves.
That’s a worry for down the road.
But there was an immediate impact of those income tax cuts in the newly passed tax credits and exemptions that Kemp vetoed.
House Bill 376 would have doubled to $60 million the cap in tax credits for restoring historic buildings.
House Bill 1070 would have increased the tax credit for maintenance of short-line railroads that connect industrial sites with major railways. The current $3,500 credit per mile of track expires at year’s end, and the legislation Kemp deleted would have extended it through 2027 while increasing it to $5,000.
Efficient railways drive shipping costs, so deferred maintenance could eventually affect consumers.
House Bill 1077 would have extended for five years the existing sales tax exemptions for fine arts performances and museum exhibitions that expire at the end of 2027.
This could affect ticket prices for the symphony, art exhibits and other events, including the Georgia National Fair at the Georgia National Fairgrounds and Agricenter, which the bill sought to include in the exemption.
Senate Bill 478 would have increased to 60% from the current 40% the amount of sales tax revenue from outdoor recreational equipment sales that go to the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Trust Fund.
Money from the fund helps to acquire lands that are critical to wildlife and clean water and for outdoor recreation. And it pays for parks and trails.
Kemp also vetoed House Bill 14, which would have established a Georgia Music Office to promote the growth of the industry. And he struck out House Bill 519, which would have created a $10 million annual taxpayer credit to match the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Kemp wrote that the federal tax credit does not yet exist, so Georgia does not need HB 519.
Among the large line items he vetoed was Senate Bill 59. The measure sought to further buttress the state’s efforts to address timber lost from Hurricane Helene in 2024.
Georgia had allocated $200 million toward that project, but timber producers have already absorbed the money. SB 59 would have added another $50 million for them, raising the cap to $250 million.
ATLANTA — Alleging racism, Black Georgia lawmakers assailed Gov. Brian Kemp’s call for a special session to redraw election maps, saying Republicans want to drag the state back to the era before the civil rights movement.
“It’s despicable that Georgia is following this racist playbook and taking us back to Jim Crow,” said Sen. Nikki Merritt, D-Grayson, chair of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus.
The Democratic lawmakers who met outside the Capitol Thursday were reacting to the Republican governor’s signing of a proclamation Wednesday that calls lawmakers back to the Capitol on June 17.
They will contend with two election-related issues.
Kemp asked them to address the July 1 deadline they set two years ago to cease using QR codes for tallying votes. Despite meeting for two regular legislative sessions since passing that law, the Legislature has neither authorized nor funded an alternative process.
Kemp also is convening them to redraw voting districts after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a new majority-Black district in Louisiana. The April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raised questions about future legal interpretations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a legacy of civil rights protests.
The Black leaders gathered at Liberty Plaza, next to the Gold Dome and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Christopher Bruce, with the ACLU of Georgia, referenced the road’s namesake along with others who had marched with him and had beaten and bloodied for it.
“Our ancestors did not die for us not to fight now,” he said.
Merritt and the others called for protesters to fill the streets and to turn out for upcoming elections. The primary is May 19 and the general election is Nov. 3.
She also called on leading businesses and the chambers of commerce to rally against the redistricting, recalling the historic alliance between white and Black leaders and business interests in Atlanta.
Atlanta was known as “the city too busy to hate,” she noted, setting it apart from the rest of the South and putting it on a prosperous path that she said was now in jeopardy. The state’s image and its ability to attract international investors are at risk, she said.
Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, the state Senate minority leader, said Republicans see the electoral tide turning against them, have run out of ideas, and are “dusting off the same playbook of racial hate, fear, and racial divisiveness.”
He observed that lawmakers will be returning to the Capitol amid the throngs of soccer fans who will come to Atlanta for the World Cup.
The Republican-led General Assembly will be on a world stage, he said. Viewers “will see that the Republicans have opted to continue racial oppression,” he said. “And they will see protests and they will see stories about the old South and racial divisions.”
ATLANTA — Democrats reacted angrily to Gov. Brian Kemp’s call Wednesday to rewrite electoral district lines after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April.
Kemp, a Republican, ordered a special legislative session for June 17 to redraw election maps after the high court ruled last month in Louisiana v. Callais that a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana was unconstitutional.
That raised questions about future legal interpretations of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened protections for Black and other minority voters by barring practices that diluted their votes.
Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and other Southern states moved to redraw district lines after the ruling.
Democrats in Georgia said Kemp’s decision to join the rush is further evidence that Republicans fear they can no longer win elections.
“When Republicans can’t win elections, they first lie about fraud,” Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, the Georgia Senate minority leader, said in a statement. “Then they beg Republican judges to save them from democracy’s verdict. Finally, they make new rules to help them win next time.”
He called Republicans “drunk-on-power bullies” who “don’t give a damn what voters want.”
Earlier this week, Kemp also signed House Bill 369, which will require five metro Atlanta counties — Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — to hold nonpartisan elections for county commissioners, district attorney, and other county offices.
Democrats saw that as a move to undercut the increasing Democratic vote in those counties.
On April 1, Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett wrote Kemp asking him to veto the bill. Fulton commissioners hold undeniably partisan offices, she reasoned, since they both fund the county elections board and appoint members to it.
“Because our work absolutely has political implications, it is critical that voters understand the party affiliations of the county commissioners on their ballot,” she wrote.
Barrett noted that Kemp had rejected President Donald Trump’s call in 2020 to help overturn the election results in Georgia that had Trump narrowly losing to Joe Biden: “Governor, you stood up for the will of the people in 2020, I’m asking you to stand up for the will of the people again.”
The Georgia General Assembly’s failure to address a deadline of its own making played into Kemp’s decision. The special session he called is also supposed to address a July 1 deadline to stop using Quick Response (QR) barcodes when tallying votes in Georgia elections.
State Republicans created the deadline when they passed a 2024 law banning the QR codes. In the subsequent two legislative sessions, they did not adopt an alternative.
The death last month of U.S. Rep. David Scott, a metro Atlanta Democrat, triggered a special election in July, leaving little time to address the issue.
The Georgia House Democrats’ caucus issued a press release that accused Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a GOP candidate for governor, of ensuring a special legislative session by failing to allow a vote on legislation that would have addressed the July 1 deadline.
The House passed a bill that would have moved that deadline back two years. The Senate did not vote on it as the legislative session came to an end in the early morning hours of April 3.
Now, the GOP is using the issue to justify a special legislative session, House Democrats said, adding that the rush before the upcoming elections illustrates why the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress six decades ago.
“The speed and urgency that Republicans have moved to redraw maps to lock-in single-party rule, indefinitely, shows why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place,” the House Democrats wrote.
The QR code issue will not be an easy one to fix. Groups such as the Coalition for Good Governance have sued Georgia in the past over the way the state conducts elections. They contend that the voting machines violate federal and state laws that predate the 2024 law banning QR codes.
The Coalition recently petitioned the State Election Board to mandate the use of hand-marked paper ballots for the November general election. The board rejected the petition.
Local election officials have said that they do not have enough time to switch from the current digital system.
The Legislature will have even less time to address the issue when they meet in July.
“These things should have changed long ago,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition.
ATLANTA — Edwin Brant Frost IV faces a long stretch in prison and a demand to repay millions of dollars to investors after he pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud in connection with what prosecutors called a “classic” Ponzi scheme.
The plea agreement signed Tuesday by Frost, the former owner and president of the defunct First Liberty Building and Loan, estimated the loss at somewhere between $65 million and $150 million.
“The Defendant agrees to pay full restitution, plus applicable interest” to the victims, said the document, which Frost signed in court before U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May of the Northern District of Georgia.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Angela Adams and Samir Kaushal handled the case, and are recommending 14 years in prison. The maximum for the crime is 20 years.
U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg and Adams filed a wire fraud charge against Frost on April 23. They alleged that he violated the law when he wired money between First Liberty accounts in November 2023, well after the company was underwater financially.
By 2021, the court document said, First Liberty had ceased generating enough revenue to pay the interest it owed investors, so Frost recruited new investors and used their money to pay the interest.
Frost went on to raise at least $140 million from at least 300 investors, the court record said, and paid himself and his family over $5 million. Examples given of his use of investor money included $230,000 to rent a vacation home in Maine, $140,000 on jewelry and $2 million on credit card bills.
Frost also used investor funds to make $570,000 in political contributions, the prosecutors wrote.
Frost and his family were major donors to Republicans. His son, Brant Frost V, was chairman of the Coweta County Republican Party.
