Georgia senators huddle after Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan announced plans to suspend the legislative session over coronavirus concerns on March 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgia lawmakers are set to reconvene the 2020 legislative session on June 15, roughly three months after the General Assembly hit pause due to mounting concerns over coronavirus.
In a memo Wednesday, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, agreed with Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan to resume the session on Monday, June 15. The two chamber leaders then formally signed a resolution to resume on that date.
The decision comes as lawmakers began work last week on crafting a budget for the 2021 fiscal year, which is poised for significant cuts due to the economic slowdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. The General Assembly has until July 1 to pass the budget.
The resumption of the session also comes as businesses continue reopening after weeks of closures that started in late March as the virus spread in Georgia, sickening thousands of people including several state lawmakers.
Ralston, who helms the House, initially called for a June 11 restart while Duncan, who presides over the Senate, pushed for May 18. The June 15 date marks a compromise between the two after weeks of disagreement on when to start wrapping up the 11 remaining days of the session’s 40-day schedule.
“I appreciate the Senate recognizing that we should reconvene the session in June as I proposed,” said Ralston. “I believe this will enable us to best serve the people of our great state.”
Duncan pitched the June 15 date after backing off his original May proposal, noting the mid-June timeframe would give lawmakers and the public a few days of breathing room following the state’s June 9 primary election.
“June 15 will give members enough time, after the primary election, to be tested for free at their local health departments, which all Georgians are able to do,” Duncan said.
Lawmakers have not yet settled on the logistics of holding the session in accordance with social distancing practices adopted during the pandemic. A task force set up by Ralston is expected to issue recommendations on measures like remote voting and physical separation inside the Capitol building.
They did, however, offer a preview of some social distancing measures during in-person committee hearings this week and last, at which speakers waited outside meeting rooms for their turn to give testimony and watched proceedings mostly on video monitors installed in the Capitol.
Protesters gather outside the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta on May 30, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Gov. Brian Kemp warned Tuesday state authorities are prepared to do “whatever is necessary to keep the peace” as protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across Georgia.
The governor and the state public health commissioner, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, also heeded protesters and law enforcement in protest areas like Atlanta to be mindful of their exposure to coronavirus and seek testing if they have been involved with large groups.
At a news conference Tuesday, Kemp said he understood the anger expressed in protests since Friday over the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a white officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes during an arrest last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
But the governor also stressed he will not tolerate acts of violence and property destruction as protesting is poised to continue this week, particularly amid intelligence reports from state investigators who have identified members out-of-state extremist groups that have infiltrated demonstrating crowds.
“If those people who are unruly out there think that we will lay down and we will quit, you are in the wrong state,” Kemp said Tuesday.
“We have to have people who follow the law,” Kemp added. “And when you don’t, it puts us in a bad spot.”
Demonstrations in Atlanta, Athens, Savannah, Gainesville and elsewhere in Georgia coincided over the weekend with nationwide protests over the death of Floyd as well as other recent instances of race-related violence, including the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick in late February.
In Atlanta, four consecutive nights of largely peaceful demonstrations starting last Friday have at times devolved into scenes of property damage and confrontations with police, who in turn have fired tear gas cannisters and made hundreds of arrests. The city was placed under a 9 p.m. curfew Tuesday for the fourth straight night.
The protests in Georgia’s largest city prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency for all 159 Georgia counties on Saturday and order the deployment of 3,000 Georgia National Guard troops, who have been involved in crowd-control activities in recent days to enforce nightly curfews.
Vic Reynolds, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at Tuesday’s news conference that investigators combing social media have identified “certain groups” aiming to incite violence and destruction rather protest peacefully. He did not name which groups those may be.
“We are convinced…there are individuals here from various groups around the country, a lot of which are bent primarily on destruction and violence,” Reynolds said.
Authorities also said members of a “violent extremist group” were present at protests in Athens on Sunday but did not name the group in a news release issued Monday by the Athens-Clarke County Police Department.
Meanwhile, state health officials are growing anxious about potential outbreaks of coronavirus as hundreds of people packed together during protests.
Officials still see encouraging signs the virus’ spread is slowing due to lower positive case rates and fewer hospitalizations, said Toomey, the state health commissioner. But the protests have thrown a new variable into the equation, forcing officials to boost testing activities around the demonstrations and diverting National Guard troops that have been assisting test sites.
