 We will talk a little bit about the structure of the event. We're going to start with some event questions that I've selected in consultation with the panelists. And then we also are welcoming, would love to see questions from you guys as well in the chat. So please post any questions you might have in the chat and we will try to get those in the rough order that they are presented to us. You are certainly welcome to ask multiple questions, but we do ask that or we will prioritize answering one question per participant. And then, you know, we exhaust the full questions that we'll certainly take multiple questions at that point, but I do want to make sure we do, we certainly will make sure that everybody has an opportunity to speak. And also please be courteous and civil to each other in chat window, bear in mind all the standard stuff about the expectations for student conduct, et cetera. So some of the questions we'll be talking about today are the significance of something that happened earlier this week, crossover day, budgetary questions about this current fiscal year, which is the 2023 fiscal year, and then the upcoming fiscal year that will start in July 2024, as well as some of the key issues that have been before the legislature and involved in say politics more generally lately, including certainly key questions like health care, housing affordability and safe housing and things like that. Education, the issue of the proposed splitting of Atlanta into a separate entity, perhaps known as Buckhead City. And then also sports betting, gambling has also been on the agenda as well. And also some broader questions about politics and government in Georgia and nationwide may come up as well. So without too much further ado, I will make this slide to disappear. And we will proceed to our questions if the assuming both of our panelists are ready. So let's see. So let me move my thing over so I can don't look like I'm looking away from the screen. So we'll start with our first question. So I mentioned in our introduction that one of the things that happened earlier this week on Monday was somebody crossover day in the general assembly. So what is crossover day and why is it important in the work of the Georgia State Legislature or the Georgia General Assembly? Great question, Chris. I will jump on this one and leave the budget to Julie in a minute. Welcome all students. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Julie, for being here. Thank you, Dr. Bink for joining us and other faculty. Welcome to our second policy discussion of this semester. To kick things off again, great question. What is crossover day? To understand crossover day, we need to look at a few details of the Georgia Legislature or the General Assembly. Constitutionally, the Georgia Legislature has 40 days to get through its entire agenda. The number one most important thing that the Georgia Legislature must do that all legislators must do is pass a budget. In addition to that, there's other legislation that's introduced a little over the halfway point. Day 28, I believe we have what's called crossover day and crossover day quite simply. It's like a cutoff. If you've introduced legislation into the Georgia House of Representatives, if it has not passed the House of Representatives by the end of crossover day, it's fundamentally dead. And the same thing goes for the Senate. Monday was crossover day. Now there are a few legislative tricks that can be used to bring something back to life. But in general, if your legislation hasn't passed at least one chamber of the state legislature by the end of crossover day, it is effectively dead. And it is a huge rush on that day. There were over 200 bills for the Senate, over 100 before the House. And those that successfully passed at least one chamber will go on to live another day and try to get passed in the other chamber. And if then, of course, all to the governor. On that note, I will hand it over to Julie if she wants to add anything to that. This is something of a unique legislative reality in Georgia that not all states share. But again, it's an interesting cutoff point a little over halfway through. I think that was an excellent explanation and description. And as you mentioned, even if a bill doesn't crossover between the chambers, there are still ways to get it through most commonly through language as an amendment to a bill that does survive crossover day. So there's a couple of things to watch. If you do follow politics in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal of Constitution actually earlier today, they said sports betting might not necessarily be dead. There may be a way they're going to try to work some of it into another bill. So because it actually has a lot of sponsors. Another thing that to point out about the state legislature, and it's 40 days right now, March 29th is scheduled to be signing die, which is the last day. So it's going to be a flurry of activity over the next couple of weeks. So those of you that are interested in following, I encourage you to tune in. Atlanta Journal of Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, great resources as we wrap up the session here in the next few weeks. Yeah, great. Yeah, that's one way in which state politics differs a lot from national politics and that, you know, at the federal level, you know, the Congress meets for a two year session. It does have adjournments and things like that, but there's no real institution like crossover day or a specific drop dead deadline in law. It's just one of those things that as you get closer and closer to the end of a two year congressional session, your bill is less and less likely to pass. But it's not quite the same thing as a lot of states like Georgia, for example, do with the crossover day. There are some states that don't do that. There are some states that, you know, have longer terms. There are some states where the state legislature only meets every other year. So, you know, one of the neat things about state politics in general is, you know, just the variation between the states and Georgia's. I would say somewhere in the middle in terms of what might call professionalization of the legislature. And it's got some some things where it looks a lot like what sometimes referred to as a citizen legislature. You know, it's a legislature that meets, you know, for a brief period of time and is part time and doesn't really do all that much relatively speaking. But it also has some characteristics of some of the larger states that have, you know, more professional legislatures like California and New York, for example, or two of the states that usually political side to side identify as the most professionalized legislatures. And, you know, as Georgia has become a larger state, it's become a quote unquote more professionalized state in some ways, but not professionalized in others. And one of the ways perhaps when we're not professionalized is, you know, that short 40 day session, which does, which again, as Julie sort of alluded to, has this kind of interesting factor as well, that it kind of, it starts out very slow and it kind of builds up pace until it's like, you know, become like a sprint at the end. You know, the first couple of weeks are kind of sleepy and then it, you know, suddenly people go, oh, yeah, there's a deadline. It's kind of like, well, I guess it's kind of like, you know, an assignment in college or something, right? It's like, okay, well, you know, I hear, you know, this paper is due three months from now, and now it's due two months from now, and now it's due one month now. And I was like, oh, one month and that was only four weeks. So maybe I need to start working on that, right? So the deadline sort of concentrates the mind in the legislature as we move through the next few weeks into, you know, as Julie was saying, is sign of die is right around the corner, really, relatively speaking. So as Dr. Hall alluded to, we, our first kind of substantive question is about the budget. We're actually two budgets, technically speaking. We have the supplemental budget or amended budget for the current fiscal year, so the 2022-23 fiscal year, which, you know, we're currently in, which is kind of a common practice in state legislatures to go back and kind of backfill the budget, adjust it for realities that weren't quite anticipated when the legislature met last year. And then we also have the budget for the upcoming year as well. And so two important pieces of legislation, there are literally billions of dollars at stake. You know, what are some of the key highlights of both of those budgets that are going to be relevant to, you know, our audience and the state as a whole? I'll take that one. Good explanation there, Dr. Lawrence, of the budget, the amended fiscal year budget for 2023, as he mentioned, because when they make the budget, they don't know what the tax collections are going to be necessarily for the next year, so they have to make those adjustments. As we know too, the state has a pretty large surplus of cash sitting around, so that opens some doors fiscally that we might not have seen in previous years. So it's important to note though that while we have this nice surplus sitting around and we're seeing some nice bonuses from that surplus, if you watch economists and budget staff and they're just kind of saying, hey, you know, maybe we need to be a little bit of aware that the forecast for future years could show a decline in revenue. So that's also on their mind as they're balancing, spending and these programs. So just a few highlights. The amended fiscal year 2023 has actually been passed earlier this week. I don't believe the Governor Kemp has signed it yet, but it was passed on Monday. Just a few highlights I thought you all might be interested in. A one-time tax credit was proposed. It was up to $250 or $500 depending on your filing status. And if you filed previously, some of us