Power plants in Georgia will no longer be allowed to burn creosote-treated railroad ties to produce electricity under legislation that passed out of the General Assembly Thursday.
The prohibition measure, House Bill 857, originated from complaints by residents in rural areas outside Athens who have been pestered over the past year by foul smells and water pollution emanating from two new biomass plants.
The plants, owned by the Alabama-based utility Georgia Renewable Power, were initially permitted to burn wood chips as an alternative fuel to coal for electricity production. But their permits were later changed to allow for burning wooden railroad ties coated in creosote, which has been linked to some forms of cancer and respiratory problems.
Residents in Madison and Franklin counties, where the plants are located, lobbied hard in recent months to ban the practice, citing health injuries to themselves and nuisance smells. Their cause was taken up by Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, who sponsored the measure prohibiting creosote-coated ties from being burned.
Sen. John Wilkinson, R-Toccoa, who worked with Powell on the bill, said the ban on creosote ties would address concerns from residents.
“This has become a problem and we feel for the safety of constituents in those counties that we need this bill,” Wilkinson said Thursday.
Sen. Frank Ginn, a former Franklin County manager, said the plants have been an economic boon in the area but never should have been allowed to burn creosote-coated ties. He urged passage of the bill to force the plants to clean up their act.
“I want to send a message,” said Ginn, R-Danielsville.
Representatives of the international utility conglomerate Veolia, which manages the two plants, have pinned blame for the smell and smoke on start-up issues that they assured residents would be quickly eliminated. And backers of the plants have highlighted the alternative-fuels nature of the operation as well as the tax revenues generated from the plants that benefit the counties.
But the show of support was not enough to save the railroad ties. Powell’s bill cleared the state Senate unanimously and now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
The bill does, however, contain a carve-out for a similar biomass plant located near Dublin that state regulators have given assurances does not burn creosote ties. That plant, run by WestRock, has also been around longer and was not experiencing the same start-up issues as the facilities in Franklin and Madison, according to regulators.
Georgia students would have fewer standardized tests to submit to at the close of each school year under legislation that passed out of the General Assembly Thursday.
The change eliminates four year-end tests in high school and one in the third grade from the trove of assessments required annually for third graders through seniors in Georgia.
State school officials would decide which four tests should be eliminated for high schoolers. Third-grade students would not have to take a social studies assessment.
Senate Bill 367 cleared the state Senate by a unanimous vote after changes were made in the House late last week. It now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
The version of the bill that passed Thursday is scaled back from its original language, which aimed to give local school officials more leeway in deciding whether the tests should count toward students’ final grades and how to compare results to schools outside Georgia.
Year-end tests currently count for 20% of a student’s grade but members of the state Board of Education could move to revise that percentage if they wanted.
Under the bill, state education officials would be allowed to study whether some tests are redundant and if they could be eliminated. It would also require local school districts to compile data on how their students fared with the testing to compare performance with schools in other states.
Additionally, schools would have to administer tests within 25 days of the end of spring semester for elementary and middle school students, and on a date to be determined by the state Board of Education for high schoolers.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. P.K. Martin, came after many teachers and school professionals in Georgia urged the governor and state education officials for fewer tests.
Kemp made the bill by Martin, R-Lawrenceville, part of his agenda for the 2020 legislation session that wraps up this week. He has also pushed for rolling back some standardized tests overall in Georgia.
The governor has already taken steps to waive all tests for the upcoming school year amid the coronavirus pandemic. That decision first requires federal approval.
Martin said Thursday that his bill would “serve the students and teachers in the state very well.”
Some House lawmakers expressed skepticism about reducing year-end tests before voting to approve the measure. Rep. Randy Nix, R-LaGrange, worried fewer tests could dampen students’ motivation to score high marks.
“There’s a fine balance between accountability and just doing away with tests,” Nix said at a hearing last week.
But the measure drew support from teacher and school administration associations that have framed the large amount of annual testing as a burden for teachers and students.
Margaret Ciccarelli, legislative services director for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, touted how Georgia students churned out good work in recent months despite being forced to continue their studies remotely after classrooms shut down due to the virus. “I want to lift that up as a demonstration of commitment and accountability,” Ciccarelli said last
Tonya Anderson (D-Lithonia) sponsored second-chance legislation that cleared the General Assembly on June 24, 2020. (Official Georgia Senate photo)
Second-chance legislation allowing Georgians to clear minor offenses off their criminal records in the interest of helping them secure jobs and housing passed out of the General Assembly Wednesday.
