Campaign Issues

This is just a glimpse at the policy prescriptions Carl has in mind for the state. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to Carl through email or Twitter.

Transit

Thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed and signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021, there are currently more than 470 infrastructure projects ongoing in the state of Georgia due to more than $10.2 billion in federal funds. With all that money coming into the state, there is a need to make sure the money is being used wisely. Right now, most of the funds dedicated to transit options are going to Atlanta, which will result in any economic development due to the act being concentrated in the Atlanta metro, depriving the rest of the state from growth. If elected, I will fight tooth-and-nail to get more of that money directed to our part of the state.

According to the GDOT, nearly 1.6 million trips are made between Muscogee and Harris County every year, a number that will continue to climb higher. Unfortunately for anyone commuting between the two counties, there is no bus connection for commuters between the counties, and METRA coverage doesn’t provide much access to residential areas in Columbus. Buying a few additional buses and hiring new bus drivers would allow METRA to expand coverage in north Muscogee County, including the Fortson and Midland areas, through additional lines and possibly more stops on existing lines.

The Georgia Department Of Transportation (GDOT) has identified Harris County for as needing more transit access to help commuters traveling to and from Columbus. I will advocate for anything Harris County needs to give students and workers access to good, reliable, and frequent transit that they currently do not have, including securing the funds for new electric buses for Harris County schools as well as charging stations for electric vehicles in the county. Electric vehicles require less maintenance due to significantly fewer moving parts in their engine and would lower emissions which would mean cleaner air for everyone along a bus route.

In addition to supporting METRA and creating a public transit authority to service Harris County beyond its current on-demand public van service which is extremely limited, I want a revival of the lost intercity rail networks that used to service the state. Amtrak has identified a potential high-speed rail corridor that would connect the city of Atlanta to Charolette, North Carolina, either running through Athens or Augusta before going into South Carolina. This corridor would later be expanded south to Macon and then eastward to Savannah. This is problematic as it does not include Columbus – the second-most populated city in Georgia – in the proposal. As such, as a state representative for the area, I would make it impossible for the rest of the legislators from the other cities to ignore Columbus with these plans. In 2014, then-mayor Teresa Tomlinson and the Columbus city council commissioned a HSR feasibility study for a Columbus-Atlanta HSR corridor. The study found that a HSR line between Columbus to Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson Airport could have been built for $3.9 billion and would have resulted in travel times between the two cities being just 60 minutes with a stop in Newnan along the way. Sadly, that hasn’t come to fruition and construction costs are higher today than they were a decade ago. But that is also what makes not being excluded from any planned routes so critical, as costs will only increase over time due to inflation. The time to build rail is now; waiting is just going to make doing so more expensive and set the area back. As your state representative, I will advocate for a line between Columbus-Atlanta or Columbus-Macon that could then be extended out to Montgomery, Alabama, or even southward to Jacksonville, Florida. Even if it isn’t a high-speed rail corridor, I will fight for intercity passenger rail for the community.

And of course, safe roads and bridges are a requirement for everyone traveling through our communities. Harris County is a rural area, and the stretch of I-185 through the county would benefit greatly from the construction of wildlife bridges to reduce collisions between vehicles and animals such as deer. An assessment of where the best places to construct such crossings would be needed, but wildlife crossings in other states have been highly effective at reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions, protecting both animal and human lives in the process.

Other improvements on our roads and bridges are needed, too. I will fight for additional funding to convert some of the busier or more accident prone intersections in the area into roundabouts or other safer intersection designs. I support building out dedicated bike lanes and more sidewalks so bicyclists and pedestrians can traverse the community more safely. We can do this through pedestrian bridges over dangerous streets, road diets on streets where there are too many lanes in the first place, and better road planning from the start.