“When you have this many people gathered together in close proximity, you run the risk of viral transmission,” Toomey said.
Speaking Tuesday, Toomey said health officials are setting up one or two testing sites for protesters in Atlanta and working with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on providing tests for city police and firefighters. National Guard members and other state authorities sent to protests will also be tested, she said.
“We want to make sure that everyone who may be exposed unwittingly has access to testing quickly and that we can assist in this time to mitigate any potential spread from this demonstration,” Toomey said.
“We want to make sure that the pandemic doesn’t spread because of this,” she added.
As of Tuesday afternoon, roughly 48,200 people in Georgia had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel strain of coronavirus that sparked a global pandemic. The virus had killed 2,102 Georgians.
Kemp, noting the challenge of balancing social distancing with the right to protest, urged Georgians Tuesday to remember the virus has not abated and that there still is no vaccine for it.
“We are still battling a pandemic and we need to stay vigilant,” the governor said. “Continue to keep your distance, wash your hands and do all the other things we have been saying for weeks and weeks now.”
Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan outlines his agenda for the 2020 legislative session at the State Capitol on January 13, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan signaled Friday he plans to work with state lawmakers on passing hate-crimes legislation following the high-profile arrests of three white men in the fatal shooting of a black man near Brunswick.
Duncan, who presides over the Georgia Senate, said Friday lawmakers need to craft legislation that gives victims of hate-motivated crimes “certain tools” to bring civil lawsuits and sets a framework for law enforcement officials “to correctly identify, investigate and prosecute hate crimes.”
“This is an important piece of legislation to get right,” Duncan said in a statement. “It is time to make it clear that Georgians will not stand for hate and violence.”
Duncan’s remarks follow the arrests earlier this month of Gregory and Travis McMichael, a father and son living in the Brunswick area who face murder charges in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery, who is black, was allegedly gunned down after being pursued in late February by the McMichael men, who are white.
Video of the shooting taken by a third man arrested in the case, William Bryan, who is also white, sparked widespread outrage among Georgia leaders and prompted renewed calls for passage of the hate-crimes bill.
The measure, sponsored by state Rep. Chuck Efstration, cleared the Georgia House last year but has stalled in the Senate. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have issued calls in recent weeks to pass the bill. Efstration said he plans to push for its passage once the General Assembly resumes the 2020 legislative session in mid-June.
In a statement earlier this month, Efstration, R-Dacula, noted the bill has gained support from the state House’s top lawmaker, Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge. Other influential House lawmakers including the legislature’s longest-serving member, Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, have also pushed for passage this session.
“It is now time for the Georgia Senate to do the right thing and pass the Georgia Hate Crimes Act without delay,” Efstration said.
Sen. Butch Miller (left) and Sen. John Alberts (right) talk budget cuts at a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Criminal Justice and Public Safety Subcommittee on May 27, 2020. (Georgia Senate video)
Nearly 2,000 Georgia criminal offenders enrolled in programs that let them work jobs and finish their sentences outside prison could be headed back behind bars due to budget cuts prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, state lawmakers learned Wednesday.
Roughly $4.3 million would be cut from the state Criminal Justice Coordinating Council’s budget for local grants to accountability courts, a popular program created by then-Gov. Nathan Deal in 2013 offering alternative sentences to curb recidivism for thousands of Georgia inmates with mental illness or substance-abuse issues.
If implemented, the cuts would likely cause around 1,900 current participants in accountability courts across the state to return to local jails or prisons to complete their sentences, said Hall County Superior Court Chief Judge Kathlene Gosselin, who chairs the state Council of Accountability Court Judges.
Many of those participants are employed in restaurants, poultry plants and elsewhere and have continued working throughout the coronavirus pandemic, kept track of by program supervisors who are routinely informed of their progress via Zoom video meetings, Gosselin told state lawmakers Wednesday.
“Those people will likely end up either in local jails or prisons if they do not have an opportunity to do this,” Gosselin said at a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Criminal Justice and Public Safety Subcommittee.
In all, Gosselin said between eight and 12 of the alternative-sentencing programs would likely need to be shelved over lack of funding from the budget cuts. Local judicial circuits that receive grant funding for the programs would have to decide whether they can still maintain them with less money, she said.
