GA Power customers still paying for Plant Vogtle
Dear Georgia Power:
I received a postcard in the mail from you and it put the icing on the cake. I have been angry about the repeated Georgia Power ads on TV promoting the “lower rates” and how Georgia Power cares for Georgia citizens. You are a monopoly. Customers do not have a choice of electric utility. Your image needs to be polished, but better management would have a far better impact.
This postcard had the opposite effect on me as you hoped. Freezing base rates in 2025 is a joke. You did not freeze fuel costs, storm fees or specific financing adjustments such as the Plant Vogtle boondoggle. How long will we pay for the mismanagement of this project, which went eight years beyond schedule with a $17 billion cost overrun?
Our bills are $43 more a month because of this mismanagement. The delays cost customers $1,000 each before the Vogtle expansion produced its first kilowatt of energy.
You have the ear of the Public Service Commission. Your next postcard should list the politicians and how much you contributed to each of their campaigns. You repeatedly fail to be transparent in your rate increase cases. I am old enough to remember that Georgia once had one of the lowest power utility rates in the U.S.
Your primary concern is your stockholders, not your customers.
ALAN MORRIS, ATLANTA
Original Freedom Riders deserve congressional medal
Hank Thomas was 19 when he left Washington, D.C., on a bus as one of the original 13 Freedom Riders in 1961.
The late Congressman John Lewis was on that bus too (at 21), and we lost him in 2020.
Charles Person, another Georgian, was 18 at the time and made a career in the military and we lost him in January 2025.
These three Georgians and their friends opened the eyes of our entire country to show the systemic racism that existed in the South at that time. Seven Black and six white men and women went on this journey. These brave people wanted Black and white Americans to sit together at lunch counters. Many of them spent time in prison, in solitary confinement, for this “gross crime of sitting together.
The only remaining original Freedom Rider is Hank Thomas, who became a successful businessman in Georgia. I am asking all of us to contact our congressional representatives to change the proposed House Resolution (H.R.) 1247, to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Riders collectively and change the wording to “the original.”
Interestingly, our first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, 100 years before the Freedom Riders. He did not initially want to end slavery but rather stop it from invading new states coming into the country. Then, he met Frederick Douglass, the freedom fighter, who was one of the few Black men who frequented the White House back then. Douglass convinced Lincoln to end slavery everywhere. Blacks and whites coming together to make positive change.
Think of this when you vote and contact your representative for Hank Thomas. He deserves the Medal.
RANDALL HARMAN, GREENSBORO
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