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Request a Demo‘Come after our children and we’ll come after you’: State moves to crack down on gang recruitment
The Gist
State officials are seeking to disrupt criminal gang activity in Georgia through legislation that would require stiff mandatory minimum sentences for gang members who recruit other people, and especially children, into their gangs.
This comes at a time when violent crime is increasing across Georgia and local and state leaders are looking for solutions. But some lawmakers and human rights advocates say that harsher penalties will not curb gang-related crime, and urge legislators to address the underlying problems that lead young people into gangs and criminal activity.
What’s Happening
Last month the Senate passed an update to the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, calling for mandatory minimum sentences of five years for anyone who encourages, solicits or recruits another to become a member of a criminal street gang or to participate in gang activity. The bill, SB 44, has even harsher penalties for those who recruit a child under the age of 17, or someone who is disabled: 10-year minimum sentences for the first conviction, and 15-year minimum sentences for any subsequent convictions, with no possibility of probation or parole.
In presenting the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee, its sponsor, Sen. Bo Hatchett, R-Cornelia, said he was doing so “on behalf of Gov. Brian Kemp, who has made tackling street gangs a priority” due to “the rising occurrence of gang members targeting children for criminal street gang recruitment.”
At a meeting of the Georgia Anti-Gang Network in Atlanta last month, Kemp said, “We’re making clear to gangs all across Georgia: Come after our children, and we will come after you.”
Hatchett said an investigation into gang activity in north Georgia that resulted in the indictment of 17 alleged members of the 183 Gangster Bloods in Barrow County last November found that “among other crimes, gang members were recruiting children using family-friendly events.” The attorney general’s office has reported that a block party organized by the gang, whose members are charged with murder, armed robbery and trafficking fentanyl and methamphetamine, used a bouncy house and an ice cream truck to recruit children into their criminal activities.
“Gangs are in the business of making money, and the lifeblood of their organization is recruitment,” said Hatchett, who observed that the reason gangs are trying to recruit young people is “they’re not as obvious a target for law enforcement officers, they can carry out the missions of the gang, and their penalties will be less. So you can send a 14-year-old kid to go rob several cars or carry drugs on their person, and they’ll be out in a couple of days. Whereas, if they’re older they’ll stay in longer.”
In advocating for the bill, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Executive Director John Melvin said, “What I’ve seen in the four years that I’ve been with the bureau is a logarithmic increase in the number of gang cases that the bureau is working and in gang problems statewide.”
Melvin noted that the legislation “gives the keys to the kingdom for a defendant willing to help the state.” A provision in the bill allows judges to lighten or suspend sentences for people convicted of recruiting adults into gangs, if they provide aid that results in the arrest or prosecution of fellow gang members or criminal accomplices. “It says, ‘Alright, if you want out from these mandatory minimums, then you help the D.A.,’” Melvin said.
Opponents of the bill point out that the “snitch” provision does not apply to people who recruit children into gangs, and that Georgia law already provides substantial penalties for recruiting minors into gang participation. They express concern that mandatory minimum sentences would unduly punish youth and young adult offenders caught up in gang life.
“We already have sentencing of five to 20 years” for gang recruitment of children, said Mazie Lynn Guertin, executive director of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (GACDL). The key difference, she said, is that those laws “allow for judicial discretion. With this, the judge’s hands would be tied.”
“This bill will not stop individuals from preying on young, vulnerable children,” she said. “Instead it seems it will disproportionately harm teenagers and harm siblings … Oftentimes people join [gangs] coming from unstable homes or economic instability [and] they get a younger sibling to join. We know that in our system 17-year-olds are adults, so who’s going to be prosecuted is the 17-year-old adult who recruits their 14-year-old little brother.
“… This is going to be young people recruiting young people, and we’re going to talk about it like it’s a bunch of adults behaving badly, but every one of these people is under 25 years old. We’re going to think of them as predators, but really they’re just children themselves,” said Guertin.