Gosselin’s assessment came amid two weeks of General Assembly hearings on 14% spending cuts agencies across state government are being asked to make to offset the loss of tax revenues brought on by the pandemic-induced business lockdown.
Dozens of state agencies submitted proposals last week for budget reductions totaling about $3.5 billion for the 2021 fiscal year, which starts July 1. The proposals were requested by top budget-writing lawmakers in the General Assembly, who are poised to make passing the budget the top priority once the legislature reconvenes next month.
If passed as is, the 14% cuts would translate to furloughs and layoffs for teachers, social workers, prosecutors and more, according to a review of agency proposals released last week. That would help close Georgia’s expected $3 billion to $4 billion tax revenue shortfall, though critics have called for raising revenues rather than spending cuts.
A hallmark of state criminal justice reforms, the alternative-sentence accountability courts saw roughly 12,400 participants enrolled in 163 courts statewide last year, of which 9,440 were still enrolled at the start of 2020, according to the council.
The state pocketed roughly $38.2 million in fiscal 2017 from more than 1,700 graduates of the program who both saved the state money in reduced prison costs and paid state income taxes, according to a study from the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.
Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said Wednesday “painful cuts” to programs like accountability courts that aim to reduce overall prison costs are counterproductive.
“We all understand the concept that it costs us more tomorrow when we don’t spend it today,” Miller said. “The pot’s only so big and we’ve got to cut the slices.”
Lawmakers also got an overview Wednesday of proposed cuts for public-safety agencies overseeing prisons, state troopers, state investigators, parolees and juvenile offenders.
Several agencies like the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Community Supervision and the Department of Public Safety are facing furlough days for staff. Others like the Department of Corrections have proposed closing certain facilities, including Autry State Prison in Pelham. Shutting down the South Georgia prison would save nearly $18 million, officials say.
Sen. John Albers, who chairs the subcommittee, said he wants lawmakers to focus next month on finding ways to help agencies reduce the need for furloughs. That would involve looking at whether some of the state’s lucrative tax credits and incentives could be reined in to free up more revenue for agency spending, Albers said.
“I hope that we can work very diligently in order to get folks back to full-time work,” said Albers, R-Roswell. “I think we have several ways to do that.”
Left to right: Sens. John Wilkinson, Butch Miller, Ellis Black and Jesse Stone of the Senate Appropriations Education Subcommittee discuss budget cuts on May 26, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Story by Beau Evans and Dave Williams Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The state could avoid furloughing pre-school teachers if they would be willing to absorb pay cuts rather than stay home, members of a Georgia Senate budget subcommittee suggested Tuesday.
The Senate Appropriations Education Subcommittee kicked off two weeks of hearings on 14% spending cuts agencies across state government are being asked to make to offset the loss of tax revenues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Disagreements over how and where to make those cuts surfaced immediately, with some senators pitching the idea for preschool teachers to take a salary cut instead of saving costs by reducing the school year by several days.
“I am personally very much opposed to across-the-board cuts,” said Sen. Ellis Black, R-Valdosta, who chairs the education subcommittee. “I think we need to make cuts based on the needs.”
Dozens of state agencies submitted proposals last week for budget reductions totaling about $3.5 billion for the 2021 fiscal year, which starts July 1. The proposals were requested by top budget-writing lawmakers in the General Assembly, who are poised to make passing the budget the top priority once the legislature reconvenes next month.
If passed as is, the 14% cuts would translate to furloughs and layoffs for teachers, social workers, prosecutors and more, according to a review of agency proposals released last week. That would help close Georgia’s expected $3 billion to $4 billion tax revenue shortfall, though critics have called for raising revenues rather than spending cuts.
From the start of Tuesday’s meeting, influential Republican members of the Senate education subcommittee disagreed over whether the state’s roughly 80,000 preschool students should be forced to take off 13 instructional days or whether their teachers should have smaller salaries for the time being.
In the worst-case scenario, a 14% budget reduction would slice more than $61 million from the state Department of Early Care and Learning, which oversees Georgia’s pre-kindergarten programs. To bridge that funding gap, agency officials have proposed reducing the school year by 13 days, eliminating 4,000 open slots for preschool students and closing 180 pre-k classrooms statewide, Commissioner Amy Jacobs said.
