Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for July 16, 2018

On July 16, 1790, Congress declared Washington, DC the new capital city.

Georgia Congressman Carl Vinson set a new record for longevity in office on July 16, 1963, having served 48 years, 8 months, and 12 days since his election in 1914. Vinson’s record held until 1992 and his tenure is now sixth-longest.

On July 16, 1914, Asa Griggs Candler, retired President of Coca-Cola, wrote his brother Warren, who was a Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, a letter offering one million dollars and 72 acres of land in Atlanta for the church to establish a new university in the East.

The United States performed the first test of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 at the Trinity site in New Mexico.

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, watched the mushroom cloud rise into the New Mexico sky. “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” he uttered, reciting a passage from an ancient Hindu text.

Shirley the Elephant celebrated her 75th birthday this weekend at Wild Adventures Theme Park in Valdosta, GA, according to the Valdosta Daily Times.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

Federal funding for Obamacare “Navigators” will be slashed, according to the Rome News-Tribune.

The White House is again slashing funds for the “navigators’’ who help enroll people in the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.

The cuts will almost certainly reduce the in-person assistance provided to Georgians seeking an exchange health plan for next year.

Macon-based Community Health Works, which oversees a navigator program in the state, said Wednesday that the federal navigator funding for the upcoming year’s enrollment for Georgia will be $500,000 – about one-third of the 2018 exchange total. The cuts will especially affect enrollment of hard-to-reach populations, experts said.

The federal funding for insurance navigators nationwide will drop to $10 million for the 2019 open enrollment period, down from $36 million for 2018 and about $63 million the year before, federal health officials announced late Tuesday.

Flowery Branch will hold candidate qualifying for an at-large seat on City Council, according to the Gainesville Times.

Candidates can file paperwork at City Hall, 5410 Pine St., during normal business hours starting Monday, July 16, and ending Wednesday, July 18. The filing fee is $144.

The Nov. 6 special election will coincide with the county’s general election, so voters will be able to go to their county-designated polling place to cast their ballots.

The new Post 3 council member will be elected at large.

The last day for voters to register for the special election will be Oct. 9.

The AJC looks at the latest early voting numbers for the runoff election.

Georgians continue to flock to the polls early, with more than 42,000 votes cast this week.

The early voting count was up to nearly 88,000 since the window opened on July 2. Slightly more than 76 percent of the ballots cast in early voting so far have been in the Republican runoffs.

About 23 percent of the ballots cast have been in the Democratic primary, but the draw to the polls fell after the top two elected offices for the party’s nominees were set during the May primary.

Drug cases are swamping the GBI Crime Lab, according to the Valdosta Daily Times.

A deluge of drug cases has jammed up state crime labs, contributing to a bulging backlog that is delaying cases and leaving agencies waiting more than a year for some lab reports.

For Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress, this surge in casework sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Division of Forensic Sciences is affirmation that local officials made the right call when they decided to open their lab years ago.

“I don’t think we’re in a world anymore where you can rely solely on the state crime labs. You just can’t,” Childress said. “City and county law enforcement need to start taking some of that pressure off these labs.”

The Macon Telegraph spoke to U.S. Senator David Perdue and his cousin, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

Question: The $200 billion trade war with China, how is that going to impact Georgia?

Sonny Perdue: Well, obviously, it affects agriculture across the United States. Agriculturists — because of the productivity of American producer, farmers, ranchers here — are always the tip of the spear. We export more agricultural products. They don’t create the trade deficit; it’s other products that do. So our farmers are always at risk on any kind of trade disruption. And there’s some legitimate anxiety out there about it. We hope it gets resolved sooner rather than later.

Question: How do the president’s tariffs affect imports going through Savannah?

Sonny Perdue: Well, there will be probably some there, but we don’t know yet. They haven’t been fully implemented. There’s just a small amount there now. There may be some impact of it through traffic in Savannah, but we don’t know yet for sure.

David Perdue: Let’s keep one thing in mind, this is a strategy that will help us export more in the long term. So in the long term it should help Savannahs’ export volume.

It’s a good article, worth reading in its entirety.

13 WMAZ has video of Secretary Perdue and Senator Perdue.

Trump also believes that the legalization of marijuana should be decided by the states.

Sonny Perdue wanted to share his thoughts on the issue.

“I’m not a big one on marijuana growth, but I do agree that it could be a state-decided issue,” he says.

The Macon Telegraph also spoke to State Rep. Robert Dickey about the importance of H-2A visas for migrant agriculture workers.

Robert Dickey, owner of Dickey Farms, said without H-2A, peach growing here would likely consist of just a few small pick-your-own orchards. In a good year, Georgia’s peach crop generates about $50 million, with most of that coming from orchards in Middle Georgia. Packing houses at Dickey Farms and Lane Southern Orchards are also popular tourist attractions, and peaches generate other associated jobs, such as truck driving.

Although H-2A has not been a target of President Donald Trump’s immigration reform efforts, Dickey has concerns about the program being restricted or even eliminated.

“I lay awake at night worrying in the fall and in the spring if something were to happen, if the border (were) to close, if this program were to get halted in some way, I’d lose everything I own,” he said.

Georgia Health News looks at “virtual credit cards,” and why they’re causing issues in healthcare.

Here’s how the virtual cards work: A medical provider bills an insurer for a $100 service. The insurer can pay through an electronic funds transfer or a physical check, but instead delivers a virtual credit card to the provider.

There’s no actual plastic involved. The ‘‘card’’ is just a single-use series of numbers that the provider can enter into a credit card terminal or web portal. Then the payment is transferred into the doctor’s account.