During the Senate floor debate, Sen. Derek Mallow, D-Savannah, expressed concern about the “unintended consequences” of the bill, which he said could land young people who have otherwise not broken any laws in prison for engaging in self-preservation by joining a gang.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in poverty or impoverished or had the opportunity to live in the neighborhood that I grew up in, but there’s an opportunity in a gang, and that’s protection,” Mallow said. “If there’s a neighboring gang across the street, you better pick a side to be on because … that might determine life or death for you that day.”
GBI Special Agent in Charge Ken Howard, who oversees the GBI’s Gang Task Force, told State Affairs, “We in law enforcement, whether it’s within the Gang Task Force, or judges and prosecutors around the state, get in the game and use discretion. We’re not charging low-level actors with Gang Act crimes. We frankly don’t have time. We target the worst of the worst.
“We’re not going after that 18-year-old dude with no record who recruited somebody, or the kids on the corner in the city selling a dime bag of marijuana,” Howard said. “We recognize that they’re just cannon fodder for the older, smarter, higher-level members of the gang who are using them in their criminal enterprise. … We don’t want to bury that kid in a [correctional] system that may very well make him more of a predator, or more of a problem, than he already was.”
Why It Matters
While overall crime in the U.S. and Georgia has decreased markedly over the past 20 years, violent crimes have increased in both urban and rural areas of the state in the last three years. Murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults have risen, while robberies and most property crimes have declined.
Attorney General Chris Carr and other state officials attribute 60% of violent crime in the state to gang-related activity. Citing their own data and a 2018 survey of county and state law enforcement agencies by the Georgia Gang Investigators Association, the GBI reports that at least 100 criminal street gangs and 71,000 gang members are active in the state.
According to the GBI, the number of gang-related investigations led by the 20-member GBI Gang Task Force has increased from 208 investigations in 2020 to 317 investigations in 2022. In that period, they’ve seized $36 million in contraband — mostly drugs, weapons and money, in cases involving 44 death investigations, 115 drug trafficking investigations and eight human trafficking investigations. Several of its big busts last year targeted gang members running organized crime rings out of six Georgia prisons and one prison in New York.
The budget of the Gang Task Force has grown from $1.7 million in 2020 to almost $6 million in 2023.
“Criminal street gangs in Georgia are part of large, multi-billion-dollar enterprises, affiliated with national gangs like the Bloods and Crips, and prison gangs that have tremendous authority over the guys running the streets,” said Howard. “Many of them tie back to criminal cartels in Mexico. What we’re dealing with is organized crime, no different than what mafia families were doing in New York. Everything they do is for money, and their pursuit of it fuels other crime, and violence follows.”
The 12-member Gang Prosecution Unit in Attorney General Chris Carr’s office was created in July of 2022 to take on the surge in gang-related crime. Since then, it has charged 58 people with crimes including murder, racketeering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, armed robbery and fraud, and secured 15 indictments.
The Gang Prosecution Unit is seeking to more than double its budget from $1.3 million in fiscal year 2023 to $3.1 million in fiscal year 2024, mostly to pay for a $1.75 million digital evidence management system that it says will help prosecutors to store and process data and video evidence, such as video from body cameras of police officers and law enforcement vehicles, and surveillance video from municipal, business and private sources, including hotels, airports and doorbell cameras.
Violent crime is an escalating concern in Atlanta, where for the third straight year the number of homicides increased. The Atlanta Police Department investigated 170 homicides last year, the most since 1996.
The uptick in violent crime has reenergized the movement among some residents of Buckhead in north Atlanta to secede from the city of Atlanta, an effort that resurfaced in the Legislature again this year. Its proponents cite high crime rates and violent incidents in Atlanta as a top concern. (Two bills related to Buckhead cityhood failed in the Senate last week).
