Weekly Newsletter, February 3rd
Georgia and Dade-Focused Edition This Week
by Tom McMahan
When I started this, I promised I wasn’t just going to focus on Trump’s daily insanity, and I mean that. We also have to keep an eye out on what’s going on locally and at the state level, so since last week was “all MAGA” essentially, this week will be closer to home…with some national links at the bottom.
LOCAL
The Dade School Board had its 3rd required meeting on January 23rd to opt out of the HB581 property tax exemption voted on in November. Dade is hardly alone in opting out. While I haven’t been able to get a number across the state, 15 of the 17 school systems serviced by NW Georgia Regional Education Service Agency had opted out, including Dade. A quick search online of “HB581 opt-out produces pages of local news stories about school systems opting out, which seems to indicate that kind of ratio isn’t confined to northwest Georgia. At this time, there don’t seem to have been any meetings of the Dade Board of Commissioners or the Trenton City Council on opting out, so those parts of our property tax seem to be on track to being locked into the requirements imposed by the referendum.
I’ve tried to find a fairly simple breakdown of what this referendum does and more about the opt-out policy. This is pretty good, at least, it’s as good as I could find so far.
RECOMMENDATION - Contact County Manager Don Townsend and/or your District Commissioner and ask for an update on how this will impact county government funding. Do the same if you live in the City.
In 2025, our Committee will begin to highlight and support various non-profits throughout our county. The Dade County Historical Society is one of those non-profits. Upcoming events this month for the Historical Society include a genealogy workshop on February 20th from 5 to 7 pm at the Dade County Library. A second such workshop will occur on August 28th. The next meeting of the Society will be on April 12th.
STATE
In the wake of the ongoing failure of Brian Kemp’s Georgia Pathways health coverage, several Republican state senators have joined with the state Democratic caucus to push an actual Medicaid expansion for Georgia. Georgia still has not expanded Medicaid under the Obamacare program, one of a very few states to not have done so. Kemp offered “Pathways” as an alternative, but very, very few people have actually enrolled, and state hospitals are still financially unstable as a result.
A breakdown of the proposed Georgia 2025 budget can be found at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI) website. The following pie chart is taken from that:
GBPI also has a great bill tracker. I have found them to be a very reliable source of information on the state budget and its economic impacts, positive and negative, over the years. I wholeheartedly recommend you subscribe to their newsletter.
NATIONAL
{sigh} I’m simply going to list some contributor links and some of my own to read up on the past week’s dysfunctional chaos in Washington.
The latest from the always reliable Ron Filipkowski: (more on the trade war next week)
Timothy Snyder on the “logic of destruction” by Trump and Gang and ways to resist it:
The FAA as a “canary in a coal mine” of Trump’s ineptitude
The idea of “DOGE” as some advisory committee has flown out the window… it’s just Elon and some barely-out-of-college bros breaking into information they don’t have legal access to:
One more news aggregator to check out: (as with all Substacks, it has a free option to check it out before subscribing if you’re interested.
You're doing a great job. Just remind everyone that I've set up my Substack as a resource for people who want to run for office, support those who do, or be better informed voters. I have a heavy focus of state and local government and election administration which should be very helpful. Look too for issue briefs such as the one I did on Medicaid expansion.
Oh and posted yesterday contact info for all US Senate Democrats including BlueSky addresses.
This reminds me I'll give you a free subscription if you need it. Every post is free for two weeks (and every initial post is also in downloadable format,). The key ones are outside the paywall too but if there's something you need let me know. I assume that I can figure out how to give a comp subscription.