89 laws take effect July 1

Just in time for the heat of summer, one of 89 laws taking effect today will allow commuters to legally quench their thirst while waiting for a bus or a train.

[See below for a description of a few of the laws.]

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While the new measure still bans most food and drink on those buses and trains, steamy MARTA platforms could become slightly more bearable. The change in law will also allow transit systems such as MARTA to sell food and drinks to commuters who might not have brought their own. But MARTA is thinking beyond Cokes and hot dogs.

“It’s a much bigger issue,” Dwight Ferrell, MARTA’s deputy general manager, said, “whether it’s a newsstand or a dry cleaners. We hope that businesses will want to place their businesses in our stations to provide greater amenities to our customers.”

Ferrell said staff will present a plan to the MARTA governing board by September.

Before today, it was already legal for MARTA patrons to have resealable plastic bottles of water or food and drink for children under 5 at stations and on buses and trains. But beginning today, MARTA riders can have food and drink at the stations and carry any beverage in a resealable plastic bottle onto trains and buses.

Among other laws taking effect are measures to allow juniors and seniors in high school to attend college for high school course credit, and salary increases for math and science teachers in 2010. The Atlanta Symphony, too, could see a boost as a new law exempts goods used in construction of a symphony hall from sales and use taxes.

Yet another new law names April as Confederate Heritage and History Month, thanks to legislation that also designated Savannah’s Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum an official state civil rights museum.

HB 388, which also goes into effect today, allows for the adoption of embryos. Religious conservatives championed the bill to provide an alternative to the destruction of embryos harvested by couples trying to conceive a child. Jim Beck, president of the Georgia Christian Coalition, was among its supporters.

“People of faith have always contended that an embryo is life,” said Beck, who added that the new law “is really a step toward acknowledging that an embryo is, in fact, life.”

The bill’s authors, however, specifically skirted the issue of whether an embryo is a person, and it does not give embryos, including the estimated 20,000 now frozen in Georgia fertility clinics, their own rights.

Beck said while he does not expect “a floodgate to open and people to step forward” and adopt embryos, “my argument would be [even] one [adoption] is good.”

“Any embryo saved from destruction is a life and is a life that may enrich a family,” he said.

For state and local governments, meanwhile, another initiative takes effect today that could have larger consequences.

The final requirements of the 2006 Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act take effect, requiring companies that do business with public employers to verify their employees are in the country legally.

Previous deadlines had staggered implementation of the law.

A look at a few of the 89 new state laws that take effect July 1:

SB 8: Allows students with allergies to administer epi-pen injections at school.

SB 14: Prohibits anyone on a sex-offender registry from serving on a local school board.

HB 86: Requires absentee ballots to be counted and reported at the precinct level.

SB 64: Makes HIV testing mandatory for anyone in a jail or prison for a year or longer.

SB 151: Allows crime victims, relatives and friends to testify at trial through pre-recorded audio or video.

HB 228: Reorganizes the state’s health and human services agencies and creates a new Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.

HB 280: Provides salary increases for math and science teachers in 2010.