received that last year, that bonus. So that's kind of a nice surprise for a lot of people to help during these economic times. Also approximately $1 billion will be allocated to property tax relief. The average is expected to be approximately $500 per homeowner. So that may be something that also helps homeowners during this time. Also to approximately $1.1 billion will be allocated to GDOT, the Georgia Department of Transportation. I don't know if you remember last year whenever we were not paying the state tax on gasoline. While that helped us and our wallets for our families, that took money away from GDOT to fund highway construction maintenance on our roads and our infrastructure. So to help make up for that lost revenue, they want to refill that account as well. Now these are all planned to be allocated. There's actually separate legislation that will need to be passed to do all three of these things. But as of right now, last time I looked, it looks like that those programs will most likely be funded. So those are some things to look out from the amended fiscal year budget. The fiscal year 2024 budget, an hour ago I looked at the newspaper and it appears that the house did actually pass it. So it'll go on to the Senate for their action. A strong focus in this budget was actually on funding public safety. And there's been a proposal to increase the salary of law enforcement officers by $4,000, provide funding for a GBI cold case office, and approximately $1.25 million to place a Georgia State Patrol satellite station in Buckhead. Also a lot of funding is focused on mental health and substance abuse care. And they'll receive money to not only expand those programs, but also to hire more staff to increase pay. The formula for funding K-12 education should be fully funded, which in previous years, whenever economic times were a little bit more difficult, it wasn't. And there's also funding in the budget, if it does go through both chambers, to allocate money for students in K-12 who may receive reduced lunches. It would actually allocate the money that these students wouldn't actually have to pay for their lunches at all. So that's something that we're saying. Probably maybe a little more relevant to those of you who are on the Zell Miller scholarship. Now Governor Kemp wanted to fund that at 100%. The House budget writers decided, no, we're not going to do that. They are proposing for it to be funded at 95%. And the other 5% will go towards some pre-K programs. And state employees, state employees are scheduled, if this goes through, to receive a $2,000 pay raise. Last year, there was a $5,000 pay raise. Yeah, we're all like, yay. This includes K-12 teachers, employees in the university system of Georgia, and other state agencies. Why are they doing this? It's really, oh, it's just a handout. Well, the realities of government employment, there's a lot of turnover. There's actually about 29% full-time agency staff turnover in state government because state government salaries are not always competitive with the private sector. So the hope is that by boosting these salaries, that there'll be an opportunity to retain and attract talent. I'm very little ad. Great job summarizing that, Julie. The only thing I would jump on in terms of some contemporary politics, Julie mentioned the extraordinary budget surplus that the state of Georgia has, which is a good thing. It's a sign of a strong, robust economy, something of a champagne problem. But the Kevin administration and the legislature is dealing with something of an issue in terms of public opinion. While not a majority, but a strong plurality of Georgians when polled, want to use a good deal of that budget surplus on infrastructure programs, on education. But there's also a poll for tax rebates that Julie mentioned. So there's a slight political fracture there in terms of the government and a plurality of Georgians when polled. But beyond that, I really have very little to add. Great. Yeah. I think the only point I would add is in the grand scheme of things, having money is better than not having money. Particularly when it comes to the legislature, they're not having to make tough decisions in a way that they might have had to in previous years or perhaps down the road. I guess the only thing that you'll have to bear in mind is that there ought to be some caution to make sure we're not making commitments that we're going to have to worry about down the road being able to fill them, which is where some of that pain does come in when the demands on government are more than the money coming in. So speaking of an area that involves a lot of budgetary spending, health care is one of the largest areas of government spending in Georgia. And those have continued to be a focus of interest for the legislature in recent years trying to figure out exactly how to best deliver care to people. I know mental health has been a big issue that the now late Speaker Ralston was quite concerned about. But we've also seen some other issues dealing with health care as well, access to rural medicine, and for that matter, access to medicine in urban communities as well, like South Side of Atlanta has been a big issue lately. Gender firming care has been an issue in the news. What sort of actions has the legislature taken this year to deal with the health care issue or issues plural? John's muted. I have to do that at least once. There are a number of health related issues before the legislature. I'll start off with one that is universally popular. Let's start off with an easy one. And that would be a cap, a proposed cap on the price of insulin. The legislature is looking at a $35 maximum price that can be charged by pharmaceutical companies for a 30-day supply and a $105 cap on a 90-day supply. This is a policy that has extraordinary bipartisan support. Insulin is not necessarily as expensive to make as it, in terms of the price that you might see sometimes. This is a controversial area of market economy. Is it ethical in the name of profits to charge an exorbitant amount of money for a medicine that is literally going to determine life or death for many Georgians? So that's a fantastically popular policy. It passed a Senate 52-2, so it had incredible support. Some other legislation that receives some degree of bipartisan support, HB 129 involving pregnant women and making them eligible for temporary assistance for needy families funding. So for any of our students out there that aren't familiar, the temporary assistance for needy families or TANF was a product of bipartisan support in the 1990s signed into law by President Clinton that reformed American welfare. And while it is available to families with children in Georgia, it is not available to pregnant women who don't have children. So what the House bill is trying to do is open up availability for pregnant women living in poverty who do not yet have children. So on the one hand, this is something that is exciting for Democrats and Republicans, particularly the Democratic Party, which would generally champion such a policy. However, the qualifications for this program are quite strict. I believe it's something in the realm of $800 per month. If you make more than that, you would not qualify. It has incredibly narrow parameters. While obviously voting in favor of this policy, many state Democrats are basically offering the critique that this is just not enough, that instead of expanding TANF for pregnant women living in poverty who don't already have children, we should go ahead and expand Medicaid. Now that opens up another huge area of legislation, Medicaid expansion. I was almost about to ask all of the audience if you were aware of it, but I won't be able to hear you. Is everyone here familiar? I'll just pretend you're saying yes with the Obama administration's signature healthcare policy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I'm going to assume you all said yes. Part of and one of the pillars of the Affordable Care Act was an expansion of Medicaid. Now if you are at, if you're a state that takes part in this because the Supreme Court, while upholding the central tenants of the Affordable Care Act, they said that forcing states to expand their Medicaid was a bridge too far for the federal government. So states had to voluntarily join the Medicaid expansion, which would allow them to provide Medicaid for individuals making up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Short story, even longer, if you were a state that decides to take part in the Medicaid expansion, you are going to dramatically expand the number of your citizens that qualify for Medicaid and the federal government is going to pay 90% of the additional cost forever. You pay the remaining 10. Georgia is one of 11 other states that has not yet expanded our Medicaid role and the pressure has been building for several years to do exactly that, mainly because we have, I believe, almost one and a half million Georgians who do not have health insurance. And if we were to expand Medicaid along the Affordable Care Act, there would be about a half a million Georgians who instantaneously would have healthcare free of charge. Now this additional money would cost the state of Georgia around 350 million, but we would get back about 3.5 billion from the federal government. So that brings me that long intro to House Bill 226, which is an attempt at expanding Medicaid coverage to low income people with HIV. Obviously this had bipartisan support, but again, Democrats wanting to go ahead and just expand Medicaid in the state of Georgia, which has, at this point, in terms of a percentage of our population at almost 14% were basically the third highest state in the Republic in terms of the percentage of citizens who are not covered by any healthcare plan. On that note, there's so much to get to here. I want to jump over to an incredibly controversial piece of legislation that was up, and that was Senate