Georgia Today: State budget cuts; Gas prices hurt businesses; New Grady ER officially open

Peter Biello: Welcome to the Georgia Today podcast. Here we bring you the latest reports from the GPB newsroom. On today's episode, a new report looks at how caregivers are impacted by their work. Rising gas prices are hurting Georgia business owners, and advocates in Atlanta try to help families using housing vouchers become self-sufficient. 

Terry Lee: It's our duty and responsibility to make sure that we create a pathway for our residents to be successful. We cannot let our residents be left behind. 

Peter Biello: Today is Tuesday, May 12. I'm Peter Biello, and this is Georgia Today. 

Story 1

Peter Biello: Gov. Brian Kemp cut $300 million from the state budget before signing it at the state Capitol today. GPB's Sarah Kallis reports. 

Sarah Kallis: Kemp vetoed $300 million in new spending in his last budget signing to mitigate an expected slowdown in state revenue, as well as the effects of an income tax cut, which he also signed into law. 

Brian Kemp: I could have signed the budget and not made these cuts, but it would have been a mess for somebody in the big budget next year after I'm gone, and I just wasn't going to leave the state or our next governor or the General Assembly, quite honestly, in that fiscal position.

Sarah Kallis: Kemp says the state will still likely need to use reserve funds to cover the projected $1 billion revenue loss from the income tax cut. He says no existing programs will be cut. Fiscal year 2027 starts in July. For GPB News, I'm Sarah Kallis at the state Capitol. 

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Peter Biello: A new report finds caregiving can have a significant impact on the financial, social, and emotional health of those providing care. GPB's Ellen Eldridge has more. 

Ellen Eldridge: The sacrifices family caregivers make include spending time with friends and leisure activities. The toll leads to caregiver burnout and eventually depression. Annika Urban is with U.S. News & World Report who conducted the study. She says help, including assistance from home health agencies, can provide a reprieve. 

Annika Urban: That can be a really useful thing for people who, you know, need to continue having their full-time job in order to, for example, pay. Because one of the things we did find in this survey was that caregivers, 14%, noted completely resigning from a job due to caregiving duties.

Ellen Eldridge: Urban says Georgia has more than a hundred home health agencies, including nine in the metro Atlanta area. For GPB News, I'm Ellen Eldridge. 

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Peter Biello: Last year, Atlanta Housing launched a plan to help families using housing vouchers reach self-sufficiency. So, how's that plan coming along? GPB's Amanda Andrews has more from the annual State of Atlanta Housing event. 

Amanda Andrews: The Resident Renaissance plan expanded services for nearly 20,000 people receiving rental assistance from Atlanta housing. The expansion offered in-home care to seniors, youth literacy programs, and workforce development. CEO Terry Lee says the Resident Renaissance is a response to federal housing policy. 

Terry Lee: Policy is moving towards time limits — and that's time limits on rental assistance, right? Stronger work requirements? It's our duty and responsibility to make sure that we create a pathway for our residents to be successful. We cannot let our residents be left behind. 

Amanda Andrews: Lee also announced an expanded down payment assistance program. It will offer up to $60,000 for eligible Atlanta housing tenants to become homeowners. For GPB News, I'm Amanda Andrews. 

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Peter Biello: Atlanta's Grady Health System is celebrating the opening of a new freestanding emergency department in South Fulton County. Hospital and local officials cut the ribbon on the 24/7 facility yesterday while emergency care is scheduled to begin in June. The ER is expected to expand access to emergency health care in the region four years after Wellstar closed its hospitals in East Point and Atlanta. It's also part of a nearly $1 billion expansion on the campus in Union City. 

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Peter Biello: A man has pleaded guilty to an auto break-in last year in Atlanta that police say resulted in the theft of unreleased music by Beyoncé. 41-year-old Kelvin Evans entered guilty pleas today in Fulton County Superior Court to entering an automobile in criminal trespass. News outlets say he was sentenced to two years in prison. He was scheduled to go out on trial this week. In July, Evans broke into a parked Jeep Wagoneer rented by a choreographer and answer for Beyoncé. Stolen items included hard drives containing unreleased music, along with footage, plans and concert set lists. Atlanta police have not recovered the items. 

