Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for June 3, 2014

On June 3, 1941, Georgia voters ratified a Constitutional Amendment extending the term of office for Governor and the other Constitutional Officers from two years to four. Governor Eugene Talmadge campaigned for the Amendment, hoping to serve a four-year term after the two-year term he currently held, but was defeated in the 1942 Democratic Primary by Ellis Arnall. Remember this phrase: legislation almost always has unintended consequences.

On June 3, 1942, Curtis Mayfield was born in Chicago, Illinois and would later live in Atlanta, dying in Roswell in 1999.

On the morning of June 3, 1962, a plane carrying 106 Georgians crashed on take-off from Orly near Paris, the deadliest crash in aviation to that date.

On June 3, 1980, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter had amassed enough delegates to assure his nomination in the Democratic Primary for President.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Tiananman Square Massacre in Beijing, China. Pro-democracy protests had begun on April 15, 1989 and on May 20, martial law was declared. The People’s Liberation Army began taking the square back on the evening of June 3d.

http://youtu.be/1IyUoPgfa2k

Yesterday, President Ellen Sirleaf of Liberia visited Albany, Georgia, where her son, James Sirleaf is the ER director of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. President Sirleaf won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize; Dr. Sirleaf received his undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta

37 Weeks, a project by the Atlanta History Center and Georgia Public Broadcasting continues documenting Sherman’s campaign in Georgia with Week 8.

Georgia News

The 2014 Peachtree Road Race will also host the American 10k National Championships for men and women. Because it will be the national championship this year, the race is not inviting elite runners from other countries. The last female to win was Joan Nesbit in 1995, and Ed Eyestone was the last American male to win, in 1991.

New EPA regulations on carbon emissions from power plants will hit Georgia harder than many other states, but the Peach state’s main power producer has taken steps in recent years in anticipation of stricter carbon rules to reduce the role of coal-fired generation.

But [Sierra Club activist Colleen] Kiernan says Georgia Power has already made impressive strides toward cleaner power.

“Since 2005 Georgia has already reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 22% at our power plants. So we’re already well on the way. And you can tell our air is cleaner,” Kiernan said. “We have far fewer smog alert days than we used to in the early 2000s.

But coal is cheap, plentiful and produced in the US. Nine of Georgia Power’s plants are coal-fired, producing 35 percent of the state’s power. But Georgia Power is shutting down most or all of three of its coal plants in the next year.

“The mix is changing. With the retirements of a number of coal units, our percentages will shrink in terms of coal. But coal remains a vital source,” said John Kraft, spokesman for Georgia Power.

Georgia Public Service Commissioner Stan Wise said Monday evening that the PSC has cut air pollution from power plants “close to 90 percent” since 1990, and the dirty emissions continue to decrease. The cost of meeting an accelerated deadline of 2030, he said, will be expensive for Georgia electric customers.

“We’re expanding solar, we’re buying some wind, we’re doing the right things. But to go ahead and say, ‘You’re going to do this in the next 15 or 20 years’ really puts a real onus on the state. It’s the federal government directing how we’re going to dispatch [power] generation, so it’s going to cost more money…. If you have to cut emissions by 2030, there’s going to be significant, new costs. This is despite the fact that we’ve already made great headway in the last few years. Significant movement in that area. Leave us alone. We’ll take care of this business….. I am confident that we’ll continue to get these things done, and not do it with the rate shock that’s associated with some of these rules that come out of a Washington bureaucracy.”

Georgia Power questions whether the EPA’s new rules have overstepped its authority.

Georgia Power sees the rule as overstepping EPA’s authority.
“EPA’s proposed emission guidelines appear to be based on reduction measures that extend well beyond Clean Air Act requirements and infringe upon states’ authority to determine the best approach for their own generating sources,” said spokesman John Kraft.
The company plans to submit detailed comments to EPA after it reviews the rule, Kraft said.

The Georgia Public Service Commission, the elected body that regulates Georgia Power, was less enthusiastic.

“The Obama administration continues its war on coal with the issuance of carbon dioxide rules for existing coal plants,” Commisioner Stan Wise noted in a written statement. “These overreaching rules trump state authority, put energy users at risk to future price swings, ignores the investments and progress Georgians have made to improve the environment and are a backdoor attempt to force federal renewable energy mandates.”

Commisioner Tim Echols agreed.

“President Obama is using a federal agency to implement climate plans and new regulation — without congressional approval,” Echols said. “His plans to curb carbon dioxide output and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will ironically have a disproportionate impact on red states like Georgia that use a lot of coal, and I am trying hard to believe it is just a coincidence.”

Public Service Commission Chairman Chuck Eaton, a conservative Republican, said the new rules will raise the cost of electricity in Georgia.

“This will raise electricity prices. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it,” said Commission Chairman Chuck Eaton, noting that in the last two rate hikes, half of the added expense was due to environmental regulations. “… I will be the one, and my fellow commissioners, stuck handing out the bill to pay for all of this.”

Gov. Nathan Deal remains hopeful the ultimate economic impact will be slight.

“I am told, however, that since the utilities in Georgia have been very proactive, that they have probably already taken many of the steps that these new regulations may in fact require. So, we are hopeful that is the case. And if it is, it should have minimal impact,” he said.

One bright spot for Georgia in the new EPA regulations is that we are well on the way to bringing two more nuclear power plants online at Plant Vogtle. The Municipal Energy Authority of Georgia recently received approval for a financial restructuring to facilitate subsidized financing of its share of the new reactors. In April it was announced that Georgia Power and Oglethorpe customers will not pay a fee for federal loan guarantees that reduce the cost of financing their share of the plants.

