Priorities

Brian has spent years building a record to match those words. He wrote laws to protect seniors from abuse and to improve care in nursing homes. He gave families the ability to run background checks on the people they hire to work inside their homes. He protected pregnant women in the workplace, let workers use their sick leave to care for family members, and strengthened the rights of grandparents raising grandchildren. He stood up for victims of human trafficking, helped bring national opioid-settlement money home to Georgia communities, and backed strong action against Medicaid fraud so that money meant for people who need care is not stolen.

The clearest example of how Brian works is what he did for Georgia's foster children. For years, children in state care were sleeping in government offices and hotel rooms — not for a single night, but sometimes for weeks at a time, with no bed, no school, and no one to count on. Everyone agreed it was wrong, but almost no one believed it could be fixed.

Brian took it on. He wrote Senate Bill 133 and built the coalition to pass it, sitting down with Governor Kemp, the Department of Human Services, and the veteran juvenile court judges who saw this problem in their courtrooms every day. The law created a single, uniform process for how a child enters state custody, required courts to exhaust every option to keep a child safely with family first, and made the courts and the child welfare system work together instead of around each other. It passed the Senate 53 to 1. He also opened the door to college for young people aging out of foster care, because a child the system has already failed deserves a real shot at a future.

Fixing something this broken takes more than one bill, and Brian has said as much himself. But a hotel room is no place to raise a child, and he was willing to spend the months it took to move Georgia closer to ending the practice. That is how he works: he finds the problem, does the work, and keeps at it until it is fixed.

Georgia is growing fast. Brian is proud that it remains one of the best states in the country to do business, but that growth should not come at the expense of the communities people call home. These issues are personal for Brian, whose own family history is rooted in Georgia agriculture and in the parks and coastline that make this state special, including Jekyll Island.

He helped create and fund the Georgia Farmland Conservation Fund to protect the working farms that feed the state and carry its heritage forward. He drafted legislation to address the release of hazardous substances like ethylene oxide, because communities deserve a serious response when dangerous chemicals threaten public health.