The measure by Sen. Tonya Anderson, D-Lithonia, aims to give people with first-time misdemeanor and non-violent felony convictions in Georgia the ability to petition superior courts to have those records shielded from public view.
Senate Bill 288 cleared the state Senate by a unanimous vote Wednesday afternoon after gaining passage in the House earlier in the day. It now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
“This bill is intended to give people a second chance, have their records restricted and position them for reemployment, for housing and to go back to school,” Anderson said from the Senate floor Wednesday.
If signed into law, Anderson’s bill would require qualified ex-offenders to wait until four years after completing their sentences before filing a petition. They would have to keep a clean record during that time.
It would not apply to people with convictions for certain domestic and nuisance charges like family violence and stalking, plus other major offenses like sex crimes, drunk driving and child molestation.
State law currently requires people with certain downgraded charges, vacated convictions and cases that have languished for years to petition a court to restrict access to their records. But only certain misdemeanor convictions can be shielded such as alcohol-related charges, first-time drug possession and crimes committed before age 21.
More than 4.4 million people have a criminal record of at least an arrest in Georgia, totaling nearly half the state’s population, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Allowing many of them to block prospective employers or landlords from seeing minor crimes for which they have completed sentences should improve the state’s economic and social environment, Anderson has said.
Rep. Houston Gaines, who co-sponsored the measure in the House, framed the bill’s passage Wednesday as a win for criminal justice reform.
“This bill is one of the most important criminal justice reforms we’ve made as a state,” said Gaines, R-Athens.
Anderson’s bill was scaled back from its original version in mid-March that proposed automatically restricting public access to most kinds of criminal convictions and arrest histories, including for convicted felons who completed their sentences long ago.
The final version of Anderson’s bill, which limited the kinds of convictions eligible for records shielding, marked a compromise with prosecutors that gained backing from the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.
Asked in March about the changes, Anderson said her measure was a step forward in a longstanding push by criminal justice advocates to help many Georgians avoid being denied good jobs and housing due to a criminal record.
“Bite the elephant one bite at a time,” Anderson said. “It’s something to get people started.”
Georgia lawmakers are mulling a proposed excise tax for vaping products in the 2020 legislative session. (Stock photo by Lindsay Fox)
Georgia House lawmakers revived a proposal Wednesday to slap an excise tax on vaping in Georgia and raise the minimum age for who can purchase tobacco and vaping products from 18 to 21.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Bonnie Rich, R-Suwanee, was shot down on the state House floor in March over a late change that cut the proposed 7% excise tax in half for so-called “modified-risk” tobacco items, like smokeless dip.
Lawmakers in the House Ways and Means Committee picked Rich’s proposal back up Wednesday with the full 7% tax restored for all tobacco and nicotine products, including vaping devices.
It was inserted into a measure by Sen. Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga, that aims to raise the statewide minimum age to 21 for both cigarette and vaping purchases.
The committee sent Mullis’s measure, Senate Bill 375, to the full House for a vote. If passed, it would then need approval from the Senate.
Rich, whose House Bill 864 originally carried the tax proposal, said in committee Wednesday the charge on vape sales would help promote safety for kids as more and more youth acquire a taste for vaping in Georgia and the U.S.
“We need to get in front of this and start regulating this industry to protect our youth,” Rich said.
Vaping manufacturers and store owners opposed Rich’s bill earlier this year, warning that higher prices on vaping products could drive smokers back to tobacco after using vaping devices to kick the habit. They also argued certain licensing rules in the bill could kill small businesses in Georgia.
“When you raise the price of this product, people will go back to smoking,” said Keith Gossett, owner of Bucky’s Vape Shop in Columbus, at a hearing in February.
Nearly 500,000 people die each year in the U.S. from tobacco-caused diseases, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But supporters of a tax and tighter rules on vaping have stressed the need to protect children from vaping, particularly in light of the risk that kids who get hooked on nicotine could gravitate to cigarettes.
They point to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration showing nearly 4 million middle and high school students used vaping products in 2018, a large increase from the prior year.
“The vape epidemic among our youth has not subsided,” Rich said Wednesday.
The return of Rich’s vape-tax proposal comes as lawmakers mull raising the current sales tax on cigarettes to help plug the state’s budget deficit amid the economic slowdown spurred by coronavirus.