According to the map of the deadly fatalities by Smart Growth America linked here, there has been a stark increase in pedestrian deaths from 2018-2022 to 2008-2017. The 2022 preliminary report on pedestrian traffic fatalities by the Governors Highway Safety Association shows pedestrian deaths nationally bottomed out 2010 with an estimated 4,302 deaths but has sharply spiked over 8,100 deaths in 2022. There are several ways to reduce these numbers and make our streets safer.

As a member of the state legislature, I will bring forth a list of the most dangerous roads in our area (Veterans Parkway, Victory Drive, etc.) and seek the advisement of the GDOT on safety measures to re-engineer these streets with the emphasis on reducing incidents of pedestrian-vehicle interactions, building out proper cycling infrastructure and increasing public transit options to stave off an unsustainable increase in cars on these streets, and greater funds for law enforcement to enforce our traffic laws. Any time there is a deadly collision, we need to look at what changes can be made to prevent another one from occurring.

Georgia has one of the highest levels of motor vehicle deaths per capita (16.5 out of 100,000 in 2022) in the nation. We know traffic calming measures would reduce this immensely. I want to reduce all motor vehicle accidents in the state, and particularly, I want to make sure the accidents that do happen are less deadly than they currently are. Focusing on the least protected on the streets – pedestrians – will help us make the roads safer for everyone.

Additional agenda pieces

Above, I laid out the groundwork of some of the most important policy ideas I intend to advocate in the state capitol, but there’s more work to be done on several other fronts:

• Free school lunches for all schoolchildren (pre-K through 12) – Growing up, I never understood why I had to pay to eat food at a place I was legally required to be almost the entire day. If I didn’t have money, I couldn’t eat. This is the reality facing too many kids and teens in Georgia now. We are currently running a budget surplus, so we could and should use that excess money to take care of the children in the state. Free school meals have been shown to improve students’ academic performance, they reduce food insecurity for the poorest folks in the state, and kids who aren’t hungry are shown to have better attendance records and less behavorial issues. If we truly want the best for our kids, giving them free lunch at school five times a week is the easiest way to show it.
• Decriminalization of marijuana – There are too many Georgians with criminal records for minor possession of marijuana. This hampers their ability to get certain jobs and promotes a cycle of inequality. Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco products. If those can be regulated, so should marijuana. The state would benefit immensely from tax revenue off of marijuana, we would be able to reduce the money gangs and drug dealers make from marijuana sells which in turn would reduce other illegal drug sales, and the majority of the public supports decriminalization. That said, we will need strict enforcement of DUI laws as driving while high is just as dangerous as driving while intoxicated off of alcohol or another drug. In addition to improved alternate public transit that I already laid out, I support public awareness campaigns like we have for drunk driving, as well as policies prohibiting public use.
• Abolishing the death penalty – One innocent life wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death is too much. Our justice system is not infallible, and it’s been shown that there have been innocent people wrongfully convicted and put to death for crimes they did not commit. While someone wrongfully convicted may still die in prison before their innocence is proven, giving them the death penalty squashes their ability to prove their innocence prematurely. As it stands, the death penalty is applied to people of color or from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, while those who are white and wealthy are significantly less likely to be sentenced to death. This undermines the equal use of the law across different backgrounds, which then undermines respect of the law. Additionally, death penalty cases are significantly more costly than life without parole cases. And if the intent is to try to deter crime, there’s no evidence it does, as states without the death penalty have similar violent crime rates as those with it. There’s no ethical or economic argument to support the cruelty of the death penalty when the facts are laid out.
• Raise the state minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $17 an hour by 2030 – Georgia is one of two states, the other being Wyoming, with a minimum lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. With very little hope of a minimum wage increase passing federally with a divided Congress, many workers in the state are in desperate need  As one of the most rapidly growing states, Georgia’s low minimum wage is one of the most obvious potential hindrances to continued growth. Nobody wants to move somewhere that they can’t even afford to get by working a 40-hour full-time job. As such, I support a policy to increase the minimum wage to $17/hr by 2030, giving businesses 5 years to increase workers pay. Minimum wage increases will lift hundreds of thousands of Georgians out of poverty, which in turn will result in less dependency on government programs just to get by and an economic stimulus for the whole state. It would have made the most sense to do this during a time of low inflation so as to not exacerbate things economically, but we did not do it. But we can rectify that now, since inflation has hit the Fed’s target of 3% and leveled out.
• Impose stiffer penalties on those guilty of hate crimes and crackdown on racist groups who may be in the state – Over the past sixteen years, hate groups have used absurd conspiracy theories, from claims our first black president wasn’t a US citizen to recent claims that refugees from Haiti are killing people’s pets and barbecuing them in Ohio, to drum up fear and divide our country on race lines. This behavior is anti-American and needs to stop. Unless you’re 100% Native American, you’re descended from migrants to America. As Ross Perot said unequivocally during the second 1992 presidential debate, “if you hate people, I don’t want your vote.” The hate being preached towards immigrants is dangerous and lawmakers have a duty to denounce it and stand against it, as well as standing against those who have propagated these baseless conspiracies. People of all backgrounds have the right to live peacefully in this great nation. We are a melting pot. It is those stowing division who have no business in American society.
• Remove parking minimums – Most parking lots are overbuilt. Go any place and you’ll see that most of the parking spaces are empty 90% of the time. This is true for most of the state, save for during big events or during holiday shopping. If we got rid of parking minimums, it would give land developers more flexibility to tailor parking lots to actual demand of businesses versus an arbitrary standard. Parking minimums have greatly contributed to urban sprawl, so getting rid of them would open up empty parking lots into being developed into either more storefronts, green spaces, or denser housing in the area. Promoting more mixed-use zoning and increasing transit options beyond cars go hand-and-hand with this.
• A legislative ban on conversion therapy – Currently, 26 states, Puerto Rico, and DC have some sort of bans on conversion therapy through either legislative statue or executive order. A majority of Americans are opposed to conversion therapy as it is pseudoscientific and abusive, especially so when it’s a minor being forced to endure it. I stand with the majority of Americans in wanting to put an end to this practice.
• Increased public library funding – Libraries serve a vital function for our community. They serve as community hubs, promote literacy and education, and historically have been a primary resource for educational opportunities, such as childhood literacy programs. Unfortunately, many have become the target of funding cuts in favor of private sector options such as Amazon, or they are attacked by book banning groups who are outraged over a handful of books that the libraries they are mad at might not even have ever carried in the first place. I want increase the programs offered by libraries, put the kibosh on these book banning protests, and build more mini-libraries throughout the state. We need to be addressing current staffing issues, extending hours the libraries are open, and expanding the educational materials at Georgia libraries. Expand access; don’t limit it.
