With Rising Property Taxes, Georgians Can Vote to Freeze Values for Assessments

Home Owner

While property taxes continue to rise in many jurisdictions across Georgia, voters will have a chance to cap how much home values can rise for property tax purposes.

“Monthly costs for Georgians, from the north Georgia mountains to the coast, continue to rise,” Lt. Governor Burt Jones said in a statement last month. “During record high inflation, skyrocketing debt and expenses rising every day, local governments should be focused on bringing costs down – not letting them increase.”

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Georgia’s Cobb and Gwinnett Counties Voters to Decide Transit Tax on November 5

Cobb County Bus

Voters in two metro Atlanta counties will decide on a tax to support transit when they head to the polls for November’s presidential election.

On Tuesday, Cobb County commissioners voted 3-2 to place the 1% 30-year Mobility SPLOST on the Nov. 5 General Election ballot. Officials previously said a 1% SPLOST could generate $10.9 billion in tax revenue for the county over 30 years.

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Georgia Senate Advances Bill to Create New Mulberry City

Chuck Efstration

The Georgia Senate passed a bill that could create a Mulberry city in northeastern Gwinnett County should voters give the proposal a thumbs up.

Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 333 last week, sending it to the state House for consideration. If passed and signed into law, it would put the issue on the spring primary ballot.

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Senator Ossoff Touts that Georgia Will See $1.8B from Feds in Fiscal 2024 for Infrastructure

Sen. Jon Ossoff

The feds are sending Georgia more than $1.8 billion for fiscal 2024 for a slate of infrastructure projects, a federal lawmaker said.

The money is part of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

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Election Integrity Event Organizer Says Fake Police Showed Up at Her Home, Detained Her

A Gwinnett County woman who held an election integrity panel over the weekend to educate Georgians says men who she believes were impersonating police officers showed up at her home and detained her hours before the event began.

“The long and short of what occurred, is I had an encounter with the police right before I went to the event,” Surrea Ivey told The Georgia Star News. “Initially, I didn’t think anything about it. When somebody – I say somebody because I subsequently found out it was not the police – when these individuals knocked on my door, they were in police uniform and they said they had reason to believe I was in possession of government equipment.”

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Massive Challenge to 2020 Election Results Filed in Gwinnett County

A group of Georgians still fighting for election integrity after President Joe Biden was declared the winner by a tiny margin in the Peach State Monday filed a massive challenge to the Gwinnett County Board of Elections.

“A stunning total of 37,500 affidavits are delivered to the Gwinnett County Board of Elections office in challenge of the voter rolls and handling of the 2020 Election,” said a press release from what is described as a group “team of patriotic Georgia residents.” “These affidavits include 20,000 challenges to actual votes that were certified just after the 2020 election. The submitted affidavits only include Gwinnett County vote challenges. Still, the number far exceeds the Presidential spread for the entire state of Georgia and confirms the 2020 election should not have been certified!

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Atlanta Regional Commission Appoints Executive Team

The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), the official planning agency for the 11-county Atlanta region, announced the appointment of its new executive team.

“ARC is already one of Atlanta region’s most impactful organizations, and these changes will only strengthen our ability to build a better future for all metro Atlanta residents,” ARC Executive Director Anna Roach said on Monday.

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Deployment of Absentee Ballot Drop Boxes in Georgia Looks Significantly Different in First Statewide Election Since January 2021

With the Georgia General Assembly’s passage of the Election Integrity Act of 2021, otherwise known as SB202, the application of absentee ballot drop boxes looks significant different in the first statewide elections since the January 5, 2021, federal runoff and special election for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats.

The use of drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential and January 2021 elections were enabled by an emergency rule promulgated by the State Election Board in June of 2020. During the November 2020 election, more than 300 absentee ballot drop boxes were deployed throughout the state, funded with $45 million in “Zuck Bucks” that flowed through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) into Georgia, according to analysis conducted by Capital Research Center.

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Kemp Signs Bill to Help Parents Challenge Obscene School Library Books

In a victory for parental rights, a bill Thursday was signed into law giving Georgia’s parents the right to challenge books and other school materials that they find offensive.

“No later than January 1, 2023, each local board of education shall adopt a complaint class resolution policy for its local school system to be used to address complaints submitted by parents or permanent guardians alleging that material that is harmful to minors has been provided or is currently available to a student enrolled in the local school system who is a child of such parent or permanent guardian,” SB 226 says. 

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Two Gwinnett County Parents Arrested, One Allegedly Bruised, Slammed Against Wall at School Board Meeting

Law enforcement officers at Thursday’s Gwinnett County Public School (GCPS) Board meeting arrested two mothers, one on a charge of criminal trespass and another on a charge of obstruction as part of the school’s enhanced security measures. Both mothers told The Georgia News on Friday they did nothing wrong and that School Resource Officers (SROs) overreacted — to put it mildly.

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Gwinnett County Parents Square Off over Critical Race Theory

Tensions were high Thursday as school system employees assembled at this month’s Gwinnett County School Board meeting and handed out flyers instructing parents to act with civility as they discussed and debated Critical Race Theory (CRT). The contentious issue of CRT divided the parents who showed up in droves.

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Gwinnett County Official Confirms Vote Data Was Uploaded to Laptop Via USB Drive – ‘It’s Protocol’

A Gwinnett County, Georgia elections official confirmed that Dominion Voting Systems (Dominion) representatives use USB drives to upload vote count data to laptops for external processing. The USB drives are also known as “memory sticks,” “thumb drives,” or “flash drives.” It is standard protocol for Dominion, as well as for most electronic voting systems.

The county official issued the statement in an emailed response to a viral video claiming that a Dominion representative manipulated vote data. In the film, a Dominion technician appears to load vote count data from county monitors onto a USB. Then, he proceeded to plug the USB into a separate laptop.

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