“You can imagine, that is quite an impact to Georgia’s pre-k program,” Jacobs said.
The assessment by Jacobs prompted some members of the education subcommittee to wonder whether having teachers work for less pay would be a better course than taking 13 school days away from students.
Black floated the idea of teachers taking a “special virus deduction” in their salaries to avoid the 13-day shortening of the school calendar.
“If we follow through with this, they’re going to be getting less money and the kids will be getting less education,” Ellis said. “The question is how dedicated are these teachers and are they willing to make that much of a sacrifice so these kids can get that education.”
Sen. Jesse Stone, R-Waynesboro, framed a teacher pay cut as a sacrifice during a tough time, without which children might suffer from fewer educational opportunities.
“Everybody has to make sacrifices on a temporary basis,” Stone said. “But we’re imposing the sacrifices on the public and in this case the children.”
But the proposition drew pushback from Sen. John Wilkinson, R-Toccoa, who said pay cuts would also have to be distributed across other agencies like the state Department of Corrections. Just forcing teachers to work for less pay would not be fair, he said.
“I think we need to be very careful and look at the big picture,” Wilkinson said. “I think you’ve got to look across the board.”
For her part, Jacobs, the agency commissioner, said she doubts there would be much appetite among educators for the pay-cut plan.
“I can’t imagine that they would look favorably upon that if they’re having to work more days for less pay,” Jacobs said. “I think there needs to be a hard look at what lottery revenues look like.”
The $61 million in cuts was the bleakest of several options Jacobs gave lawmakers and would depend on whether there is a steep decline in Georgia Lottery revenues, which the agency relies on heavily. So far, lottery sales have remained stable while the pandemic continues hammering other sectors of Georgia’s economy.
The word from other agency heads who testified Tuesday was less dramatic. Several department heads told members of the Senate Appropriations Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee they plan to avoid layoffs or furloughs by freezing vacant positions and shifting available federal funds into positions that otherwise would face elimination.
“We wanted to avoid furloughs,” said Richard Dunn, director of the state Environmental Protection Division. “We have a lot of competition for the talent we have. I was afraid furloughs would wreck that.”
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Gary Black, whose agency faces $5.6 million in spending reductions, said he’s relying on eliminating vacancies and shifting full-time employees from jobs targeted for elimination into other duties. While some food safety inspector jobs are getting the axe, Black said meat inspectors would be exempt from the cuts.
However, the department’s marketing and promotional efforts would take a big hit. The agency’s Georgia Grown program will not have a presence this year at either the Georgia National Fair in Perry or the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Black said.
“It is unrealistic to suggest this plan will not impact services,” he said.
The full General Assembly will reconvene in mid-June to wrap up the 2020 legislative session, though an official date has not yet been set.
Counties in South Georgia see low completion rates for the 2020 U.S. Census in this map created on May 22, 2020. (U.S. Census Bureau)
Georgia is lagging in its count of the 2020 U.S. Census as outreach workers struggle reaching communities in isolated areas for counting amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The decennial count affects the state’s share of a huge pot of federal dollars given annually for a wide range of programs like Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps, housing vouchers, highway construction, child-care services, special education and more.
Roughly $1.5 trillion will be available for states to tap into depending on the size of their census-determined populations, according to research from Georgia Washington University. The larger the population, the larger the share.
But so far, only 56% of households in Georgia have filled out the census this year, far fewer than the 72% completion rate the state saw in 2010, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The low response rate ranks Georgia 35th among all states and trails the national average by about 4%.
That has prompted worry among local workers and volunteers tasked with boosting Georgia’s census count this year.
“From a statewide standpoint, we’re just not doing well,” said Michele NeSmith, research and policy development director for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. “Unfortunately, the counties with the worst response rates are the ones that need to have as accurate a count as possible.”
The bulk of the undercounting is in rural parts of the state that were already at risk of flying under the radar due to poor access to the internet, which is how most people complete the census.
As of Friday, 32 counties – mostly in rural South Georgia – of the state’s 159 counties had a census completion rate of less than 40%, according to Census Bureau data. Combined, just 15% of those counties’ residents had filled out the census via the internet.