One such violent incident occurred last November, when a shooting on the 17th Street Bridge in Midtown killed 12-year-old Zyion Charles and 15-year-old Cameron Jackson. Investigators charged three teenagers with murder in that case, including a 15-year-old and 16-year-old who were students at Atlanta Public Schools. Both youth were charged with two counts of murder, aggravated assault and violation of the gang statute, police said.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is currently prosecuting the high-profile murder and racketeering case against Atlanta-based rap star Young Thug and two dozen other alleged members of the YSL (Young Slime Life) gang, called gangs “the number one threat against public safety” in Atlanta last year. She said gangs “are committing conservatively 75 to 80 percent of all the violent crime that we’re seeing within our community. And so they have to be booted out of our community.”
After another shooting last December that claimed the lives of a 14- and 16-year-old, an exasperated Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in a press conference that ending gun violence is a “group project … It takes every single one of us to counter this plague in our community — from city government, to our police, to our schools, to clergy, to parents and to young people themselves; we must pledge not to accept this violence as normal and do all that we can to end it.”
Some lawmakers and many youth and human rights advocates are calling for less incarceration and more community-based solutions to gun violence and gang-related crime.
“We have numerous opportunities to address the actual underlying issue of trauma, of poverty, of mental health … but sentencing people to be incarcerated simply because they participated in street gang activity does not make street gang activity go away, it doesn’t make our communities safer, and it doesn’t get us to the point of restorative justice, which makes communities whole,” said James Woodall, a public policy expert at the Southern Center for Human Rights.
“Bills like SB 44 do very little to address the reason why people may be compelled to engage in gang activity,” said Brian Nunez, a policy associate for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Lengthy and costly mandatory minimum sentences do not appear to reduce crimes … The best way to make communities safer is by investing in them. Evidence-based studies show that community mobilization and social interventions are far more effective than harsher punishments in reducing gang-related activity.”
One such evidence-based approach touted by criminal justice reform advocates is the Comprehensive Gang Model developed by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which relies on a coordinated strategy between law enforcement and educational and community groups to positively engage youth and others at risk of gang involvement. It has proven successful in reducing gang-related crime in several cities where it has been implemented, including Los Angeles, Richmond, Houston and North Miami Beach, according to the National Gang Center.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee discussion of SB 44 last month, Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, asked GACDL’s Guertin, “If this doesn’t help, what do you suggest? We’re dealing with a proliferation of gang activity, recruitment of young kids. What other tools do we have other than to get these people off the street? We’ve tried the rehabilitation route, we’ve tried three strikes you’re out, we’ve tried harsher penalties. If you were up here, what would you do to try to solve this problem?”
“I would be talking to my colleagues on the education committee, on the multiple health committees,” Guertin replied. “The issues that bring us here … it’s a lack of advantage, on any number of fronts — housing, education, access to employment — I just don’t believe that carceral measures are going to be the answer to any of this … Like you said, we’ve done this. We’ve done three strikes. The money is not being spent on the collateral matters that draw a child into a place where they find identity and camaraderie. It’s broken and it’s backward, but that’s what they’re finding there … in gangs. We’re not offering them much else.”
What’s Next
SB 44 was passed by the Senate on a 31-22 party-line vote, with most Republicans voting for it. The bill now awaits consideration in the House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee.
Have questions, comments or tips about gang-related activity or ways to curb violent crime in Georgia? Contact Jill Jordan Sieder on Twitter @JOURNALISTAJILL or at [email protected].
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Related:
Why is Georgia spending millions on a task force to fight criminal gangs? (State Affairs)
Profile: Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Michael J. Register (State Affairs)
Meet Chris Carr: Georgia's attorney general eyeing reelection (State Affairs)
Header image: Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, Georgia Gang Prosecution Unit Section Chief Cara Convery, Attorney General Chris Carr and Gov. Brian Kemp join state and federal officials and law enforcement officers at a meeting of the Georgia Anti-Gang Network in Atlanta on Feb. 7, 2023, which focused on disrupting the recruitment of children and young adults into gangs. (Credit: Office of the Governor)
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In hot water with your HOA? A new law buys you time to fix the problem
The Gist
Georgia homeowners living in communities governed by homeowners’ associations now get time to fix a covenant violation before the HOA can take legal action, thanks to legislation signed into law Monday.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 220 at the Capitol, continuing his flurry of bill-signings across the state. To date, Kemp has signed about three dozen bills since sine die, which marked the end of the 2024 legislative session, his spokesman Garrison Douglas told State Affairs. Sine die ended in the early hours of March 29. The governor has until May 7 to sign, veto or take no action on a bill. If he takes no action, the bill automatically becomes law.