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Peter Biello: Georgia business owners are feeling the impact of rising prices. The U.S. Labor Department today reported the consumer price index rose to a one-year rate of 3.8%, the highest in three years. The spike was led by gas prices. Will Gruver operates a Savannah-based janitorial service, JanPro, with about 70 franchisees who all have to drive to clean businesses. 

Will Gruver: You know, without obviously upping contracts, we have to keep those the same. Um, it's definitely hitting the pocketbook because it probably takes 30 or 40% just getting there. We try to implement as much CPI as we can, but it's been quite a moving target. 

Peter Biello: So-called core inflation rose more modestly, suggesting energy prices aren't yet raising other prices. 

Story 7

Peter Biello: The Coastal Symphony of Georgia will present its first concert at a new performance space in Brunswick tonight. The $20 million Center for the Arts at the College of Coastal Georgia officially opened a few weeks ago and is described as a dynamic cultural hub for both the campus and the community. It was paid for by a voter-approved special local option sales tax for education. The symphony's performance will be its season finale, featuring works by Gershwin, Strauss and Bizet. 

Story 8

Peter Biello: How do you write a memoir with large chunks of your memory have been obliterated? Georgia writer Carrie Neville underwent the frightening process of electroconvulsive therapy in the hopes of curing her crippling anorexia, addiction, and suicidal thoughts. But it did not cure her. Instead, it made a chaotic, fractious mush of her memory. Her harrowing and raw but ultimately hopeful memoir is called Mama May Be Mad, and she recently spoke about it with GPB's Orlando Montoya. And just to note, this conversation includes frank conversation about suicide. 

Kerry Neville: I've been asked that question, "Was it about catharsis?" You write to recover from what you've gone through. I'm categorized as a literary writer. My two previous books were short story collections. So there's the artistic impulse. But really, it was the need to write about what happens once you get to the other side of, you know, that wall. If you suffer from mental health difficulties, complexities, sometimes you don't know there's possibility on the other side. 

Orlando Montoya: I was surprised that electroconvulsive therapy still is used. What led you to your decision to pursue that treatment? 

Kerry Neville: Well, it was sort of a complicated decision. I don't even know if it was fully my decision at the time. You know, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and anorexia and also alcohol use disorder. And you know, my psychiatrist, my therapist, my then-husband, we tried everything. Every medication, every kind of therapy, You know, CBT, DBT. ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, was the last possibility. And it's one of the most common outpatient procedures performed in the United States right now. But really, it was what's left to try. My doctors wanted to keep me alive. I wanted to die. 

Orlando Montoya: Your doctor told you before the treatment that major memory loss was a slight possibility, but how long did it take you to figure out that for you, it was reality? 

Kerry Neville: Pretty quickly. You know, so I underwent over the course of about a year and a half 25 electroconvulsive shock treatments, quite a number. You know, and each time I would wake up from the procedure, I would remember less about myself than going in. And, you, know, some of those things are momentary and you recover, but it started expanding in that, you know, I would go home and I wouldn't remember how to drive around my neighborhood. I would forget, you know, I mean, all of us are forgetful about appointments and things, but it was pretty significant. 

Orlando Montoya: And so getting back to the question that I raised at the beginning, how do you write a memoir when so much of what you knew about yourself was missing? 

Kerry Neville: It's a matter of excavation, I think. You know, a lot of people assume maybe writing a memoir doesn't involve significant research, right? I mean, you go into it thinking, "I'm writing about me, I." The most egotistical thing I can do, right? "I know everything about me." But regardless, I think when you write a memoir, it is an act of discovery, right? So you have to sort of dig in and, you know, talk to people who live with you or lived around you. I was very lucky that, you know, I've always found writing as the thing that anchors me to this world. I have these journals, you know, and so I kept journals then that were contemporaneous. I also, because I was on SSDI for a time — I had to leave my previous job when on disability because of the insurance issues with long-term care insurance. I got sent all of my hospital records and all of my therapy records that — and so I got to read doctor's notes about me, hospital notes about me, which I don't recommend if you're not a writer and you don't have enough distance. 