A separate measure to boost the cigarette sales tax from 37 cents per pack to $1.35 that backers say could raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the state passed out of the Senate Finance Committee in recent days and now awaits consideration on the Senate floor.
Legislation to increase the fees for storing toxic coal ash at landfills in Georgia passed out of the General Assembly Wednesday.
Senate Bill 123, sponsored by Sen. William Ligon, would raise the fee for coal ash disposal from $1 per ton to $2.50 per ton, matching the fees charged for other items.
The increase is intended to discourage an influx of coal ash being transported to Georgia from power plants in surrounding states.
The bill also erases a carve-out for coal ash disposal the General Assembly passed in 2018 that charged $2.50 per ton for all kinds of waste storage except coal ash, which was set at $1.
The bill by Ligon, R-Brunswick, passed out of the Georgia Senate Wednesday after clearing the state House of Representatives earlier this week. It now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
Under the bill, 20% of the revenue generated by the coal ash fees would go to local governments for recycling, litter control and improvements to areas adjacent to landfills such as repairs to local roads affected by the hauling of solid waste to landfills and beautification initiatives.
Any contracts effective on Sept. 1, 2020, between landfills and local governments where the dumps are located would not have to adopt the lower fee for coal ash unless the contract was renewed, amended or otherwise changed.
The bill stemmed from concerns by local environmentalists that the lower disposal fee could spur out-of-state power companies to send Georgia massive amounts of coal ash.
The ash, which is the byproduct of burning coal at power plants to generate electricity, can contain compounds causing cancer after long exposure.
Five landfills in Georgia have taken in millions of tons of coal ash since 2017, much of it originating from power plants in Florida and North Carolina, according to state Environmental Protection Division records.
Environmentalists’ concerns come as the state’s top energy producer, Georgia Power, is moving away from storing coal ash in liquid ponds and instead disposing of it in dry landfills. The company has previously touted the economic benefits of recycling coal ash into materials like concrete.
Lawmakers do not appear likely to pass any legislation this year requiring Georgia Power to install impervious lining around every site where coal ash is stored, including ash ponds set for permanent closure in the coming years.
Georgia Power is in the process of closing all 29 of the large pond areas that store coal ash. But environmentalists worry some ash ponds will be sealed in place forever without any protective lining, creating the potential for groundwater contamination.
The power company has insisted its plans for closing the ponds should keep liquid ash from leaching into the groundwater surrounding coal plants.
The General Assembly passed legislation Wednesday to keep in place certain unemployment benefits that were expanded in Georgia during the coronavirus pandemic.
Final passage of Senate Bill 408, by Sen. Brian Strickland, comes as Georgia continues grappling with the economic fallout from coronavirus, which prompted roughly 2 million people to file unemployment claims and shot the state’s jobless rate up to nearly 12% in April.
Amid the pandemic, those who qualified for unemployment benefits were granted leeway to collect payments for up to 26 weeks instead of the usual 14 weeks, and enjoyed a boost in the allowance rate that let them keep up to $300 per week in wages earned – instead of the usual $50 – on top of their benefits.
Those expanded benefits are set to expire once Gov. Brian Kemp ends the state’s public health emergency, which currently runs through June.
“Those provisions are temporary and they will end,” Jeffrey Babcock, the labor department’s legal services manager, told state lawmakers last week.
But language added to the bill by Strickland, R-McDonough, would let the state labor commissioner keep those expanded benefits largely in place, depending on the state’s jobless rate.
“The purpose of this bill is to get some more permanence to that,” Babcock said.
The number of weeks would increase incrementally from 14 weeks when the state’s jobless rate is 4.5% up to 26 weeks when the jobless rate is 10% or higher. The labor commissioner would also have authority to set the weekly deductible threshold at between $50 and $300.
The bill would also grant the labor commissioner powers during a statewide governor-declared emergency to modify the maximum benefit amount and relax rules on claims processing, unemployment insurance tax filing deadlines and work-search reporting.
And the bill would allow the labor commissioner to establish a work-sharing program that lets employers avoid layoffs by reducing their employees’ work hours but giving them prorated unemployment benefits.
The bill passed out of the state Senate by a 49-1 vote Wednesday with Sen. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, voting against. It now heads to Kemp’s desk for his signature.
Originally, Strickland’s bill only proposed to allow employees to continue using earned sick leave for family care beyond July 1, when that provision in state law is set to expire.