What’s Happening
HB 220 requires community-governed associations to notify in writing a home or condo owner of a covenant breach — such as painting their house a color not approved by the association, and give them time to fix it before going to court or taking some other legal action.
Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton, sponsored the bill which included parts of an HOA bill promoted by Sen. Donzella James, D-Atlanta. James had been trying for two years to get some HOA-related legislation passed.
While the HOA portion of HB 220 does not go as far as James’ proposed single legislation, it’s a start, she and others say.
Why It Matters
An overwhelming majority of new subdivisions being built in Georgia now will have HOAs, experts told State Affairs. In fact, new homes that are part of a homeowner association are growing fastest in the southern and western part of the United States. An estimated 2.2 million, roughly 22%, Georgia residents live in a building or home overseen by anHOA or some other type of community association, according to the Community Association Institute.
Lawmakers such as James have heard complaints in which HOAs have terrorized homeowners and threatened to take their property, all while homeowners have had little to no legal options. In some cases, homeowners have lost their homes after falling behind on HOAs fees, even if they never missed a mortgage payment.
What’s Next?
While HB 220 is now law, Senate Resolution 37 has yet to be appointed. The resolution, sponsored by James, creates the Senate Property Owners’ Associations, Homeowners’ Associations, and Condominium Associations Study Committee. Committee members will be appointed by the President of the Senate, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones.
Lawmakers appointed to the committee will delve further into HOA issues before presenting recommendations to the Legislature when it convenes in January.
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All you need to know heading into the May 21 primary
Gist
Georgia’s primary is less than a month away and there’s a lot to unpack.
The May 21 primary will be the first time some Georgians will be voting in new districts for state and congressional candidates. They’ll also be voting in local races for sheriff, judges, school board or county commission members. Primary winners who have challengers will go on to compete in the Nov. 5 general election. Georgia is an open primary state, meaning voters can choose the party ballot they wish to vote for.
This year, Georgians who want to vote absentee in the primary could face possible challenges due to mail delivery delays.
What’s Happening
North Georgia and metro Atlanta are seeing significant mail delivery delays. The holdup, according to media reports, appears to be at the United States Postal Services’ new Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Palmetto. The problem has led to dangerous situations in which people are not getting critical medication.
Georgia’s U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff recently grilled USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on the delays. Ossoff told DeJoy during an April 16 hearing that on-time delivery rates were abysmal. He said 66% of outbound first-class mail had been delivered on time while 36% of inbound mail had been delivered on time in the last three months.
DeJoy blamed the problem on the difficulty in condensing operations at the facility.
With the approaching primary, state lawmakers are concerned the ongoing mail delays could disrupt the election process.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, told State Affairs that Georgia voters are ready.
“Georgia voters are already registered,” he said. “They know how they like to vote. More than half of them vote early. About 5% vote absentee by mail, just in general, and then the rest are voting on election day. So we’ve been able to set up systems that are familiar with Georgia voters so that the percentage who might be worried about their absentee by mail ballots are relatively small.”
Why It Matters
Georgia emerged as one of the country’s most important political battleground states during the 2020 election. The Peach State will once again play a key role in deciding who wins the 2024 presidential election in November.
In the May 21 primary, Georgia voters will whittle down their choices for who they send to Congress and to the state capitol next year.
Under a federal court-approved redistricting process last year, Georgia now has new congressional and state district electoral maps. Those maps created one majority Black seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, five new majority-Black districts in the state House and two in the state Senate.