In July, after the federal Securities and Exchange Commission sued First Liberty alleging it had operated as a Ponzi scheme while donating money to political campaigns, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asked recipients to return any contributions.
Later that month, state GOP Chairman Josh McKoon announced that his party had delivered $36,844.
Last month, Raffensperger said a bank associated with First Liberty had pledged to repay nearly $6.7 million to 46 investors.
As part of his plea deal, Frost agreed to cooperate with any further investigations or court proceedings. He is to be sentenced in Judge May’s courtroom in Newnan on Aug. 14.
ATLANTA — Georgia lawmakers will return to the state Capitol on June 17 to contend with two election-related issues under an order signed Wednesday by Gov. Brian Kemp.
The proclamation requires the General Assembly to convene for a special session to consider redrawing legislative districts, pointing to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in April that invalidated a new majority-Black legislative district in Louisiana.
The order also calls on the Legislature to address a lingering problem with the state’s voting process.
Georgia’s current voting process will become illegal July 1 under a 2024 state law that banned the use of Quick Response barcodes, known as QR codes, for tallying votes. Despite meeting for two regular legislative sessions since passing that law, state lawmakers have neither authorized nor funded an alternative process.
The death last month of U.S. Rep. David Scott, a metro Atlanta Democrat, triggered a special election in July, leaving little time to address the issue.
Kemp’s proclamation calls lawmakers to the Gold Dome at 2 p.m. on June 17, the day after any necessary runoff elections to decide the outcome of the May 19 primary elections.
By then, some lawmakers who return to the Capitol will know that they lost and will be out of office next year.
They will be redrawing election maps without the same limitations previously imposed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened protections for Black and other minority voters by barring practices that diluted their votes.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that a new majority-Black legislative district was unconstitutional, raising questions about future legal interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. Lawmakers in several Southern states moved to redraw district lines after the ruling.
ATLANTA — State lawmakers passed a budget that was about $1 billion larger than what Gov. Brian Kemp expects Georgia will collect in tax revenue next fiscal year, so he took a scalpel to their spending plan.
The fiscal year 2027 budget he signed Tuesday trims $300 million from spending that the General Assembly had added.
“They may not be happy, but they also realize we’ve got a hole in the budget that we’ve got to fix,” Kemp said, before signing House Bill 974, which will govern spending starting in July.
The Legislature passed a $38.5 billion budget, but Kemp told reporters that revenue estimates for next year are only $36.6 billion. Part of the reason: income tax cuts that lawmakers passed in the waning hours of their legislative session and that Kemp signed into law Monday.
Richard Dunn, director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, said Georgia now has a $1.3 billion “structural deficit.”
Gov. Brian Kemp signs the fiscal year 2027 budget (House Bill 974) in his office at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, as his wife Marty and Richard Dunn, director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, watch.
He said Kemp’s cutbacks will address $300 million of the excess spending and that growth in revenue should take care of much of the rest. The state will likely have to dip into its surplus to fill whatever gap remains, he added.
That amount can change depending on the rate of economic growth.
“The state must now address a reduction in revenue for the coming fiscal year of nearly $1 billion,” Kemp said, “and that’s assuming we don’t have an economic downturn.”
The income tax cuts, which Kemp embraced, tipped his budget off balance.
On Monday, Kemp signed House Bill 463, which rolled back the income tax rate to 4.99% from 5.19% for the current year.
It also waived income tax on the first $1,750 of overtime pay and cash tips, retroactive to the beginning of the year, and it increased by $5,000 the amount of excluded retirement income for those 65 and older.
But that new law is designed to continue cutting the tax rate if state revenues remain strong, reducing the rate by another percentage point over eight years, to 3.99%. The rate is scheduled to fall 0.125 percentage points (an eighth of a point) next year.
HB 463 also increased the dependent and standard deductions by 25% this year and calls for gradually increasing both by that same amount over eight years, depending on the same revenue triggers as the tax rate cuts.
The standard deduction for single filers rose to $15,000 from $12,000 when Kemp signed HB 463. It is scheduled to go up another $375 next year, ultimately reaching $18,000. The amounts are doubled for couples filing jointly. The dependent deduction rose to $5,000 from $4,000 and would top out at $6,000 after eight years of steady increases.