Bill 140, which was an attempt at banning gender-affirming procedures, things like hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers for the treatment in minors, and basically limiting the ability of family doctors, medical professionals to prescribe certain drugs for transgender youth. There are a lot of variables at play here. This did pass 33 to 22 on strict partisan lines. Basically, what Republicans have said, and this was introduced by Senator Summers, Republican from Cordell, I have to admit, I've been in Georgia almost a decade. I have no idea where Cordell is, but this was the author of the legislation. Basically, he's saying that he wants to prevent minors in the state of Georgia from taking part, or he wants to prevent, what he would consider as irreversible gender reassignment surgeries and procedures for minors who may not literally lack legal consent. The Democratic Party is pushing back, saying that the elevated suicide levels are actually more irreversible than this legislation. When you look at the data, and there are mountains of data suggesting this, the LGBT community itself, but particularly the transgender community have significantly higher levels of suicide rates. We've seen also in the data that when transgender youth have access to gender reaffirming medication and counseling, suicide rates tend to plummet. That's really where the two parties are on this legislation. Republicans say they want to prevent young people from taking part in irreversible medical procedures. Democrats are countering that with the transgender community has a disturbing level of suicide rates, and assistance from medical professionals has been shown to help that. The American Academy of Pediatrics itself recommends that doctors provide children with comprehensive gender reaffirming and developmentally appropriate healthcare. The medical community is quite united in its desire to provide these services to transgender youth. So a lot going on here, we'll see how this fares when it goes over to the house. I've lost track of time. I can't tell if I'm going too long or too short. So one last thing I will jump on is, and actually I'll stop there because if I keep going, it'll be another 20 minutes. I think you did a great overview. Like you had mentioned, the late speaker Ralston was very much in support of expanding mental health care. And there were a couple of bills I've made it through the house to help recruit more workers in mental health. And also maybe give some student loan forgiveness for different types of healthcare workers. So if those bills pass, that may be applicable to some of our students that are watching in the future. So I think Dr. Hall did a great job. And just so you know, Courtney is about 60 miles south of Macon on I-75. Carter Summers, my senator. So let's see. So another issue that's of course been for the legislature earlier this legislative session was the issue of safety and affordable housing, particularly in Metro Atlanta has been a real issue. There have been bills on tenant protection, trying to increase the affordability of housing through overriding local zoning rules and things like that. Any updates on the status of that legislation after crossover day? I'll take that one. We'll touch on the tenant protections first. The specific bill is the House Bill 404, which did survive. It's called the Safe at Home Act. Over the last few months, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has really been digging in on the issue of affordable housing and safe housing in Georgia. And it was on the mind of legislators before they started doing this work, but it's really helped bring it to the forefront. So that kind of shows you the importance of journalism and the relationship between their work and what happens in politics and the state legislature. So they actually had a series called Dangerous Dwellings and where they highlighted several issues related to unsafe rental properties in the Atlanta metro area. There was actually an interactive list of what they deemed the most dangerous apartment complexes in the Metro Atlanta area. So as compared to other states, Georgia's legislation was lagging behind in protections for tenants living in substandard housing. So the AJC and other housing advocates really wanted to call this out and actually try to start to do something about this. So everybody has a safe dwelling. And so I encourage you to look at that if you're interested in this issue. Again, it's dangerous dwelling to just Google that Atlanta Journal Constitution. So House Bill 404, the Safe at Home Act, was introduced to ensure that rentals are quote, fit for human habitation. So there can be some different definitions of that. But it has to be fit for human habitation, not just when you go pick up the keys and sign the lease and hand over the check. It has to be through the duration of your lease. So if this is passed, it's also going to place various limitations on landlords, including a limit on security deposit. For example, only two months rent, they can't request like a whole year's worth of rent for a security deposit because that's unreasonable for most people. And also two notification requirements before eviction proceedings would begin. Again, to make sure that there's a process, people are informed, they just don't come home and their stuff is sitting on the street. So it actually will expand if it's passed and signed by the governor, it will expand tenant protections in the state of Georgia, which is very good for our renters. As far as looking at other issues in affordable housing and workplace housing, if you watch the state of the state address in January, Governor Kemp was touting his economic record and development and job growth in the state. But he said one issue that he's seeing is that he he's in communication with these companies wanting to come to Georgia and bring these jobs to Georgia, but there's no place for their workers to live. And this is something that we're seeing all over the state. And if you have been trying to buy real estate lately, some communities have very, very limited stock and very limited stock in what we would call affordable housing. So we're seeing that problem all over the state, but we're really seeing it in rural Georgia. And that's where a lot of this economic development is happening. So he proposed taking money from another program and creating this rural workforce housing fund, which would be used to build new houses, update the houses that need to be updated, that may have fallen into disrepair, and also to retrofit commercial buildings. As you go downtown in a lot of communities, urban as well as rural, you'll see a lot of vacant commercial space that could potentially be retrofitted into affordable housing like apartments, condos, those types of things. So that's a program they're working on. A couple of other bills. House Bill 514, which did survive crossover day, it's the Housing Regulation Transparency Act, which actually would limit local governments on how long they could impose zoning or permitting moratoriums for single family housing, setting it at 180 days. So what happens, let's try to do a little zoning 101 here in about two minutes. So basically if a developer wants to come into a community and build a housing subdivision, if it's not zoned already for that, they may have to go through a zoning process or application process and hearings through local government to get approval for these projects. So some communities are okay. We'll rubber stamp that real quickly. Some other communities kind of wanted to do some study and make sure that they actually need those houses in their community. So they may have moratoriums on this type of development. Some communities are actually seeing developers like companies coming in and building these subdivisions to rent these houses out. So they're kind of trying to stop that because they'd rather sell, you know, have people buy them instead of large investment companies rent them out. So there's a lot of concern with local government. And so they put these moratoriums on these projects for a variety of reasons. But the state legislature doesn't want these moratoriums just to continue for years on end. So they're going to limit it if it survives and gets signed by the governor. And then another bill, House Bill 517, which actually did not make it through. But as we mentioned earlier, things can survive through amendments onto other legislation. This was called the Georgia Homeowner Opportunity Act, which would place certain restrictions on the powers of local governments insofar as requiring certain architectural control or design elements on housing to not be allowed. The argument for this bill by the supporters is that we don't have affordable housing because local governments are putting too many architectural controls. They're telling you what type of siding you can have on your house, what type of shingles you can have, what type of color your house can be. So those are architectural control standards. So that's what the supporters of this bill, they said, we don't want local governments to be able to do that. Housing is too expensive because local governments are requiring all these different things. So they said it's going to promote affordable housing as contractors would have the ability to have more flexibility in design and materials because we know vinyl siding is going to be less expensive than brick putting it on a house. So there was a group called the Georgia Coalition for Housing Opportunity, which consisted of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, the Habitat of Humanity for Humanity, the Home Builders Association of Georgia and the Georgia Association of Realtors, which is an interesting coalition. When you think about it, they actually all spoke in favor of this legislation because they want to promote more affordable housing, but you have your opposition to this legislation. Your