The redistricting resulted in new seats, intriguing matchups and former politicians returning to the fray. You can see the newly drawn maps here.
What’s Next?
Here’s what you need to know to ensure a smooth voting process:
To vote early.
Early voting is April 29 to May 17. Find your polling place here.
To vote absentee.
Here’s what you can do to avoid problems if you vote absentee:
- Get your absentee ballot application done early. You can request an absentee ballot here.
- Track your application through Georgia BallotTrax. You must have a valid absentee request on file with your county board of elections in order to see your absentee ballot status in Georgia BallottTrax.
- If you’ve been having mail delays, place your completed absentee ballot in an official drop box during advanced voting instead of using the United States Postal Service. Check your county voter registration and election office for drop box locations. And yes, your absentee ballot counts. It is counted in the final tally not just close races.
- If you change your mind about voting absentee and decide to vote in person, take your absentee ballot to your local elections office where they will void it.
- If you need to contact your county election office, find that information here.
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Weekend Read: Motivated by deep commitment to change, senator from Cataula promotes 369 bills
Shortly after the 2024 legislative session ended in the wee hours of March 29, state Sen. Randy Robertson began working on legislation he plans to introduce during next year’s legislative session, which starts in January 2025.
“I easily spend eight or nine months researching, working through, sitting down with attorneys making sure what I’m doing is constitutional,” the third-term Republican from Cataula told State Affairs. “[I’m] reaching out to subject matter experts to make sure that we are addressing a problem and we are addressing a problem with the right solutions and we’re not creating an additional problem.”
Raised by a single mom, the retired law enforcement officer was surprised to learn that his name was attached to 369 bills, the most introduced in the Senate during the 2024 legislative session.
Robertson said his upbringing and career in law enforcement has helped him focus on the types of bills and decisions he makes whether in the Senate chamber or on the nine committees on which he serves.
His middle name might be “over achiever.”
Robertson is vice-chair of the Senate Public Safety committee and also serves on the appropriations, children and families, ethics and government oversight committees. Last fall, Robertson took on the duties of heading the Senate’s Fulton County Jail subcommittee which is looking into problems at the Atlanta facility where 13 inmates have died in the last year.
In addition to his committee work, Robertson is the majority whip in the Senate, the fourth-highest ranking member of Senate leadership behind the president pro tem, Majority Leader and lieutenant governor.
Robertson spoke with State Affairs about the motivation behind the legislation he has sponsored. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. You had a productive legislative session. You sponsored or co-sponsored a total of 369 bills during the session, making you the senator who introduced the most pieces of legislation in the Senate. What was your motivation?
A. There’s a big difference between sponsoring and co-sponsoring. Sponsoring is that individual bill that I sat down and have written up and walked through with the attorneys. The co-sponsorships a lot of times are issues I absolutely agree with and I’ll support a sponsor as they carry that bill forward, as far as debating the issue and voting for the issue and things like that.
Q. What legislative goals did you set for yourself for the 2024 session?
A. Well, to basically just finish the drill. In 2023, we passed the Prosecutorial Qualification Commission. And there’d been a change that the [Georgia] Supreme Court had asked us to make. We were able to do that with new legislation. Then, the completion of our bail bond reform legislation that we had done and just a few other things related to adoption and election integrity. Those were my primary drivers.
Q. So you got those things done?
A. We were able to get those done, for the most part. There was a bill on adoption that, for some reason, did not get through. So that’s something we’ll continue to work on. The bill would have allowed an adoptee the opportunity to get their original birth certificate once they turned 18. That was something we were hoping we’d be able to get done and sadly, we weren’t. But we’ll be back championing that legislation next session.
Q. What were you looking to accomplish with bail bond reform?
A. In the previous year, a lot of groups would come forth and they would say there are people in jail who could not afford to make bond. So we have now included in the law that nonprofits can actually establish bonding companies under Title 17 in Georgia. And since they have the opportunity to raise money, this would put them in a better position to help get some of these individuals out of jail that they’re concerned about being left there.
