Summer studies: Georgia legislators in the thick of a season of peering ahead to next session

Lawmakers, industry leaders and subject matter experts are now huddling together to dig into some of the thornier issues that proved too unwieldy to tackle during a jam-packed three-month legislative session last winter. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder

College football is back, pumpkin-flavored everything has returned, and the legislative study committee schedule is loaded with meetings.

Fall must be creeping in.

Lawmakers, industry leaders and subject matter experts are huddling together to dig into some of the thornier issues that proved too unwieldy to tackle during a jam-packed three-month legislative session last winter.

Just last week alone, these panels probed what is driving the escalating violence in state prisons and examined alternatives to opioids for pain management, ways to preserve Georgia’s disappearing farmland, how to improve access to affordable childcare in the wake of the pandemic and the impact of electronic transaction fees in an increasingly cashless society.

Many of these committees may attract few headlines – especially as the presidential race tightens in Georgia – but the deliberations and fact-finding missions underway at the state Capitol will shape the agendas and debates that greet lawmakers when they return for the 2025 legislative session in January.

“There’ll be a lot of things that will get a lot of attention over the next few months, but I don’t know if there’s anything that is happening at this Capitol right now, in my opinion, that impacts more people on a day-to-day basis than the topic we’re going to study,” said state Sen. Brian Strickland, a McDonough Republican who is chairing the Senate panel looking at childcare costs.

And at least one “special” committee offers a glimpse of the likely culture war skirmishes to come. Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones created a committee focused on “protecting women’s sports,” and state senators kicked things off last week with a visit from college swimmers who say they were put at an unfair disadvantage by being made to compete against a transgender athlete.

Lawmakers are also continuing to look at what role the state should play in regulating artificial intelligence. There is also a panel that will look at private water systems after a failed push to give the Georgia Public Service Commission oversight of them. And another will study consumer protections for nicotine vapor products.

Sen. Emanuel Jones, a Decatur Democrat who is leading a study committee focused on safe firearm storage, said he hopes the panel’s work will help strengthen the case for creating tax incentives for safe storage after such proposals came up short in the 2024 session and identify other ways to keep children safe from firearms.

“Our purpose is to focus on what we can do in our great state to save as many children as we can,” Jones said at the panel’s first meeting in August.

The work of these committees will yield year-end reports packed with recommendations that may turn into legislation next year or otherwise inform the legislative machinations under the Gold Dome.

But some of the lawmakers involved make no promises when it comes to laying the groundwork for the next session.

Rep. Lynn Smith, a Newnan Republican who is leading one of the committees, tried to take the pressure off lawmakers – some of them relatively new – about the task at hand. Smith’s committee is wading into the complicated question of what qualifies a stream as navigable in Georgia and therefore open to the public.

The controversy is a spillover issue from the last two sessions after a property owner along a popular stretch of the Flint River successfully argued in court last year that he had exclusive fishing rights because he holds a pre-1863 land grant.

Lawmakers rushed to protect fishing access at the time and then came back in the 2024 session to pass a measure that was designed to address the concerns of private property owners left wary of the first bill. That bill was the result of a different study committee that met last fall .

What did not pass this year, though, was a separate bill that attempted to spell out which streams are navigable. Instead, lawmakers decided to send the complex issue to another study committee.

“I have no agenda. I hope that this is a tutorial for all of us – for me, for the rest of us – as we work our way through this issue,” Smith said at the panel’s first meeting held recently. “We are not charged to come up with the conclusion.”

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