two biggest leaders in this opposition would be the Georgia Municipal Association, which represents the 537, well the soon to be 538 municipalities in the state of Georgia and the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia, which represents the 159 counties in Georgia. So it makes sense that those two groups were leading the charge against this legislation because this legislation is going to take a lot of power away from local governments and regulating how housing looks in their community. And one of the big arguments, if you watch the testimony that was made by the opponents was that this legislation is supposed to promote affordable housing. That's how they're framing it. But if you actually read the legislation, there's nothing in it that would actually show that the contractors, all the money they save by using less expensive materials, would be passed on as savings to future homeowners, people that buy the homes. And also to another big concern was think about the geography of Georgia. The building materials on the coast might not be the same building materials that you need to use in Northwest Georgia because you don't get hurricanes usually in Northwest Georgia, but you do on the coast. So they argue that they don't want to take away those local decisions because of things like geography. But that didn't survive crossover day. Dr. Hall. Thank you. That was so overwhelmingly thorough. I have literally nothing to ask. Are you kidding me? Thanks. Thanks, Dr. Lester. So onto another big ticket item for state government and that is education, always an important area of state government. Before I do that, ask that question. I do want to just briefly remind you that we are happy to take your questions in the chat. So feel free to ask questions if you want to do so. You're not obligated to do so. We're not going to hold you at gunpoint. Make you ask questions, but we got plenty of questions to keep us busy. But nonetheless, if you do have questions, please please do share them in the chat window and we'll try to get them to our panelists. But going back to our next potential question, on education, an important area of state government, an expensive area of state government, what are some of the things that the state legislature has done this session that affect education, both in the K through 12 sphere as well as in higher education? I guess Dr. Hall, if you'd like to take that one. Actually, I had another incredible policy area here, education. I would like to reiterate what Dr. Warren said. I just noticed that chat does not have a single question. I've never seen that before. We can't be the first group that doesn't have a question. So please, if you have any, feel free. With that said, I'll start with a controversial legislation and then get more controversial as I go, I guess. I'll start with Senate Bill 233. This is a big one. When you look at the issue of school vouchers, it's a fascinating policy area because it actually experiences Democratic and Republican Party members who might cross over a bit. Democratic Party or Democratic voters overwhelmingly in favor of public education and funding it. But if you're a Democrat in an area with an underfunded school system, with a failing school system, you're no longer a Democrat or Republican, you're a parent. And this is an area where you see Democrats actually siding with what's traditionally a Republican policy area, and that is school vouchers. So with that introduction, the state legislature is looking at a potential $6,000 annual voucher that can be given to parents. If they have children that are in a school system, that's in the bottom 25% of the state of Georgia. The general theory behind school vouchers is this. If you're in a public school system that is failing, that has low test scores, then we give you a voucher that will allow you to go to another school, which basically translates almost all the time into a private school. And this can be a private school that is private for academic reasons or private for religious reasons. So the $6,000 voucher is intended to go to parents with children in failing schools. It has a good deal of support in the Republican Party, not as much in the Democratic Party. Supporters basically claim that this allows individual families to make decisions for themselves, and most importantly, to get their children out of failing public schools. Opponents look at it philosophically from one and only one direction. This is a fundamental abandonment of publicly funded schools. Every nickel that goes to a school voucher is a nickel that does not go to public schools. So philosophically, Democrats generally oppose school vouchers for that very reason. Also, when you look at the reality, the average private school in the state of Georgia runs a little under $12,000 a year. So the $6,000 voucher is not going to pay for the average private school. And there's also concern among Democrats in Atlanta that this money will predominantly go to families that can already afford private school. This issue is one that has national significance. This is something that's debated in all the states. But Georgia is somewhat unique. We're one of six states that does not have any policy for appropriating extra money to children whose families are affected by poverty. So the voucher proposal here is unique, and it will be interesting to see if this does get successfully passed. Moving on from school vouchers, we will go into another area. Senate Bill 88, which it just now occurred to me, I am not entirely sure if this passed crossover. I believe it did, if anyone wants to correct me, but if not, I will go ahead as if it did. This at least is a possible restriction on public school teachers. Now you might ask, what is Senate Bill 88 trying to restrict teachers from doing? Basically, it's restricting them from talking to students under the age of 16 about issues related to sexual orientation or gender identity without permission from a parent. Republicans strongly support this legislation, and they approach it from the perspective that they don't want children to learn about things like gender transitioning without parental notification. While Democrats, again, go back to the data. There are disturbingly high rates of suicide among the LGBTQ community. And we have shown in the data again that programs that discuss, that inform members of the LGBTQ community as minors have incredible success rates at lowering suicide rates. Beyond that, we'll hit another interesting piece of legislation, and that's Senate Bill 154, which is attempting to exempt public school librarians from being prosecuted for sharing any materials deemed harmful to children. Public school librarians are exempt from prosecution in terms of presenting material to children that may be inappropriate. This legislation would take that away. Basically, what the concern is, is that material deemed obscene predominantly by the Republican Party introducing this bill can get into the hands of children through librarians. Usually this involves sexual orientation or gender identity or race. Opponents of this legislation are afraid that librarians who are simply following their district policies will suffer as a result. So, several pieces of legislation here that witnesses the legislature getting relatively deep into public education. There are several others that we could discuss. I will stop there in the interest of time. Julie, if you'd like to add anything. SB 88, for those of you that may follow politics in other states, you may have heard of Florida, they call it the don't say gay bill. That was a basically Georgia's version. I mean, of course, there were differences between Florida's and Georgia's version. It actually got tabled in committee. It didn't make it out. It was also introduced by the same senator who was introducing the legislation about gender affirming care. Talking about coalitions, this is a very interesting coalition. You had Southern Baptist aligning with advocates for the LGBTQ plus community with their expressing their concerns about this legislation because it would not just apply to public schools, but it would also apply to private schools and could even trickle down to private camps. So there was a lot of opposition to this. And as of right now, you know, it was tabled, but again, expect it probably to come back up in future sessions. Okay, great. Thanks. So the gauntlet has been taken up by the chat. We do have a couple of questions now that John has challenged our chat participants. So we have one question from Brandon who's asking, are there any legislation, I'll paraphrase here, were there any legislation or was there any legislation proposed doing with the abortion issue this year? A short and simple one. And less of the exchange that I'm unaware of the state of Georgia has fallen back on its de facto legislation, which basically is called a heartbeat bill. Heartbeat bills, as the name suggests, prevent abortion after a fetal heartbeat is identifiable by medical doctors. Now, heartbeat bills are an interesting, they're an interesting exploration of nomenclature. It's heartbeat bill, it sounds like it's limiting abortions to we can hear a heartbeat, but what we have to look at is that the vast majority of pregnant women have no idea they're pregnant by the time a fetal heartbeat can be detected. So heartbeat bills to me, sometimes when I'm not careful about how I'm talking, I just call them abortion bans. The vast majority of women will never have an abortion in a state that has a heartbeat bill. Julia, are there any changes there? No, there was some legislation about defining when life begins. And of course, legislation about going back to expand abortion rights, but nothing went anywhere as far as that. So yeah, we're de facto to what we were. Yeah, in some other states, there's some revolutionary, for lack of a better word, abortion laws that are starting to attack the medication