Q&A on the News

There was a story recently on the news where employees at Taco Bell refused to serve police officers. What happened in that case? I haven’t heard much about it. —Andy Sims, Douglasville A Taco Bell employee in Phenix City, Ala., was fired after she refused to serve two Lee County, Ala., sheriff ’s deputies on July 16.

The employee wasn’t identified and Taco Bell apologized to Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones, a company spokeswoman told the Opelika-Auburn News.

“We are deeply appreciative of the men and women who have taken the oath to serve and protect our communities,” the spokeswoman wrote in an email.

The deputies left the restaurant after they were told they wouldn’t be served.

“I would hope, and am more inclined to think, that this was the action of one person as opposed to a corporate policy or general cultural attitude of the business itself,” Jones told the paper.

How many states honor Georgia’s conceal weapons permit? —Allen Lingley, Jonesboro

There are 31 states that honor Georgia’s Weapons License, as it’s called.

They are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

“You should acquaint yourself with firearms restrictions in those states when possible,” Georgia.gov states.

The license “allows the holder to carry either openly or concealed,” Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.org Inc., told Q&A on the News in an email.

Kemp’s broken relationship with the board is bad news for anybody who might find themselves on the jabbing end of a nurse in Georgia. Along with licensing all of the nurses in the state, the board regulates 78 nursing education programs and is responsible for investigating and disciplining nurses who violate the standards of the profession.

That last part — rooting out and removing rogue nurses — is the scariest part of their work and has proven the most difficult. Since the 2012 fiscal year, nursing complaints have doubled, largely due to a change in the law that requires employers to report bad nurses to the board rather than quietly firing them and letting them continue to practice elsewhere.

That’s a change the nursing board fought for, even while complaining that the Legislature and the Secretary of State’s office did not give them enough resources to handle their existing caseloads. At one point, complaints were waiting an average of 15 months to be addressed and the board had a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases.

In recent years, the nursing board got additional staff and money and has trimmed the backlog of discipline cases. A fact sheet handed out by Secretary of State staffers at last week’s meeting points out that Kemp has assisted in getting more resources for the board and pushed the board’s legislative agenda. The board had its own fact sheet touting advances they claim were made because of Cleghorn’s leadership.

Officially, Kemp wants to replace Cleghorn in the name of “cross-training.”

Privately, nursing leaders tell me they believe Kemp is trying to rein in a rogue licensing board by installing a more trusted employee as its head. A couple of state lawmakers who are watching the situation told me the move smacks of sexism, since the nursing profession is overwhelmingly female.

Board state’s largest

The Professional Licensing Boards regulates and licenses 39 professions ranging from interior designers to wastewater plant operators, but no profession is as large as nursing and no board generates as much revenue. Kemp can be expected to fight to retain the board both on philosophical and financial grounds.

When the dental and pharmacy boards petitioned the Legislature for permission to leave, Kemp complained to lawmakers that the move would be financed out of his office and would result in new spending. Kemp’s spokeswoman recently told me that allowing the nurses to go their own way would also be less cost-efficient.

I took a look at state spending since dental and pharmacy left and found modest increases in the budget since those boards became independent. Since the 2014 fiscal year, the pharmacy board budget has increased 12 percent, while the dental board has risen 13 percent — most of that increase came in the boards’ second budget, when the cost of doing business became more clear.

Kemp’s budget for the remaining professional licensing boards has increased 26 percent over the same time period. Harper told the nursing board that the “lion’s share” of that money has gone to them, but board members immediately shot back that they had to beg for improvements to deal with an increased workload.

“We are the biggest board and bring in the most dollars that we never see,” board member Andrea Phipps said.

Increasingly, it appears this is a marriage that cannot be saved. Dean, Georgia Baptist College of Nursing