Orlando Montoya: There are a few turning points in the book when we can see the light coming into a very dark space, and one is your decision to end your relationship with the doctor that you call only Doctor Disregard. How did that decision improve your health? 

Kerry Neville: People who know me would say I'm probably a very stubborn person. Willful, y'know? When you're depressed, we sometimes feel like we have no will. And I was sitting there. He had called me, and he just kind of, y'know, was dismissive. He said, "You're a hopeless case." I don't know. Something about that, in that moment, hit me in the most stubborn, willful part of myself. And because this is public radio, I can't repeat on air what I said to him. But suffice it to say, it was a very direct response and I walked out of that office. And I would say I walked back — I mean, not immediately fully into my life, but that was a moment where I was like, "Oh, I get to decide who I am, I get decide what recovery is going to look like."

Orlando Montoya: Finally, how are you doing now? 

Kerry Neville: Gosh, you know, there's lots of ways to answer that question, right? The sort of easy, superficial way is, you know, "I'm doing great and getting better every day," right? But that's also a kind of false surety. You know, some days are really hard. I'm a lot. Some of my family and friends wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. So let me, if there's a short anecdote that I can tell: Now, in 2012, this was after I'd stopped drinking, I'd started eating again. You know, my bipolar had sort of leveled out. But I was still really in a kind of existential despair and bleak. And I told my therapist at the time, I said, "You know, I don't know if I can keep doing this." And what I meant was, like, living. And he said, "OK, let's give it a year." He said, on September, I think it was 27th, 2013, "If you still feel like this, we can decide to part ways. And I'm not going to say it's ethical of me to say this, but then you do what you need to do." Someone giving me permission to potentially end things. He said, "But you have to promise one thing. In the year between now and then, you cannot give yourself the option to ever consider suicide. Can't consider it, can't flirt with it, can't ruminate about it, can't fantasize about it. You have to find another way to get through that hard moment." A year went by. A year and a month went by. Year and two months. And suddenly I looked at the calendar and I was like, "Oh, that date passed." And I made it, and I didn't once ever give myself that option. What I had to do was find other possible ways to find and hold fast to hope. So that's how I'm doing now, is that there are hard days, and there's hard days for everybody. I mean, not just in our personal lives, but nationally, globally. I still find ways to hold fast to hope each day. 

Orlando Montoya: Well, Kerry Neville teaches creative writing at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville and is the author of Mama May Be Mad. Kerry, thanks for talking with me. 

Peter Biello: That's Kerry Nevel speaking with GPB's Orlando Montoya. That book was recently featured on Narrative Edge, GPB's podcast and video series featuring Georgia writers and Georgia stories. Find it wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. And if you are having thoughts of self harm, help is available. Call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. 

Peter Biello: And that is a wrap on this edition of Georgia Today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Catherine Stockett, the author of the bestselling novel, The Help, has released her second novel. The Calamity Club is about an orphan in Mississippi during the Great Depression, her mother, who had fallen on hard times, and one woman's mission to help reunite them. I just finished this book over the weekend. It's 600 pages, but it certainly doesn't feel like it. It moves really quickly, much like The Help did. I'm going to be in conversation with Catherine Stockett at Wild Heaven West End Garden Club in Atlanta on Thursday. And if you buy a ticket, it gets you a signed copy of the novel. We hope to see you there. You can learn more at acapellabooks.com. If you haven't subscribed to this podcast yet, take a moment right now. That way we'll pop up in your podcast feed automatically tomorrow afternoon. And if want to learn more about any of the stories you heard today or find new stories, visit gpb.org/news. Your feedback is welcome. Email us at GeorgiaToday@gpb.org. I'm Peter Biello. Thank you again for listening. We will see you tomorrow. 

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