like the morning after pill medication that can end the development of a fetus. We'll see if that passes muster across the Republic, but nothing really new to report in Georgia. Great question. Okay, great. So we have another question and we've got a third one in the meantime. Our second question comes from Professor Adam Square, who was asking if we could give an update on the bill that would have removed runoff elections and what are our thoughts on removing or keeping runoffs or modifying elections were generally speaking, I would imagine. Great question there. I'm going to jump ahead. Julia, I'll lean on you after this, because I'm about to basically say I don't know. I'm not aware of current legislation removing runoff elections. I do know that the history of Georgia runoff elections are kind of terrifying. They have a strong foundation in old school, disturbing racism that when you have the requirement for runoff elections, it can tend to dilute certain minority votes or voters. So in terms of contemporary legislation to remove them, I am going to turn it over to Julie, because I don't know. According to an article, the Illinois General Constitution today said the general assembly actually declined to vote on eliminating the runoffs. So they're focusing on some of the other election issues, but I thought this data was interesting. They said that 58% of Georgia voters that participated in a poll, statewide poll in January, actually supported getting rid of runoff elections. As you know, Georgia is one of three states that does that. So as of right now, though, that doesn't look like that's going to get the support it needs to move on. Okay. Dr. Beek has his hand up. I don't know if that's a question or a response to this or what. Yeah, I've got a general question for you folks, if you don't mind. Where would educated commoners, which is all of us except for you political scientists, where would educated commoners find a comprehensive list of this information in such a digestible way that you've given it to us? In other words, you know, where do we have to dig around in the tunnels of the internet? Or do we just have to read the Atlanta General Constitution? Or where do you go to sources? Great question, Dr. Beek. In terms of the legislation itself, you can of course go to georgia.gov. You can actually read the entire legislation. I am assuming most do not want to do that. I highly recommend our old friend Google search. If you were to search for Georgia legislation 2023 summary, you can get thousands of great articles that will go one by one through the current legislation. You won't find one article that does it all, but yes, googling a summary of the legislation. Other than that, it's always best to just read the legislation itself. That can sometimes take a lot of time. Sounds like we need to have panel sessions like this all the time so you guys can do the work for us. Absolutely. Joey, did you want to add anything? No, I, like you said, we have to rely a lot on journalism just to break it down into commonsense language. During the legislative session, every night when they meet, they don't meet on Fridays on the floor, but when they meet Monday through Thursday, when there's a floor session, sometimes there's some special episodes. I believe it's seven o'clock on your GPB station, there's a show called Lawmakers. And so they started out and they talk about kind of what happened that day and they break it down and they invite representatives and senators and other parties to come and speak on what happened on that legislative day. It's also available online just Google GPB lawmakers. And it's really issue dependent. For example, like as I was doing my research here for this, if you really want a lot of these bills, like for example, bills that are important to municipalities, Georgia Municipal Association actually has a legislative roundup and it gives plain commonsense language. The ACCG for legislative, they each week, they do a legislative roundup on legislation that will affect counties. So kind of think about maybe what your interest is and you'll probably find an affinity group for it. Also, I always get their name a little bit messed up here. Find my notes about the budget. It was a Georgia policy budget, GBPI is what it is, .org. And that's if you want, I mean, it digs deep. I mean, real deep. But there's also briefs that are very common sense too. If you want to understand budget issues and how other legislative issues will have an impact on the budget. Also too, like I said, you go to the state legislature website and you click on their calendar every day. It'll show you, they'll take you a link to the text of the bill. And I actually also encourage people to watch the committee hearings because that's where you'll hear the common sense language. If there's a bill that you are interested in, watch the committee hearings either live, recorded, it's all there online and you can actually watch the legislative session when they're on the floor and they're getting more and more high tech. You can actually put both four sessions on your screen at the same time and follow what they're doing in real time and watch the votes pop up. So there's a lot of different opportunities. Awesome. Thank you, folks. And just to kind of add to what Julie and John were saying, I think the primary resources I rely on, the Atlanta General Constitution, we've talked about them multiple times already, not just as sort of a source of some of the reporting that's led to some of the legislation, but also they have reporters that are daily doubt the general assembly reporting on things. And of course, a lot of their reporters are going to be appearing on lawmakers and things like that fairly regularly. Georgia Public Broadcasting, so you definitely have their website. You could also listen to GPB on your local GPB affiliate, WABE, which is the Atlanta Public Radio that's separate from GPB. Also, I think has some legislative coverage. And also, this is also a good point to plug the possibility of getting involved yourselves, not so much perhaps for the people my age in the room, but for the students in the room. You know, every year the General Assembly relies a lot on short-term employees, both part-time and full-time. And there are a lot of session employees that they hire, and that could be a job for recent graduates, but also people that are still in college. They hire people that are still in college for a lot of these jobs in doing things like helping with the broadcasting of these sessions and things like that, the streaming, the social media. And that's aside from the internship program as well. So they also have a formalized internship program that brings in juniors and seniors. You get college credit. And so if you're interested in learning more about the legislature, really diving deep in the legislature and perhaps even working in state government, this is a great gateway to that is either an internship or a session employee on the Hill. The compensation isn't all that great, but the understanding I have from my discussions with people up at the Capitol is that if this is a career you think you'd be interested in, this is a great way to get on the ground floor that a lot of people that were former interns or former session employees, when there is an opening for a staffer, when there is an opening for somebody to work full time, that experience is what they're looking for. And the connections you'll build, the networking, the knowing the senators and the representatives is a huge leg up in doing that. Of course, the caveat to that is you've got to go and live in Atlanta or at least commute up to Atlanta. And that could be a bit of a challenge, probably less of a challenge for us in Macon than in some other areas. But something you definitely consider. But certainly in terms of also keeping track of the legislature, I think, Dr. Leschert said, keep up with affinity groups. All these groups have lobbyists that are trying to keep track of what the legislature is going to do to their industry or they're part of the economy. There's that old joke from, I think it was Macon who said that no man's life, liberty or property are safe when the legislature is in session. And so anybody that is concerned about their life, liberty or property has somebody paying attention to what the legislature is doing as a result of that. And so yeah, GPB, that sort of thing, definitely worth keeping it paying some attention to. I did realize that we didn't answer the question about or Professor Adams-Square's kind of latter question about the thoughts about keeping her eliminating run-offs. I think that there's a lot of debate about what the merits of that are. As John said, originally when run-offs were put in place, certainly some of the intent of that was to dilute minority votes. There's no question of that. That said, there have been times when the run-off has been to the advantage of white voters or minority voters. You look at what happened back with the 2020 election. Had it been a plurality, a priority winner election for the Senate, Senator Perdue would have been re-elected because he had more votes, I believe, than Senator Ossoff did going into the run-off. But Ossoff was able to make up that difference after the run-off. And so there are some arguments for some people. A lot of the question I think boils down to and this kind of the bigger picture educational thing is most people, 58% of Georgians don't like run-offs. But the problem is that you have to replace it with something else. And that something else may not have that majority support because some people want a plurality. Some people want to say, okay, we'll never get most votes wins. Some people want to say, well, we'll have a run-off if nobody gets 45% of the vote. Well, those aren't the same thing. You've got to have a solution to replace the existing solution. You can't just sort of say, we're going to get