• Enshrine reproductive rights into law – Following the repeal of Roe v. Wade by what is seen as one of the most corrupt Supreme Courts in our nation’s history, reproductive freedoms have been under assault nationally. I want a return to the rule of law the state of Georgia had for abortion for nearly 50 years. It should be safe and legal, period. The Supreme Court upended nearly 50 years of precedent when they decided to write new law from the bench with the Dobbs decision. Now, the state of Georgia has had one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country proposed by the GOP legislature. There have been attempts to ban contraceptives as a result of Roe being overturned. Some folks have even attacked IVF, despite the entire point of invitro fertilization being to help those who can’t conceive or are struggling to conceive to, you know, conceive. These attacks on reproductive rights by fanatics have gone too far. They lie can claim that babies are being murdered post-birth. That’s not happening. In Texas, they threatened to jail a woman for having a dilation and evacuation (D&E) of the fetus she miscarried, a fetus that if she had to carry for much longer would have resulted in a potentially deadly infection or disseminated intravascular coagulation, a bloodclotting disorder that can lead to excessive bleeding. That’s not something that any woman should have to endure, period, nor is it morally right to put a woman through such physical and psychological agony by forcing her to carry a stillborn to “term”. It’s just cruel and unusual, and we can’t let that happen in Georgia.
• Continued focus on crime reduction throughout the state – In 2022, the city of Columbus saw its highest ever murder count, most due to gang violence. Thankfully, the murder rate has fallen off quite dramatically in 2023 and 2024. Through the reestablishment of the gang task force in Muscogee County this year, we are seeing lowered gang activity in the area. But there’s still more work to be done. Obviously, the starting point needs to address the reason why folks join gangs in the first place, with poverty being a major cause. Some of the proposals I already prescribed should help alleviate impoverished communities, but I want police to be seen a positive presence in communities, something that just is not the case right now. We can do this through reforming what situations warrant a police presence versus a social worker’s presence, hiring police from the within communities they work, and revisiting current qualified immunity laws. Having a badge should not put you above the law you’re supposed to be there to enforce.
• Set deadlines for the replacement of lead service lines – The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is truly one of the most groundbreaking federal laws of the 21^st century. In it, the state of Georgia has been provided with $484 million available to date to provide clean and safe water across the state through the EPA, with $95.5 million dedicated to lead pipe and service line replacement. But we need to hold ourselves accountable to getting it done as quickly as possible. The longer we take, the more likely we are to have a water contamination event like what happened in Flint, Michigan, 10 years ago. I want to establish a deadline of 2032 for the replacement of the lead service lines in the state, and if more are discovered, I will lobby the federal government hard for the additional funds needed to finish the job. Replacing these service lines is of vital importance to the state’s health and well-being.
• Introduce an amendment to the state constitution requiring incumbent office holders to resign from state office if they are seeking the presidency – We all watched Ron DeSantis attempt to use the Florida gubernatorial office as a launching point for a presidential run that was dead before it ever began. And the result of his failed run was a Florida that entered an insurance crisis without a governor there to address it. While insurers were fleeing Florida, DeSantis was eating corndogs at the Iowa state fair. This kind of behavior, a politician putting their personal ambition before the wants and needs of voters, is something we must preemptively stop from happening. If you want to run for the presidency, the least you can do is step down from the office you currently hold instead of being absent for the better part of two years while you’re off in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada campaigning. We need our lawmakers to be here in the state working, not traveling the country on Georgia taxpayers dime. I’m harping on Florida because it actually had such a law in effect that the Florida state legislature overturned for the sake of DeSantis’s laughably bad run. Overturning it left them without important leadership, and the whole state is suffering because of it. We are better than Florida, so let’s not repeat their mistakes.
• Repeal the 2024 anti-unionization law signed by Governor Kemp – Georgia is already a “right to work” state, but that term “right to work” seems to be a delineation between states that look out for the rich over workers. States with “right to work” laws have lower average wages for most workers versus those that don’t. “Right to work” laws prohibit unionization broadly, and the one signed this past year by Governor Kemp is the most egregious on Georgia’s books yet. I support an immediate repeal of Senate Bill 362 that prohibits companies voluntarily recognizing unions from accessing state tax credits for mega-projects, such as new automotive plants. If workers want to unionize, they should have the right to without facing termination. Empowering workers leads to better paid, more involved workforce. You aren’t helping a business thrive by dehumanizing the workers.
• Support building new affordable housing units and renovating and refurbishing old properties – As Georgia grows, affordable housing is becoming harder to come by. We need to incentivize new affordable housing to keep up with growth or we could wind up with a homeless crisis akin to what California and Texas are currently facing. We should also offer grants to folks looking to renovate old buildings and convert them into housing.
• Establish election day as a state holiday – Voting should be made easier for as many folks as possible in a healthy democracy. Unfortunately, voting day falls on a Tuesday when most Georgians have to work. I want to establish it as a state holiday so more folks won’t have to decide between going to work and school or being involved in how this nation is ran. Your vote is your voice in a democracy. Giving you the day off to use it is the least elected officials could do.

On November 5th, vote for Carl Sprayberry for State House district 139.