Q. So this will help make that a little bit easier?
A. It’s a matter of risk. Bonding companies would love to get everybody out but the problem with that is some individuals, even though they have bonds, they are at greater risk of flight, of not showing up in court, which would put the bonding companies in a precarious situation. So we tried to explain this to a lot of these groups [who felt people should still be able to get out on bond]. So we expanded the opportunities for other groups that wanted to be a part of the bail bonding community.
Q. What percentage of your bills were passed?
A.I don’t know. I don’t track that. Like I said, a lot of them I was just a co-sponsor on or I signed on with somebody else. I try not to get caught up in that. Some people worry about that. You just support good, quality legislation and understand that what doesn’t get through this year, if it’s something that is still an issue next year, then there’s always that opportunity to bring it back. The most important thing we have to do is get a balanced budget put out for the taxpayers and then those public safety issues, health care issues and things of that nature. Those are the most important things to get out there in session. Once those get out, everything after that a lot of times are just small pieces to correct particular issues.
Q. How has your career in law enforcement shaped your time in the Senate?
A. Well, my experience not only in law enforcement but working in the infrastructure of a local government that is subject to a lot of state laws, rules and regulations has had a huge influence on me.
In law enforcement, you’re out in the real world. And sadly, we have some legislators that really don’t understand what abject poverty is. They don’t understand what abuse is. They’ve never seen domestic violence up close. So I tell everybody, as human beings, it seems like the vast majority of us live in the zoo, where everything is controlled and we get fed, we get water we get really taken care of. But there’s a lot of people still trying to survive out in the jungle, on the Serengeti and in the forest where life is real. And, law enforcement is one of those careers that puts you out there in that environment to see what goes on.
I was primarily raised by a single mother — me and my two sisters. And so my mother worked two jobs. The things that we thought were hard growing up, now I realized were blessings. So now I am able to support a cross section of Georgians, whether they be Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. Poverty doesn’t know a political party. Crime doesn’t know a political party. So to have the experiences I’ve had, I feel it’s really benefited me in the Georgia Senate.
Q. What were you hoping to achieve for your constituents, and Georgians in general, through the types of bills that you sponsored or co-sponsored?
A. For the citizens, the one thing I really wanted to accomplish was lower taxes. With the economy the way it is and the recession moving up and down, it doesn’t seem like prices are changing at all. It seems like we’re still paying exorbitant amounts for fuel and other things. So, lowering taxes in Georgia I think was probably the biggest win.
Q. Of all the bills you introduced or co-sponsored, which were you the most proud of?
A. The Prosecutorial Qualification Commission and the bail bond reform.
Q. What was the impetus behind creating the Prosecutorial Qualification Commission?
A. We had an experience in my district with a district attorney. He came in and instead of enforcing Georgia laws and prosecuting Georgia laws, he was just going to pick and choose what he prosecuted and what he didn’t. He violated Georgia law in several ways that he chose to do that and he ended up going to prison.
The problem with that is there should have been something before that where citizens had a voice in getting that district attorney removed other than a recall, which is extremely cumbersome and very, very, very rare in Georgia.
So, just by putting this Prosecutorial Qualification Commission in place, we’re going to address those prosecutors who don’t do their job according to Georgia law. Out of the 50 to 60 prosecutors in Georgia I think we’ve had four that spoke out against it. All the rest of them realize if they’re doing their job, they never have to worry about this.
THE RANDY ROBERTSON FILES
Title: Georgia state senator representing the counties of Troup, Meriwether and Harris as well as parts of Columbus-Muskogee County.
Age: 61
Birthplace: Hamilton
Residence: Cataula
Education: Harris County school system. Columbus State University where he majored in criminal justice. The FBI National Academy and a few other specialty schools throughout his career.
Career: Served 30 years with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, retiring in 2015 as a bureau commander at the rank of major.
Hobbies: He enjoys exercising. He also is an avid reader and collector of books. He estimates he has around 1,800 books.