rid of run-offs and that's it, right? You've got to have a replacement for run-offs, right? Right choice voting. A lot of people have argued that that's a good idea, but some people argue that would make things more complicated. It would make it harder for voters to vote. Certainly, they're about some evidence that might slow things down a little bit because people just, it takes longer to say, okay, well, this is my first choice. And then my second choice is my third choice as opposed to simply saying, well, although for this person, it introduces ambiguities, issues of, well, what if somebody just only votes for one of the three candidates? How do you count that if there's a run-off? That sort of thing. So the bottom line is, I don't know that while I think most people would argue, I think a lot of people on both sides of that would argue that the run-offs have become increasingly expensive with very little benefit. Again, that question of what do you replace them with that satisfies the majority is kind of a key question there. Let's see, we've got one question. Is there a legal process for a citizen of another country to join either the armed forces? Yes, there is. Talk to a military recruiter. I will save the panelists from having to answer that one. But yeah, you can, if you're, I believe, as long as you are legally present in the US, you can sign up to join the army of the Air Force or Navy or whatever, just meet your local military recruiter. Over at the Macon Mall, I believe, is where they're headquartered here in Macon. So let's see. So I haven't had a chance to read through this whole question yet. So let me, so I guess this gets back to the education question, discussion about the quote-unquote don't-say-gay bill and that sort of thing. Michael asks, I'll try to summarize his question fairly here. Isn't it reasonable to keep explicit content out of schools and keeping schools about science and writing skills? And, you know, he says it seems to me that teachers have no business discussing my kid's sexuality with them and it should be their job as a parent. Yeah, thoughts on that? Dr. Hosser. Interesting question. First, to break that down, let's look at the role of public education. Is sexuality important? Is sexual education important? And just in life, and the answers, of course, absolutely. And also we have a mountain of data. There are two general ways of looking at sex education programs in general and public school. You have, well, sex education that will teach primary or secondary students the realities of sexuality and reproduction. And you have abstinence-only programs that simply teach don't ever have sex until you get married. It's not even close. Abstinence-only programs have a much higher rate of teenage pregnancy than schools that have sexual education programs. So from the perspective of public education, this is another area of information that human beings need to have access to. So in the same way that we teach about the horrors of the Holocaust on a chapter in high school on World War II, we think about the unimaginable evil that occurred in the Holocaust and we are perfectly fine as we should be teaching that to children. I question what the big deal about sexual education is when you think of the level of violence we're comfortable teaching our children. Why not sex education? In addition to that, when it comes to the LGBT community, we've said this several times tonight, they have a disproportionate suicide rates than the rest of the population. So if you have a public school kid in primary, generally maybe secondary education that is trying to figure themselves out, trying to understand who they are and how they are and the life they're going to have, if they're having confusion related to an issue that an adult public school teacher is informed of and they're having confusion in an area that could literally lead to such a feeling of disconnection from the rest of their community that they take their own lives. I would argue that I would definitely see the advantage of airing on the side of knowledge. So when it's a great question, by the way, when you look at it broken down and I've heard this question a lot, what the hell are public school teachers doing talking about, you know, sex and gay people and transgender? It's an important part of life. It's a reality. It's something that we need to know and public educators have a responsibility to educate. Also, when it comes down to it, there are fewer LGBTQ community members who kill themselves when they have access to resources that help inform them about the realities of their sexual orientation. It literally saves the lives of children to offer resources. So again, another reason to maybe air on the side of public educators, educate. I'll stop there because I can keep going. Do you want anything, Dr. Lester, or just move on? No, that's good. I think we can move on. So I don't know if we want to answer more questions or move on to our final two questions we talked about. Let's see. So we do have a couple more questions from the chat. So one question about this from Avriana. This is actually a question about Florida. So I don't know if anybody wants to get too deep in the weeds on it, but how do you all feel about Disney and how now having to pay taxes in Florida prior to that building denied? I'm not sure that's exactly what the deal is with the the Reedy Creek issue in Florida. I mean, we could try to go into that a little bit if you like. We might be a little bit speculating. I don't know. Dr. Howard, are you somewhat familiar with what? Yeah, I want to kick things off here with by saying that I'm not entirely sure what's happening and I'm still looking into it. I know there's a degree of self-government that Disney has enjoyed for decades that the DeSantis administration has taken away. Beyond that, I really can't speak intelligently about it. So I'll stop. Yeah, I mean, I will take off my moderator hat and try to answer this one the best as I can as far as I understand from my ridiculously geeky knowledge of one things Disney and two things local government in Florida because I spent a lot of time in Florida growing up. So I guess I probably know more about Florida politics and Florida local government than I should. So the long story, right? You know, once upon a time when when Disney was going to build Disney World, right? And they ended up getting the Swampland outside of Orlando. They got the state government to give them the authority to establish what's called a community improvement district. So basically Florida allows for a type of local government called a community improvement district that is kind of like a city or county government but but has its own private board essentially that's elected by the landowners. It's a very simplified version of it. So a fair few for me with the villages. It is essentially established under the same sort of structure. So a lot of retirement communities in Florida have are basically based around these community improvement districts. And so what happens is that the landowners elect a board that then governs a lot of the municipal services and things like that. So the benefit to Disney is not so much that they are exempt from taxes or anything like that. It's that they have a nominally friendly jurisdiction for things that would otherwise be regulated by a county or municipal government. So things like fire protection, police services, zoning decisions, elevator inspections, you know, all those sort of very nitty gritty rubber hits the roads sort of things and you know Disney benefits from that not so much financially but in terms of its control right Disney Walt Disney you know going back to Walt Disney right or very much control freaks about the experience of going to Disney World right. The whole idea is you know Walt wanted to control to be able to essentially present his vision of what the theme park ought to be so it wouldn't be trashy right. He didn't want to be sort of a you know in Atlanta city barb walk. He wanted to be you know this very classy sort of thing which Disney has more or less succeeded in doing. Having said that you know other theme parks have survived without having these sort of controls you know universal with some fits and starts you know has built itself up to be a worthy competitor right without having a universal improvement district of their own right. They're under the Orange County and you know Orlando governments and don't have to have their own elevator inspectors to be able to run their business. So that's the backstory. So So Ron DeSantis got into this thing with Disney eventually you know he convinced the legislature to take away this special district control. Originally the plan was just abolish the district then they figured out this would actually dump a bunch of debt on the taxpayers and so they said no we're not going to do that anymore instead we're going to take control of the district and so now the governor gets to appoint the members of the district board and you know as far as the practical impact of this if you are a firefighter that works for the Redi Creek Improvement District this might impact your life. If you are trying to get permission to change an off ramp on the Disney property if you're a Disney corporation transportation engineer this might change your life. For the average human being in Florida this is probably not going to change anybody's life. So and probably isn't going to affect their taxes in any meaningful way. You know I'm sure they they are levied a property tax by the improvement district for the services they provide. Now that will be a bit more arms length perhaps but you know an improvement district can't really tax you for things it's not doing so there has been talk about disestablishing the two municipalities within Disney's property but again but that would really impact I don't know it might have to do with the arcane of like liquor licenses