April 2, 2024, 8:57 a.m. This story has been updated to clarify the platform of state Senate (District 1) candidate Beth Majeroni. She has called for term limits for members of U.S. Congress, as well as the elimination of state income taxes and a state crackdown on illegal immigration.
School choice. Mining protections for the Okefenokee Swamp. Water for housing developments sprouting near the Hyundai Metaplant in Bryan County.
Whether by action or inaction, the latest session of the Georgia General Assembly, which adjourned early Friday, touched the lives of Coastal Georgians on these issues and many others.
Hundreds of measures that won the legislature’s approval now sit on the desk of Georgia’s most powerful official, Gov. Brian Kemp, who has until May 7 to either veto them or sign them into law. If he does neither the bill automatically becomes law.
In the middle of the legislative hubbub were Coastal Georgia lawmakers, who now turn their attention to the May 21 primaries and the November 5 general election. They will seek to explain and defend their legislative record, hoping to be among those 236 senators and representatives who go to the capitol in January.
Here’s how the actions of some of those Coastal Georgia lawmakers shaped the legislative session’s outcome.
‘We know there’s a time’
The most consequential divide in the 2024 legislative session wasn’t between the Republican majority and the Democratic minority but between House Republicans and Senate Republicans.
Along with his Senate allies, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones put forward measures aimed at energizing the base of the party for the May primaries and the November general election and not coincidentally, bolstering the Senate leader’s expected bid to succeed Kemp as Georgia’s governor.
Standing in the way was Jon Burns of Newington who, as speaker of the House, is that chamber’s most powerful figure.
Jones succeeded in getting House approval of a Senate bill that requires schools to teach students about the dangers and uses of social media while also requiring platforms to confirm users’ ages.
But as the clock on the session wound down, the Burns-led House largely refused to take up what most Democratic lawmakers refer to as “culture war issues” and most Republicans describe simply as “issues that Georgians care about.”
Those rejected bills would have banned sex education before 6th grade, supplied parents with information about what their children check out from public school libraries, and banned puberty blockers for minors seeking gender-affirming care.
“Some folks choose politics, the House chooses results,” Burns told reporters after the session’s end in a swipe at Jones.
He went on: “We know there’s some things, we know there’s some issues, social issues, if you will, that are important to Georgians. And there’s some of them that we embrace, but they’re also – we know there’s a time. And timing was maybe not right today for some of those issues that came over from the Senate.”
Jones fired back, touting what he said were the Senate’s accomplishments in protecting women’s sports, expanding health care, cracking down on sanctuary cities and vowing to continue seeking to enact policies “that lift up the middle class and fight back against radical Democrats’ insanity.”
‘Mature a little bit’
Election-year politics played an outsized role in this year’s legislative session, with lawmakers positioning themselves for this year’s elections, especially the party primaries in May.
Nowhere was that more evident than in the case of Sen. Ben Watson of Savannah.
Watson has always cast himself as conservative. But facing a primary challenge from his right flank for only the second time since winning a seat in the state House in 2010 ‑ this one in the person of Beth Majeroni ‑ he was taking no chances.
He led efforts in the Senate on issues dear to hardline conservatives, including a proposal to erect a statue of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a ban on puberty-blocking drugs for transgender minors.
He co-signed, with Billy Hickman, and most of the rest of the Republican caucus, a bill that would have allowed allow anyone to be exempt from following a law or a governmental policy if they argue that the law or policy burdens their religious beliefs, and another that would sever ties between the American Library Association and Georgia schools and universities in Georgia.
Finally, Watson, a physician, played a pivotal role in killing a possible deal between Democrats and Republicans on Medicaid expansion.
Forbes magazine last year ranked Georgia’s health care system the worst in the nation, partly because of poor access to such care. Gov. Kemp’s state alternative to Medicaid for low-income adults, “Georgia Pathways to Coverage,” has languished.
Even so, Watson showed up at the meeting of a committee in which he isn’t a member and cast the deciding “no” vote against Medicaid expansion, saying Kemp’s program should be given “a little more time” to “mature a little bit.”
Speaking about the vote to reporters later, Rep. Michelle Au (D-Duluth), also a physician, said, “There are days in this building that will break your heart. Today was one of those days.”
On the social media site X, Au later added: “That the deciding NO vote came from a physician is something I will not forgive.”
For Majeroni, Watson’s opponent in the GOP primary in May, all of this means that her space to run to the right of the Isle of Hope Republican has narrowed.
In recent weeks, she has emphasized term limits for members of U.S. Congress and urged the elimination of state income taxes. She also has called for a more vigorous crackdown by the state on illegal immigration and a screening of voter rolls for the presence of any illegal immigrants.
