Georgia Trend Daily – Dec. 17, 2020
Dec. 17, 2020 Augusta Chronicle
Amazon founder Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott gifts $10 million to Augusta-area Goodwill
Miguel Legoas reports that Goodwill Industries of Middle Georgia and the CSRA received the largest discretionary gift in the company’s 45-year history from American novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. She announced the contribution in a blog post Monday entitled 384 Ways to Help, where she invited others to transform communities through charitable giving.
Dec. 17, 2020 Georgia Trend – Exclusive!
Advancing entrepreneurial opportunities throughout Georgia
Mary Ann DeMuth reports, launched earlier this year, the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PII) is a public-private entity that is coordinating statewide efforts to position Georgia as the technology capital of the eastern U.S. Led by Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, board Chair and former Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson and Executive Director Debra Lam, the organization has announced its first funded pilot program. The pilot aims to empower entrepreneurs and provide resources to help create businesses in under-resourced communities.
Dec. 17, 2020 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Delta Air Lines transports its first coronavirus vaccine shipments
Kelly Yamanouchi reports that Delta Air Lines said it transported its first shipments of COVID-19 vaccines on flights from Detroit to Atlanta and San Francisco. Atlanta-based Delta said the vaccines were shipped Tuesday with the highest priority and monitored by the company’s “Vaccine Watch Tower,” a special system to track shipments with the airline’s flight operations department.
Dec. 17, 2020 Saporta Report
HUD boss bestows $450K planning grant for Westside Atlanta redevelopment
Sean Keenan reports that U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson stopped by Atlanta on Tuesday to announce Atlanta Housing (AH) would receive $450,000 in federal funding to help develop a roadmap for the revitalization of parts of the city’s Westside. HUD awarded the two-year Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grant to 11 cities, including Pittsburgh, Houston and Cincinnati, totaling $5 million for community initiatives across the country.
Dec. 17, 2020 Athens Banner-Herald
‘He will live on in those books’: Georgia author Terry Kay remembered by colleagues, friends
Wayne Ford reports, Terry Kay, a Georgia author whose novels line bookshelves in homes and libraries, died in his Athens home Dec. 12, ending a path Kay knew was imminent in October when doctors told him he had only weeks to live. Kay, 82, succumbed to aggressive stage 4 liver cancer, but in those intervening weeks he was able to have in-home visits with his family members and friends and read the many comforting comments people left on social media.
Dec. 17, 2020 Brunswick News
OSI buys land in Brantley, Wayne to help protect species
Terry Dickson reports, an important habitat for threatened gopher tortoises and a plant found only in Wayne and Brantley counties is now protected after the Open Space Institute acquired 2,500 acres from the Southern Co. in Wayne County. The land is adjacent to more than 1,600-acre Sansavilla Wildlife Management Area the Open Space Institute, or OSI, acquired and then transferred in 2019 to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources also to protect gopher tortoises. The wildlife management area is in Wayne and northern Glynn counties.
Dec. 17, 2020 Georgia Health News
Georgia reports much less Medicaid data to the feds than it used to
Rebecca Grapevine reports that years ago, Georgia reported ample data to the feds on the health care quality of its Medicaid and PeachCare programs. In fact, a federal report at that time praised Georgia’s “proactive role in designing its data systems to support quality measurement.”
Dec. 17, 2020 Georgia Recorder
Billion dollar Plant Vogtle tab debate could be on the line with PSC runoff
Stanley Dunlap reports that Georgia Power’s overdue and over-budget Plant Vogtle nuclear plant expansion served as a handy punching bag for the challenger in a Tuesday debate as he took on a veteran of utility regulation ahead of the state’s Jan. 5 runoff election. Georgia’s twin U.S. Senate contests are consuming most of the country’s political attention now that the presidential contest is finally decided in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.
Dec. 17, 2020 WABE 90.1
New Citizen Voters Helped Turn Georgia For Biden
Susan Capelouto reports, one reason Georgians elected Joe Biden for president — by just under 12,000 votes — this year may be due to the number of new citizens in the state, especially those from Asian countries, who showed up to vote in large numbers. “It was exhilarating,” said Debashri Sengupta, who was born in India and voted for the first time in Georgia this year. “We couldn’t believe we were finally voting in a presidential election.”
Dec. 17, 2020 11 Alive
UGA will help state conduct study on ballot signatures
Jonathan Raymond reports that the University of Georgia will help conduct a statewide study of the signatures used during the absentee voting process in the 2020 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday. The Secretary of State had announced the audit earlier this week, providing more details in a news conference this afternoon.
Dec. 17, 2020 Politico
‘It’s nonstop’: Georgia Senate battles rage far from Atlanta
Marc Caputo reports that Vice President Mike Pence touches down in Georgia Thursday to rally for GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, it won’t be in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where the bulk of the state’s population is concentrated. He’ll be 100 miles south in Columbus, in the heart of the considerably smaller media market that’s emerged as a critical battleground in the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs.
Dec. 17, 2020 CNN
Loeffler leaves open the option of objecting to the Electoral College results
Ryan Nobles reports that Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Georgia Republican who is up for reelection in a heated runoff race set for January 5, left open the possibility Wednesday that she may object to the Electoral College results of Joe Biden’s victory when the matter is brought before the US Congress next month. “January 6 is a long ways off; right now we’ve got a Senate race to run here in Georgia,” Loeffler said.
Dec. 17, 2020 Capitol Beat News
Judge scraps lawsuit to restore 198,000 Georgia voters for Senate runoffs
Beau Evans reports that a lawsuit seeking to restore nearly 200,000 Georgia voters with canceled registrations before the U.S. Senate runoff elections next month was shot down by a federal judge on Wednesday. Forcing Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office to overhaul the state’s voter rolls so close to the Jan. 5 runoffs would pose “significant risk of confusion” for carrying out the election, Judge Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled.
Dec. 17, 2020 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Jolt: Post-Trump, we need stronger guardrails on the nuclear trigger, says Sam Nunn
Jim Galloway, Greg Bluestein, Tia Mitchell and Patricia Murphy report that Donald Trump’s four years as president has tested nearly every norm Washington has to offer. When he hasn’t broken them, he’s underlined some glaring weaknesses.