Those counties are already experiencing population declines that could be worsened if less federal funding is available due to census undercounting, said Rusty Haygood, a deputy commissioner for the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, who is co-leading the statewide census outreach effort.
“This is the area that I’m most concerned with, us getting on the ground and getting some good responses in the near future,” Haygood said.
Metro areas have not been spared from the low census rates, though the trend is being seen most dramatically in rural South Georgia. To date, completion rates are down roughly 5% or more in Fulton, DeKalb and Cherokee counties in metro Atlanta, as well as counties covering other metro areas including Augusta, Savannah, Brunswick, Athens, Macon, Valdosta and Columbus.
The counting shortfall has coincided with social-distancing practices prompted by coronavirus, which quickly handcuffed outreach volunteers who had been planning for months to help people in hard-to-reach areas take the census in local libraries, churches and big events that have been shuttered.
Door-to-door Census Bureau workers were set to start canvassing houses where people had not completed the census earlier this month. But with concerns still high over the virus’ spread, that kind of close-contact outreach has not happened yet.
“We are getting farther and farther away from the national average,” said Anna Miller, planning and research director for the state Office of Planning and Budget, who is co-leading statewide outreach with Haygood. “So it’s not great. We have some work to do.”
Food banks and other meal programs have picked up some of the slack as many people have been encouraged to take the census while picking up lunches for themselves or out-of-school children. But outreach workers had planned to lean more on churches and other common social spots to drum up interest in the census before those establishments started closing in March.
One group, the nonprofit Fair Count, had installed wireless internet and laptops in 140 churches, daycares, community centers, barber shops and other establishments in hard-to-count areas for people to take the census before the virus hit. One a third of those establishments have since reopened. The group also embarked a 50-stop bus tour to promote the census but had to pause the tour after only six stops.
Now, Fair Count is planning a largely virtual push to boost census participation via phone banks, text messaging, online events, tele-town halls and local media interviews, said the group’s program director, Ed Reed. But outreach workers across the state are also having to balance urging people to take the census and being mindful of the tough economic and health issues that the virus has brought them.
“We are finding that the census is not necessarily a priority on people’s minds,” Reed said. “They are worried about the job they lost or the health of a family member.”
Miller, Haygood, Reed and dozens more state and local leaders working on census outreach are now eying moves by the federal government to extend the timeline for wrapping up the census. Lately, they have seen promising signs of the outreach campaign’s revival.
Importantly, Census Bureau workers reopened offices May 11 in Georgia after being shuttered for weeks due to coronavirus. They began mailing out census questionnaires in mid-May and are poised to start door-to-door outreach in August for people who have not returned their census.
Congress is also expected to approve deadline extensions that will allow the Census Bureau to formally submit census data to the president by the end of April 2021, instead of the original deadline at the end of December 2020.
That could also push back the timeline for state lawmakers to begin negotiations next summer over redrawing General Assembly and congressional district boundaries, which are also dependent on census-driven population counts.
Meanwhile, members of a state committee tasked with overseeing census outreach met Wednesday to start rekindling marketing campaigns. With $1.5 million on hand, the committee initially planned to launch television and online advertisements last month but now aims to do so in July and August.
The committee is also reaching back out to hundreds of county, city and neighborhood census-outreach groups that were set to play a key role in raising awareness of the count before coronavirus hit.
Like Fair Count, those groups will need to rely more on virtual outreach for the foreseeable future as social distancing remains a widespread practice, said Holger Loewendorf, a research analyst with the Georgia Municipal Association.
“While we can’t do big personal outreach events and hand physical objects to people to promote the census, we’ll have to find other ways,” Loewendorf said. “We’re working on that.”
Particularly challenging for outreach workers will be locating and counting thousands of college students who left campus as state universities and schools started shutting down in March. That movement is already affecting census counts in college towns like Athens, where roughly 10% fewer census forms have been returned compared to 2010.
Still, census workers and volunteers like Haygood view the upcoming outreach push this summer as critical. He stressed Georgians should not accept having a low census count and less federal funding just because coronavirus has made tallying up people more difficult.
“Coronavirus did impact us,” Haygood said. “But coronavirus is not our excuse. We can’t lay everything at the foot of coronavirus.”