and things like that I don't know but so there are two cities base something and Lake Wayne of Vista they might go away but again what that actually would entail unless you're a Disney employee and a senior Disney employee at that it probably doesn't matter. So that's the Disney answer very briefly or very wonderfully I guess. I'm now bored everybody to death here. Let's see. We did have a where was the question I was going to try to answer. Oh there was another question about the national debt yeah this where our primary focus here is trying to be on state politics and so we certainly would welcome a discussion about the national debt at a discussion of the national politics perhaps but that's not really an issue in in a state politics. So with that said we're not ignoring you just so much as saying that it's just not relevant to the topic of this discussion or the broader topic but if it's a topic of interest certainly ask a professor or something because certainly the issue of a balanced budget and national debt has been one on the agenda for well pretty much all of my lifetime going back to or at least my adult lifetime going back to Ross Perot's campaign in 1992 so it's been around. Let's see so we got about 15 minutes left. We could flip a coin and say what are we interested in talking about more Bucket City or gambling. Go with Georgia being a purple state. You want Georgia being a purple state. Okay I can ask that one maybe we'll come back to to another one depending on how we're doing. So this is kind of a broader question about Georgia politics more broadly. How would you characterize Georgia politics today. Some people would argue Georgia is still a red state. Obviously we have those for our state all of our state way like the officials or Republicans. The Republicans are dominant in both the chambers the General Assembly. On the other hand we have two Democratic senators. So are we red are we purple. We voted for Joe Biden what's the deal. Great question sorry if I skipped over that question Julie if you're waiting on one. Very quickly I wanted to point out and remind us all that in the 2022 election in terms of statewide state elections the Republican Party crushed the entire election with the exception I think of a couple of Senate seats the Republican Party dominated the state legislature. Governor Kemp won an impressive victory over an impressive opponent and Stacey Abrams. So the Republican Party is still very much here. Having said that Democrats have a lot to be happy about if you are a Democrat. You know that in 2020 President Biden won the state of Georgia granted by only a little over 12,000 votes so very close but he did win the 16 electoral votes from Georgia and we also have two U.S. senators that are Democrats. The Democratic Party has had a lot of success in recent years at the federal level. However there are a number of reasons for that. There's a great deal of growth in Georgia over the last couple of decades. If you look at the data from say 2000 to about 2020 there has been a shift in the population. As we grow urban counties are leaning aggressively more left. Rural counties are leaning aggressively more to the right but that's that's kind of intuitive that's what happens. Urban areas Democrats do well rural areas Republicans do well but in the last 20 years the Democratic counties in the state of Georgia that have increased their support for the urban counties that have increased their support for Democrats have increased their populations by almost 8 million people. Rural counties have increased their populations by about 3 million people so there are more Democrats in the state. There's an extraordinary influx of people coming to the state of Georgia a lot of the minorities generally supportive of the Democratic Party. So there's a lot of good things if you're a Democrat a lot of good things if you're a Republican. However there's also some things that would I don't want to depress any Democratic voters out there but when you look at the impressive victories of say Senator Rafael Warnock it's impressive in that from 2020 to 2022 he didn't win his Senate seat once or twice he won three times in 2022 he literally won though not with the majority the general election and then won a close runoff so in just over two years of serving in the Senate Senator Warnock has won three times. However there are a few variables at play that might be somewhat unique. I pride myself and make myself remain incredibly neutral in class or whenever I represent the university and I'm going to continue to do so but I'm going to have to say something that's a little tricky in the trade to election the Republican Party for the U.S. Senate put up a Perchal Walker by any metrics by any standards that you can possibly imagine Perchal Walker was a flawed candidate he was a weak candidate there is no way around that there were a number of accusations related to domestic violence not to mention at public speeches I don't know of a single public speech that Perchal Walker took part in that did not result in some kind of catastrophe so again Republicans would be the first to tell you this Republican the RNC was quite vocal at times about how they were a little worried about Walker's candidacy what I'm getting at is this as impressive as the victory was Senator Raphael Warnock raised an unimaginable 175 million dollars for 2022 election Perchal Walker didn't have half of that to spend also as we said Perchal Walker is something of a weak candidate so when you look at the incredibly close nature of the 2022 election and runoff there's something of a problem there I would think for Democrats if I were to give you a metaphor I'm a die-hard Alabama football fan if Alabama were to play Mercer which we have and Mercer takes us into quadruple over time and Alabama wins by a field gold would Alabama fans be happy hopefully this metaphor is making sense Raphael Warnock had twice the war chest Perchal Walker he was going up against what Republicans and Democrats refer to as a weak candidate and he's still barely beat him so I don't want to harp on this I just want to point out the fact that while the Democratic Party is having great success in Georgia it is incredibly incredibly close so with that I will turn things over to Dr. Lester if she'd like to add anything I would actually like to bring it back to actual state politics and the state legislature and the changing nature there's at least 83 non-white members of the House and Senate combined of the 236 which is a big deal and there's actually I believe 81 women this is the most diverse state legislature that we've seen and some of that is a reflection of the changing demographics of the state of Georgia and as we progress through the years we'll probably continue to see this change in effect the composition of state legislature and change the direction of Georgia politics. Good points by both of you I do think it's important to yeah I think to some extent right the the kind of winner takes all slash runoff nature getting back to the runoff question of a lot of these elections kind of masks in some ways how close things are right you know in both directions right in the sense that you know both parties at this point in Georgia I would say I don't think anybody would find this terribly controversial can depend on 45 percent vote statewide I think you know fairly so really the question is you who is better at getting that remaining 50 there the remaining five percent plus one vote right and you know sometimes it's the Democrats and sometimes it's Republicans of late it's mostly been the Republicans but sometimes the Democrats right I mean I think the Republicans in some ways have a little bit easier route to the 50 percent plus one in the sense that the Republican coalition Georgia is less fragmented it's certainly racially divided it's I think there are probably fewer demographic divides in general within the Republican electorate and so you know the Democrats have a challenge a little bit more of an uphill challenge in the sense that it's just hard to keep all the different groups that want the Democrats to succeed to keep them all on the train to make them actually make it succeed I guess is probably the best way I can put it politely you know I think I observed that you know not too long ago that this was the the fundamental problem you know Democrats face is that you have essentially you know kind of without not to put too fine a point on it but you have an African-American faction that sees itself as the the driving force behind the party sees itself as the demographic base the party sees itself as you know the rightful leaders of the party and then you also have the smaller perhaps faction of of white and non-black to some extent politicians who would also point out that that's great but Georgia is not a 50 black state right you need to have at least some white voters some non-black voters to vote for the Democrats or otherwise Democrats are not going to win elections and and there is no real way to make both groups happy simultaneously most of the time right you know you have the kind of the Goldilocks situation of you know Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff running in 2020 but that's you know a once in a blue moon situation we have two equivalent offices on the ballot at the same time right that doesn't come up right somebody has to play second fiddle when it comes to state politics right you know if the governor is black the governor can't also be white right the governor the lieutenant governor is white the lieutenant governor can also be black right um at least you know from a demographic point of view perhaps um and so try to figure out how how you navigate that keeping all those factions happy I think is always is becoming has been the challenge for the Democrats now maybe the demographic changes in Georgia will be enough that five ten years down the road um you know that those