But it won’t be the whole $100. There are fees involved, somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent of the amount paid. So the provider could end up with $95.

For a large hospital, all those fees can add up to a loss of thousands of dollars.

But provider groups, citing the credit card fees, got behind House Bill 818 in the General Assembly. The legislation sought to prohibit insurers from requiring a medical practice to accept virtual credit cards as the only form of payment.

The Georgia Dental Association and groups representing hospitals, physicians and pharmacists supported the bill, which passed the General Assembly unanimously.

The Rome News-Tribune looks at campaign financing in their local Congressional and state legislative races.

Democrat Steve Foster is challenging incumbent Republican Tom Graves for the 14th Congressional District seat that spans Floyd and 11 other counties from Whitfield to the east and Haralson to the south.

Graves, who’s been in the U.S. House for eight years, has amassed a war chest of $1.8 million. Foster’s latest report shows $972 in the bank.

The difference isn’t quite as stark in the race to represent Georgia House District 13, which covers the city of Rome and parts of the adjacent unincorporated area.

Challenger John Burnette II, a Democrat, reported $547 cash on hand compared to $26,529 for incumbent Republican Katie Dempsey.

The Troup County Commission heard concerns about district maps, according to the LaGrange News.

Ernest Ward, the president of the Troup County National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Pat Darden, the chair of the Troup County Democratic Party, approached the Troup County Board of Commissioners Tuesday with concerns about district lines and racial diversity.

Ward and Darden complained about meeting times, alleged a lack of racial diversity in county departments and questioned whether current district lines were fair. Ward and Darden spoke on similar topics at West Point and Hogansville council meetings in recent months.

Ward alleged that the current districts do not fairly represent the people of Troup County.

“It is unacceptable that when decisions are made that there is no one at the table from West Point or Hogansville,” Ward said. “… The way those district lines are drawn that access does not exist.”

Statesboro City Council will hear about a proposed Tax Allocation District (TAD) to include a soccer stadium, according to the Statesboro Herald.

The Coweta County Commission is setting hearing dates to consider property tax millage rates, according to the Newnan Times-Herald.

The Glynn County Commission will consider restrictions on short-term rentals, and holding a referendum under the Brunch Bill, according to The Brunswick Times.

Currently, short-term rentals are regulated by the same ordinances as residential properties, but compete with hotels and motels for business, Murphy said in June. County landowners using services like Airbnb and VRBO don’t have to play by the same rules, he said, which is unfair.

The commission is also expected to discuss Senate Bill 17, also known as the Brunch Bill. Gov. Nathan Deal signed the bill in May, allowing the public to vote in a referendum to push back the time alcohol can be sold for on-site consumption from 12:30 p.m. to 11 a.m.

The Brunswick City Commission plans to vote on whether or not to have a referendum on Wednesday. If the county commission decides to do so on Tuesday, it will hold its own vote on the referendum on Thursday.

Should the referendum voted pass, the public will be able to vote to implement the Brunch Bill locally in November.

Warner Robins City Council member Daron Lee wants the city to close its Human Resources department temporarily, according to 13WMAZ.

Warner Robins city councilman Daron Lee sent several emails addressed to Mayor Randy Toms and the rest of the city council, calling for the closure of the city’s human resources department “until further notice of the results from the pending investigation.”

He confirmed that the investigation he was referencing was the Houston County Sheriff’s Office investigation of a city employee for possible criminal conduct that we reported on in June.

One of Lee’s emails, dated June 26, went on to express his concerns about city government, and suggested barring some city employees from city property.

He wrote “I do believe, no hiring, no promotions and no Human Resources employees should be on City Government property until we get a good handle on what is going on. Or we need to send the Director and Assistant Director home on administrative leave.”

Former Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education President Joe Buck is running to return to office, according to the Savannah Morning News.

Buck was the frontrunner in the May 22 primary and faces Betty Morgan in a [runoff] election July 24.

Buck, who spent his career at Armstrong State University (now the Armstrong campus of Georgia Southern University), is confident he can turn around the board again. “I did it for eight years,” he said. Buck has a definite vision of what the board should and shouldn’t do. “You hire and fire the superintendent. You provide resources and the policy that plugs into those resources, so the job can get done.”

In the May 22 primary, Buck received 13,241 votes and 45 percent of the vote, short of the 50 percent plus one vote needed for an outright win. With 6,998 votes, Betty Morgan received the second most among five contenders, or 24 percent of the total ballots cast.

Retired Chattahoochee County Sheriff Glynn Cooper, the second-longest serving in the state, died, according to the Ledger-Enquirer.

Grovetown City Council member Eric Blair is asking for two additional firefighters, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

Grovetown and Harlem city councils will each discuss their city’s property tax millage rate at tonight’s meetings, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

The ACLU was in court, trying to restore a candidate’s name to the ballot, according to the Gainesville Times.

Democrat Maria Palacios qualified to run for State House District 29, but her name was removed from the ballot just before the primary on May 22 when the Secretary of State’s Office ruled she had not been a U.S. citizen for the two years required to run for office. Palacios became a U.S. citizen in 2017.

When the ruling came down from the state, the ACLU sued, saying that Palacios had been “a citizen of the state” of Georgia for nine years, which made her eligible to run for public office.

A court date has been set for Wednesday, July 18 at 2:30 p.m. in Fulton County Superior Court. The case will be heard in Fulton County, since the Secretary of State’s Office is located in Atlanta.