A lawyer from Maine is responsible for the biggest news to affect Georgia this past week.
Ralph Lancaster, a special master appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court, sided with Georgia in its legal battle with Florida over the sharing of water from the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers.
Florida wanted Georgia to cap how much water it took out of those rivers. For the 5.4 million residents of metro Atlanta, that would have meant rolling back its consumption to 1992 levels, when the region’s population was 3 million.
That could have cost Georgia nearly $2.5 billion a year in economic losses, according to an analysis the state presented during the trial Lancaster conducted over five weeks late last year in Portland, Maine. Florida claimed those losses would amount to only about $100 million.
In his recommendation to the Supreme Court, Lancaster said Florida had “failed to show” that a cap on consumption was needed.
It was Georgia’s latest victory in the water wars, a string of courtroom skirmishes with Florida and its ally in these conflicts, Alabama, that began decades ago.
This latest battle began in 2013, when Florida sued Georgia, claiming that metro Atlanta residents and southwest Georgia farmers were using too much water, causing harm to downstream aquatic species. In particular, Florida was blaming Georgia for the collapse of the oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay. Georgia countered that Florida’s own poor management was responsible for the disaster.
Georgia helped its case through its water conservation efforts. Gov. Nathan Deal’s office provided data that show that metro Atlanta is withdrawing 10 percent less water than it did a decade ago despite adding more than 1 million residents.
Even with Lancaster’s finding, the water war will likely continue to drip, drip, drip.
The Supreme Court could reject his recommendation. Congress could step in, and the three states' congressional delegations have bared their knuckles in the past. More lawsuits seem certain.
Lancaster actually mapped out a course that Florida could take. He said the state erred by not including the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the water coming out of Lake Lanier. “Without the Corps as a party, the Court cannot order the Corps to take any particular action,” he wrote.
So the corps may want to keep an eye out for process servers and take evasive action.
E-tax could spark a new court fight
Georgia could soon be in for .com-bat.
The spoils from such a conflict with online retailers would be tax dollars — as much as $621 million by 2022, according to a state fiscal analysis.
The state House this past week voted 157-11 to force major e-retailers to do one of two things:
- They could collect and remit to the state sales taxes.
- They could drop a dime on their better customers, reporting who has bought at least $500 worth of goods from their site in a year to the state Department of Revenue so it could then tax them on their purchases.
House Bill 61, authored by state House Ways and Means Chairman Jay Powell, R-Camilla, renews a fight with online merchants.
The bill applies specifically to online retailers that make at least $250,000 in sales or 200 sales a year in Georgia.
It has the support of brick-and-mortar retail stores, who have long said they are facing an uneven playing field.
The exception is Amazon.com, which agreed to start collecting sales taxes in 2013. It’s possible Amazon went along with it because it announced plans three years later to open a distribution center in Jackson County.
That physical presence is key because a 1992 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court essentially said that sales taxes should only be collected when a seller has a location in the state.
Powell has said court action is likely if HB 61 passes.
The e-tax could be a huge deal.
A state fiscal analysis estimates that about $5.1 billion worth of e-commerce and mail-order purchases by Georgians from companies without state stores went untaxed in 2006, more than half of all such sales.
The report suggests that collecting those taxes could mean an extra $274 million in revenue for the state and $200 million for local governments. And it could climb to that $621 million mentioned above by 2022.
But before you start dreaming about how that money could be spent, state Rep. Sam Teasley, R-Marietta, has suggested that the state should cut taxes in other areas to match this new e-source. He asked Powell to pledge to work on cutting other taxes once the e-tax turns into a gusher. Powell said he would.
‘Upskirting’ could lead to prison jumpsuits
It’s taken 240 years, but the Georgia General Assembly is finally getting around to making it illegal to surrepetitiously take photos up a woman’s skirt.
Yeah, that’s not illegal in Georgia — for now.
The state Court of Appeals last year, in overruling an invasion-of-privacy conviction against a former grocery clerk in Houston County, ruled that there is no specific law that bans the practice known as “upskirting” in Georgia. Don’t be a jerk is merely a guideline.
That could soon change. The state Senate voted unanimously Wednesday in support of state Sen. Larry Walker III's Senate Bill 45, which would make upskirting a felony with a maximum sentence of five yars in prison and a fine up to $100,000. Plus, when your new roomie asks you what you're in for, you've got the lamest conviction on the whole cellblock.
If SB 45 doesn't make it, a similar measure, House Bill 9, has been introduced by state Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire, to accomplish the same end. The House approved it Friday on a vote of 156-1.
“I think,” Walker said, “the general public was pretty shocked this was not already against the law to do that.”
Well, yeah.
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