compromises are going to be less explicit or maybe people care less about you know what my group getting my fear desserts or whatever but but that would be kind of my um off the cuff observation there that probably is going to get me in trouble with somebody um but in any event um uh let's see um so I think we have time for one more question uh getting back to state politics I think we'll ask the since John got his preference we'll uh we'll talk about um Buckhead city um and uh municipal government more generally so one of the recurring things for this session was actually something that came back from last year was the this idea of splitting off the northern part of Atlanta into a separate municipality that would be uh speaker of race predominantly white um predominantly wealthy uh we've deprived Atlanta of something like I want to say like 40 of its property tax base if I'm not mistaken um although certainly not anywhere near 40 percent of its population um would have had an average household wealth of over a hundred or something like 130 average family income of something like 130 thousand dollars in opposed to the rest of Atlanta which would have been you know something like a third of that um so clearly a huge demographic difference between Buckhead the city the other city not the other Buckhead because there's a second Buckhead just to confuse things um so what happened to Buckhead city why is the Buckhead city a thing will it ever be a thing you got five minutes go at it so yeah it's actually the city of Buckhead city would be the Atlanta spoiler alert it's not going to be a thing this year there's actually a really long history but kind of more recent history is 2020 whenever you have the protest in Atlanta or the death of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks uh people in Buckhead were not happy with how the former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms handled um those protests and handled Brooks death uh as well as other concerns about service delivery in Buckhead so that kind of helped galvanize the most recent movement now I think it's important for us to know what actually makes a cityhood movement um there's a few things that's actually necessary you have to have the most important thing is you have to have a legislator that will introduce the bill in the general assembly and for this most recent legislation you had nine senators who did that nine senators that did not live in the proposed city of Buckhead city so you had nine republican senators the three senators that have areas that represent areas of Buckhead in Atlanta actually are all three Democrats when I'll get back to that uh you also have to have a 501c3 and the 501c3 uh was originally called the Buckhead exploratory committee and then it changed to uh Buckhead city committee you have to have a feasibility study uh completed by a state approved Georgia academic institution Val dosta state actually did this one and then you have to have a city plan to provide three of 11 services that municipalities are allowed to provide via state law such as fire protection utility service police protection those types of things so the city of Buckhead city movement actually had all of those things um so they had the legislators now last year when they were trying to push this legislation through a former speaker who's now passed away Ralston and former lieutenant governor Duncan's like no we're not going to do this well both of those people are gone so you've got two new players here and you have two new players that were actually support uh in support of this um this bill um so there were actually two bills there were Senate bill 113 which dealt with some of the general issues related to minnes municipalities and dnxation and Senate bill 114 which was the actual Buckhead city movement bill um their arguments were public safety going back to the riots and and other issues zoning they were concerned about proposals to decrease lot size for affordable housing stuck Lawrence already mentioned the taxes they felt like they weren't getting their fair share of return on their tax dollars that went into Atlanta uh infrastructure and this I find very interesting if you watched any of the floor debate on this issue in the Senate it was about people should have the right to vote we do not want to disenfranchise voters you had Republican senators on the floor of the Georgia state senate making that case about this piece of legislation and their Democratic colleagues actually challenged them and they said one of them actually said well you sound a lot like a Democrat today sir so it was kind of an interesting watching the floor debate and how they framed this issue the arguments against cityhood was it's going to weaken the Atlanta metro area a lot of the corporations that are headquartered or have offices in Atlanta said that um this is a startup city there's going to be financial risk with the startup city um it's not easy just to start a city uh governor's kimp's office also issued a memo questioning the constitutionality of the action I believe there were 11 points tying it to government finance bonds um and then also the school like what's going to happen with these children because they can't go to a ps can folton county schools handle it because you can't just create a new school system there's some constitutionality issues with that and then the big issue for everybody no matter where you live in the state of Georgia is the precedent that this would set for other municipalities and de annexation it is absolutely unprecedented to carve a city out of an existing municipality traditionally new cities are formed from unincorporated areas and counties um the newest city will be mabelton and it was formed out of unincorporated cob so if buckhead city was allowed to be created it would kind of flip that process so that's kind of how it affects all of us um like I mentioned earlier with the spoiler alert it 114 did not go anywhere and then of course uh 113 was uh table and the leader of the buckhead city movement he tweeted which apparently the tweet is now deleted bill white he actually said that he didn't see a path forward with the city of buckhead city while governor camp was in office so wait until 2026 whether or not that's the case I don't know but that's kind of what the leader of the movement said uh dr holt i think that i see we are now over time i'm just shocked that do you see 40 percent of the property tax for atlanta comes from bucket i think i might have been under us but it was like 40 or 45 wasn't something with that something i care not exactly amazing well i saw what i saw that's incredible okay well uh on that note we have run over time so i want to take care of some housekeeping and uh a couple things first uh well of course thank our uh panelists for uh joining us dr john holland dr julie last year as well as uh our audience members and all your great questions sorry we didn't get to everything that um you know we're asking about for those of you that are interested in lgbtq issues we do have a event coming up in about five weeks um on the front lines a plaintiff in the fight for marriage equality um a discussion with don deos johnston uh who was one of the plaintiffs in uh the marriage equality case in lorda uh from i believe it was 2014 i don't have the number in front of me exactly i think it was 2014 uh he'll be coming to speak uh to uh students and uh interest community members on um thursday april 13th at 2 p.m in uh room 231 of the teacher education building on the making campus we also plan to um i believe we've secured permission i'll double check this with uh uh dr decker by belief we have secure permission for a live stream of that event um so from the from the speaker so i will um will be making arrangements to get that on our youtube page as a live stream um then um speaking of our youtube page uh at youtube.com slash at mga pulsai uh that's where you'll find archived videos of our past discussion events and an archived video of this discussion event will be posted there um hopefully sometime tomorrow um takes a little while for the video to downloading it processed and that sort of thing um we also have a women's history month event on the uh uh mourner robbins campus um that will be held with in conjunction with uh doctor our professor adam squares uh professors on diversity's class next thursday at 12 15 in oak hall in room 215 um she has a student veteran uh female student veteran in her class we'll be speaking to uh the prospectors on diversity class and again that's open to students who are interested in uh joining that and there's information on that event as well as uh the uh the uh the uh nourish equality event on our um uh department youtube page uh or and department uh facebook page and uh we're on facebook at yeah it's facebook.com slash mga pulsai we're also on a twitter and now on linkedin as well so we're all we're all over social media except we will not be doing viral tiktoks i've drawn the line at that um plus i think it's illegal for me to do that anyway as a state employee so at least on state property um will these events be live streams so um i don't believe uh professor adam squares event will have a live stream um but uh we are going to um you try to do a live stream for the marriage equality event again um uh this is our first this will be our first attempt to a true live stream um so because um you know teams is not really set up for live streams so um it's not quite the same thing so i'm told it's fairly easy to do um i will be practicing um i have the equipment i think we need to make it work um so it's just a matter of making it work um maybe with support from otr we'll see um so like thank everybody again i've been blabbering way too long um uh and uh have a uh good um uh weekend um and uh see you all at a future event hopefully and thanks again to our balance and a good evening and i will uh stop our recording