This week, Governor Brian Kemp requested $175 million taxpayer dollars to pay out cases where the state has been found to be liable for death or damage to property on his watch.

Kemp, in an attempt to shift blame for the state’s legally-determined negligence away from his failure to invest state resources in preventing deaths and damages on the front end, blamed the high price tag on victims seeking justice. 

“Brian Kemp is telling us exactly how much his incompetence - failing to adequately invest taxpayer dollars up front - costs Georgians,” said DPG spokesperson Dave Hoffman. “Time and time again Kemp makes clear he’d rather squirrel away public resources to add to his surplus than make investments to improve Georgia, and according to Kemp himself, it’ll cost at least $175 million to clean up his mess.”

Courts have determined that the Kemp Administration must pay out millions in settlements for death, property damage, and other crises caused by the negligence of Kemp’s Department of Transportation, Department of Corrections, and Department of Human Services, among others. The largest settlement went to the family of an inmate who died in a state prison - a system that has received heavy scrutiny for “horrific and unsafe conditions” under Kemp, who only recently sought to overhaul the failing system after a federal investigation and intense criticism.

Kemp’s request comes as he’s made “tort reform” his top legislative priority. Kemp’s push is being aided by an ad barrage by Competitive Georgia, a newly formed dark-money group affiliated with the far-right Federalist Society. According to Axios, Competitive Georgia’s recent ad blitz appears to be working as two recent swing-voter focus groups parroted lines from their ads, despite nobody knowing what “tort reform” meant and most “[having] no clue what a ‘tort’ is.”

Four decades of data compiled by the Center for Democracy and Justice have disproven Kemp’s claim that tort reform would lower insurance premiums as, “insurance premiums ‘do not fall in parallel with costs’ [and] caps lead to ‘sustained supranormal profits.’”