The Laken Riley effect
With the killing in late February of a nursing student in Athens, Laken Riley, and the subsequent arrest of a Venezuelan man who immigration officials said entered the country illegally, state Rep. Jesse Petrea (R-Savannah) found himself at center stage during this legislative session.
With immigration already a centerpiece of Republican campaigns across the nation this year, Petrea’s bill making it an aggravated misdemeanor for jailers not to keep track of data on inmates who are not U.S. citizens, including their immigration status and country of origin, easily passed both chambers of the legislature and went to the governor’s desk.
The bill also requires police agencies to apply for the federal 287(g) program, which delegates some federal immigration enforcement powers to local police agencies.
To those Democratic lawmakers who accused him of political opportunism, Petrea insisted (correctly) in debate on the House floor that his bill had been long in the making – he introduced it three weeks before Riley’s death – and that it was about public safety and nothing more.
Still, it was part of a raft of legislation in this session that singled out foreigners as threats, either to personal safety or to Georgia’s agricultural interests.
Critics said Petrea’s measure creates a state mandate without the necessary funding to support it and would place local police in an untenable situation. They also argued that it was likely to “perpetuate the separation of immigrant families” and expand the state’s system of “carceral control and caging people of color.”
Downstream problems
Ever since Gov. Kemp joined with Hyundai executives in 2022 to announce the construction of a $7.6 billion electric vehicle plant in Bryan County, local officials have cautioned of unintended consequences and downstream problems of a project that Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah) has described as eight to ten times larger than anything the state has ever undertaken.
This legislative session served one example of chickens coming home to roost, when Stephens, chairman of the House Economic Development and Tourism Committee, introduced a bill that would allow a private utility, the Savannah-based Water Utility Management, to provide water service for new homes near the Hyundai plant without first getting permission from local governments.
Without this quick fix, Stephens told a House committee in February, construction of desperately needed workforce housing would stall and supporters of the plant would be embarrassed.
Critics said the bill would create a bad precedent for communities elsewhere in southeastern Georgia and beyond. The Georgia Association of Water Professionals said it would also circumvent safe drinking water rules intended to protect Georgia consumers.
Stephens’ legislation prevailed in the Senate on the last day of the session in a party-line vote. Kemp is expected to sign it into law.
‘Things that should not be decided by senators and house members’
Notwithstanding the pivotal role played by Coastal Georgia lawmakers during the latest legislative session, no politician was probably more consequential for the lives of the region’s residents than the man who isn’t formally a member of the legislature at all: Brian Kemp.
When passage of a school choice bill again looked doubtful despite Kemp’s focus on it in his state-of-the-state address in January, the governor made it clear he wanted it done. It got done, as the Senate approved a plan a week before the session’s end to create a $6,500 per child voucher funding for private school tuition and home schooling.
That was welcome news to school choice advocates in at least two Coastal Georgia counties. Currently, some 16% ‑ or 6,721 ‑ of all K-12 students in Chatham are educated in the county’s 28 private schools, compared to the state average of 8%. The average tuition is $9,119 annually.
In Glynn, the number is 7% of all K-12 students in that county’s seven private schools.
Opponents said the measure was laudable in theory but not in Georgia.
“If taxpayers paid enough taxes to support both public and private schools, vouchers would be okay, but that is not the case,” said Sen. Sally Harrell (D-Atlanta).
Another of great concern to Coastal Georgians – the fate of the Okefenokee Swamp – appears now to rest on Kemp’s willingness to exert his political will as he did in the instance of school choice, after the Senate refused to take up a House-backed bill that would have paused the permitting of new mines like the one Alabama-based Twin Pines Minerals wants to develop on the edge.
One of Kemp’s close allies, Senate majority leader Steve Gooch, indicated that the governor wouldn’t intervene, even though he oversees the state agencies that will decide the matter.
“Those are things that should not be decided on by political entities like senators and house members,” Gooch told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Those are decisions that should be made by the regulatory agencies that have been created by the federal and state governments.”
Local impact
Befitting their minority status in a state government controlled by Republicans, Democratic lawmakers often struggled to shape legislation, sometimes even appearing rudderless.
Still, Coastal Georgia’s Democratic lawmakers joined their Republican counterparts in supporting measures that had local, if not always publicity-drawing, impact.
Among other things, they repealed the legislation creating the controversial Camden Spaceport Authority, perhaps killing it off once and for all.
They approved a bill reorganizing Garden City’s government.
They passed legislation creating the Weeping Time Cultural Heritage Corridor Authority to help commemorate the largest sale of slaves in U.S. history, which took place on the outskirts of Savannah in 1859.
Finally, in a measure plainly aimed at forcing the end of Orange Crush celebrations on Tybee Island, the passed a bill enabling local governments to recover from promoters the costs incurred from unpermitted events.
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