Family: He and his wife Theresa have three children and five granddaughters. (He recently shaved his beard so that his five-year-old daughter would see his actual face for the first time in her life.)
What would you be doing if you weren’t in the Legislature: “I’d be doing research in public safety, and maybe writing a book or two about how we can make policing better, more professional, how we can avoid the occasional bad apples and reduce crime and uplift citizens all at the same time.”
Top 5 Bill Sponsors in the Georgia Senate
Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula: 369 bills
Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell: 365 bills
Sen. Steve Gooch, R- Dahlonega: 361 bills
Sen. John Kennedy, R-Macon: 358 bills
Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, R-Marietta: 349 bills
Source: LegisScan
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Spotted sea trout surged, shorebirds struggled, and the water’s safe for swimming
The Gist
Spotted sea trout flourished, sea turtles and shorebirds struggled, and blue crabs crawled their way out of trouble in ever-warming coastal waters last year. Those are a few of the findings in the Coastal Resources Division’s annual Coastal Georgia Ecosystem Report Card, released today.
What’s Happening
Every year since 2014, the Department of Natural Resources collects data on 12 indicators of coastal ecosystem health that impact humans, fisheries and wildlife and issues a report card.
Based on data collected in 2023, Georgia’s coastal ecosystem this year earned a B, which equates to a “moderately good health score” of 78%, up from last year’s score of 74%.
Click here to see the full 2023 Coastal Ecosystem Report Card.
The ecosystem indicators and scoring methods for the report card were developed with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, which has helped to create other ecosystem health assessments around the country.
This year, red drum remained plentiful and spotted sea trout numbers improved, as the sea trout count in the Wassaw and Ossabaw sound systems rebounded. The report said a 2016 regulation that increased the minimum catch size limit for sea trout is helping.
Shrimp numbers improved a bit, too, just in time for their recognition as the state’s official crustacean by the Georgia Legislature this year.
According to the Department of Natural Resources, the dockside amount of wild-caught “food shrimp” brought in by commercial fisheries increased to 2.6 million pounds from 2.1 million pounds in 2023 (though the overall dockside value of Georgia shrimp decreased to $9.4 million from $11.3 million, largely due to competition from foreign suppliers of lower-priced, imported frozen shrimp).
Blue crabs got a D in the report but improved from a score of 18% last year to 32%. Warm coastal waters and increased salinity in the water could explain why crab numbers were low in the survey, but the report also noted its sample size of crab was skewed because its trawling vessel was out of commission for part of 2023. The amount of blue crab caught by commercial fisheries increased to 3.4 million pounds in 2023 from 3.1 million pounds in 2022, with a dockside value of $7 million.
Overall, the dockside value of all commercial fisheries tracked by Natural Resources in Georgia in 2023 was $19.7 million, about $2 million less than in 2022.
The lowest scorers
As was the case last year, shorebirds in general and American oystercatchers in particular were the animals that scored the lowest. Wildlife biologist Tim Keyes said big storms that hit the coast washed out and degraded the beaches and marsh islands where oystercatchers nest. Shorebirds, including wood storks, were also preyed on by raccoons, opossum, coyotes and hogs that live in remote coastal areas.
Keyes said the Coastal Resources Division is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to build new 10-foot-high sand islands and sandbars using dredged-up sediment near Cumberland Island and along the Intracoastal Waterway to give the birds a boost and a better place to roost.
Loggerhead sea turtles, a threatened species, dropped to a C grade from a B, primarily due to increased predation. Sea turtle nesting sites were plentiful once again, with 3,431 loggerhead nests located, and a 52% emergence rate for hatchlings. But many of the eggs and baby turtles were gobbled by wild hogs, raccoons, coyotes before they could make their journey to the sea, according to the Wildlife Resources Division report.
The good news
The report contains good news for humans who like to cavort in coastal waters, as the water quality index received an A, at 89%. Overall indicators show the water is generally safe to swim in and to eat local shellfish, that oxygen levels support fish and other species, and bacteria is at acceptably low levels.
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