Competing for federal largesse

Dalton, Georgia and eleven other areas will split $1.3 in government cheese federal stimulus funding, with Georgia’s share slated to create 2,623 jobs in ten years.

The Obama administration targeted the Dalton region as one of the dozen spots that will split $1.3 billion and get special attention from 11 federal agencies and a network of state and local partners, from Georgia Tech to trade groups, to produce 2,623 new jobs in 10 years.

“The initial focus would be on the local floor-covering industry”, said Lloyd Frasier, executive director of the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission, “but it expands beyond that to support a culture of advanced manufacturing in the region.”

U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said the competition between communities for the grants and extra agency assistance is at the center of the administration’s job-creation strategy.

“Innovative programs like (this) encourage American communities to work together to craft strong, clear, strategic plans to attract manufacturing investment and jobs to transform themselves into globally competitive commercial hubs,” she said.

Let’s run some quick numbers on that. Assume for the sake of argument that Georgia gets roughly 1/12 of the money or $1 billion. Dividing that by ten years yields $100 million per year to create 2,623 jobs, or roughly $38,000 per job per year. Would it not be cheaper to simply pay 2,623 current welfare recipients $38k per year and remove them from the welfare rolls?

Contrast that federal waste largesse with the approach by Governor Nathan Deal and other Republicans:

Gov. Nathan Deal, for example, has made jobs the center of his re-election campaign, trumpeting the designation of a small, trade magazine of Georgia as the No. 1 state to locate a business because its low taxes and giveaways. He has signed legislation to remove the tax factories paid on energy, to create a venture-capital fund with taxpayer dollars and to let developers of giant tourist attractions keep one-quarter of the sales taxes they generate.

His fellow Republicans in the legislature want to go further by reducing or eliminating the state income tax. They argue that companies paying the highest wages gravitate to states like Florida, Texas and Tennessee which rely on other taxes instead of the income tax.

Georgia isn’t abandoning traditional incentives, but it is getting smarter about them, according to state Rep. Ron Stephens, chairman of the House Economic Development and Tourism Committee.

Stephens, a Savannah Republican, has sponsored or cosponsored nearly every legislative incentive proposal since the GOP took control of government.

Stephens describes as a good incentive the sales-tax exemption on replacement parts for aircraft owned by nonresidents. It helped companies like Gulfstream Aerospace decide to put high-paying repair jobs in Georgia.

Other incentives have drawn business for the state’s ports and attracted movie making, he said. As a result, Savannah is the fastest-growing port in the country, and Georgia is now the No. 3 place for movies, bringing more than $3 billion to the state economy.

And speaking of Governor Deal and job creation, he announced this week more than 1,100 new jobs being brought to Clayton County.

“Georgia has become a global hub for communications services,” said Deal. “With the help of our top 10-ranked talent pool, this industry has grown to include nearly 300 Georgia-based companies. Our competitive business climate and dynamic cluster of companies will continue to support innovative call center firms such as Chime Solutions.”

It’s all about turnout

Marcus Howard of the Savannah Morning News has a piece this morning on what turnout will mean to Jason Carter’s campaign for Governor.

Georgia may be dominated by Republicans in virtually every top political office, but Democratic state Sen. Jason Carter of Decatur believes 200,000 previously uncounted votes will be crucial to winning back the governor’s mansion.

The prevailing theory among political analysts is that as red as the Peach State is today, it’s ripe for Democratic victories in the next two to three election cycles, when demographics changes favoring the party will make it a true swing state.

Carter isn’t buying it.

The numbers he and his campaign staff have been crunching offer the gubernatorial candidate, who two weeks ago secured the Democratic nomination, hope he can defeat Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.

In 2012, President Barack Obama garnered more than 1.7 million or 45.5 percent of votes. Carter said he will likely need to capture 1.3 million of those votes to win the off-year election.

However, last month’s primary turnout of just under 20 percent doesn’t bode well for Democrats. Carter received 304,243 votes to the Republicans’ 596,218 votes, of which Deal captured 72.2 percent. And nearly 60,000 more Republicans than Democrats participated in early voting.

Carter’s campaign believes upward of 600,000 Democrats who aren’t registered to vote are in the state. Registering and getting just 200,000 of them to vote in November, campaign officials calculate, will give them the win.

When I read “200,000 previously uncounted votes,” it sounded to me like he means that votes actually cast by Georgians were somehow thrown away by conniving Republicans. What it actualy meant was “200,000 uncast ballots,” meaning mythical votes that were never cast by mythical voters who are not registered.

But the Democrats have something we don’t.

[The Carter campaign is] hoping to piggy back on the advance get-out-the-vote algorithms used by the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, which was as data driven as any before it.

Karl Douglass, Carter’s Yale-educated political director, promises to have the most robust set of data about Democrats the state has seen. The campaign, he said, has already hired a “super data-based” manager and plans to keep supporters engaged throughout the election.

“We’ve got to get voter turnout higher than it was in the last mid-term, but we think we can get it higher naturally. The question is can we get it high enough with Democratic turnout?” said Douglass, who was a 2008 Obama campaign regional political director.

“We’re going to engineer that in a lot of ways coordinating with campaign offices. We’re going to have people on the ground working, doing data collection and door-to-door, starting much sooner rather than later.”
Kerwin Swint, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University, says Carter will need not just Democratic support but independent voters this year.

“It’s a midterm election year and could be a tough one for Democrats nationally,” he said in an email. “If it was a presidential year then maybe he could rely more on Democratic voters. But considering the hurdles a Democratic candidate in Georgia faces this year, he’s doing quite well.”

Whether Jason Carter’s race is a national priority or not, Michelle Nunn’s Senate campaign is a hot property and will certainly benefit from the Democratic establishment’s advances in technology and voter turnout tools.