The Brief for Wednesday, March 18, 2026

portions of it. Okay. Did you handle any ballots or election-related materials? No. During the hearing, Warner raised concerns that Trump will use the Fulton County raid as part of an effort to federalize election management for this year's midterms on national security grounds. Raoul Valley, W.A.B.E. News. Well, the latest legislation dealing with the future of Georgia's elections has passed out of a House committee. WAB's Raul Bally also reports it would push the deadline for phasing out the use of QR codes on ballots. The new version of Republican State Senator Max Burns' bill would completely change how Georgians vote, starting with the 2028 elections. It will be a uniform system with optical scanning using handmarked paper ballots. It'll provide ballot-on-demand printing. A state law passed two years ago banned the use of QR codes to tabulate votes starting July 1st of this year. That would have meant using one system for this May and June's primaries and a different one for November. This bill would extend that deadline. Republican State Representative Victor Anderson, who is the House sponsor, talked about that decision. Different things came to light, primarily our procurement processes, availability of equipment, just the procedures of what it would take to go straight to a handmarked paper balance system between May and November. It's just not practical. It can't happen. Activist Lucia Frazier, who wants voting systems replaced now, push back. So I definitely don't appreciate the people that keep complaining about we don't have enough time. I'm pretty sure we can. If we put our minds to it, we can do it. Speakers at Tuesday's hearing in support of Senate Bill 214 included county election leaders and workers. Raul Valley, WABE News, the state capital. And the Georgia State House has amended and passed a bill to temporarily suspend the state's motor fuel tax. The state representative John Carson of Marietam is the bill's sponsor. He says suspending the state's 33 cent tax on unleaded and 37 cent tax on diesel will give drivers a break. We're also calling for a 60-day pause on the gas tax, given the actions in the Middle East. This is going to be some well-received relief to our constituents and taxpayers, particularly as we head into the summer season. It passed 163 to 4. House Bill 1199 now goes to the state Senate, then presumably to Governor Brian Kemp's desk for his signature. According to AAA, a gallon of regular in Georgia has jumped nearly a dollar and stands at 372 since the war in Iran started. Tuskegee University men's basketball coach Benji Taylor says he will sue Morehouse College and two campus police officers. That threat comes after he was handcuffed and walked off the court in January. Taylor's attorneys say Morehouse football players were acting aggressively toward the Tuskegee men during post-game handshakes. Now, conference rules prohibit football players from being on the court. When Taylor asked campus police to intervene, they cuffed him and escorted him out. The Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference later fined Morehouse an undisclosed amount saying the college failed to meet the conference safety standards.

Last fall, the water for many Atlantans tasted bad. It tasted really bad, in fact, like dirt. Sh showers let folks smelling musty. Utilities say they were swamped with complaints of smelly, gross water. While most everyone's water is back to normal, municipalities around the region spent big bucks to fix the problem. As WABE's Marissa Mecky tells us, they're now focused on how to prevent it. Every fall, Cole Blackwell from the Cobb County Marietta Water Authority says his team watches out for a seasonal problem in their drinking water sources. We're one of the few utilities in Metro Atlanta that has the ability to test for MIB in-house. MIB is a compound made by algae and bacteria in water. It's not harmful for humans to drink, but it has a musty, dirty smell and taste that people can't stand. Blackwell says they've seen higher levels of it flowing out of Lake Lanier down the Chattahoochee River and into one of their drinking water intakes for years. So? Back in 2020, we began construction of a powdered activated carbon treatment system at our intake on the Chattanoichi River. He says it was built to handle a level of MIB they'd never even seen before. 20 parts per trillion. But this past fall, levels reached over six times that in the river. And in Lake Lanier, 50 times that amount. something we had never experienced before and didn't anticipate. He says the utility paid about $700,000 out of their savings to treat the water more intensively. And cops not alone. So one of the things we're in the process of doing is looking at a design to upgrade our activated carbon systems to be more efficient. That's Quentin Fletcher with the city of Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management. He didn't specify how much, but he says Atlanta spent extra money on activated carbon for their water treatment, just like Cobb. But all these professionals agree there's one big way to limit the algae growth that's affecting the whole region, reducing pollution into Lake Lanier. Jess Sterling from the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper says a lot of stuff flows off of land and into the lake. Any sort of lawn fertilizers, leaking septic tanks, you know. leaking sewer lines, species, industrial inputs or anything like that can cause nutrients to come into Lake Lanier. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Great in fertilizers, but in this case, Sterling says they can cause the algae to grow excessively. But she says these nutrients run off from all sorts of places. And that makes a big picture solution, a logistical challenge. Some politicians are already at work trying to spur more collaboration. Last year, U.S. Congressman Rich McCormick, whose district includes Lake Lanier, secured $2.5 million from the federal budget for a regional effort to reduce nutrient pollution into the lake. It'll be led by the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center in partnership with local governments and conservation districts.

And Republican State Senator Drew Eccles of Gainesville is one of several lawmakers reestablishing the Lake Lanier Caucus, a group focused on addressing water quality and management issues for the lake. I just think we need to be communicating and at better levels than we currently are. So that's one of the reasons we wanted to resurrect it. The reformed caucus met for the first time in late February. Echell says he intends to include state and federal environmental agencies and other lawmakers who serve the region around the lake to tackle the stinky problem. Mirzemecki, WABE News. That's it for the brief. More local news is available online at WABE.org. Christopher Alston is our producer. Melissa Fato is our editor. I'm Jim Burris. Amplifying Atlanta. This is WABE. Thanks for listening. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works.

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