Misti Martin: ‘We’ll accomplish our goals by doing what we’ve always done.’
Misti Martin, Deputy Director of Global Commerce, GDEcD
Photo courtesy of GDEcD
Misti Martin is the incoming deputy commissioner of global commerce at the Georgia Department of Economic Development. In her new role, she leads efforts to attract jobs and investment to Georgia through new business recruitment and expansion. Prior to joining GDEcD, Martin served as president and CEO of economic development in fast-growing Cherokee County, which straddles suburbs and exurbs north of Atlanta. She answered a wide-ranging series of questions from Site Selection via email. Her responses have been edited for brevity.
How do you view economic development through the lens of partnerships among the state, local communities and businesses?
Misti Martin: In Georgia, economic development is community-led. The state works alongside local economic developers to understand the unique strengths of each community, their own long-term goals, and how the state can best partner with the community to attract new locations or support expansions of companies that are the right fit for that community and vice versa.
Georgia is unique because we bring state and local leaders as well as education, utility and workforce partners together to support business locations or expansions, create an environment where businesses can thrive, and spur strategic business development that aligns with each community’s vision for growth.
Site Selection’s annual Site Selectors Survey, released in January, identified Georgia as having the nation’s top business climate. What accounts for Georgia’s continuing strength as a location for business investment?
Martin: Three reasons that stand out when we speak with businesses are workforce, connectivity and a business-friendly environment.
Georgia’s leadership has consistently invested in education and workforce development initiatives. With a strong pipeline of talent supported by our industry-aligned technical college system, top-tier research universities and training programs such as Georgia Quick Start, companies have access to a highly skilled workforce.
Logistics infrastructure is an area where Georgia has devoted years of strategic investment. Last year, Georgia approved a transformative $1.5 billion in funding for regional airports, state highways and other transportation projects. The investment more than doubled state funding for local roads, and half a billion dollars were allocated to supporting more efficient freight-carrying infrastructure. This year, the state’s amended budget added $840 million in additional dollars to these plans.
The importance of Georgia’s stable, pro-business environment can’t be overstated when it comes to driving investment. Companies recognize that the state’s leadership is committed to fostering growth through stability, a low cost of doing business and reliable, affordable energy.
Hyundai’s new Metaplant near Savannah
Photo courtesy of Hyundai
Over the past few years, Georgia has received generational investments from companies such as Hyundai, Rivian and Hanwha Qcells, all of whom have pledged to create thousands of jobs. Do you sense that the era of such blockbuster investments may be waning, and if so, how would that affect the state’s business attraction strategy?
Martin: These are once-in-a-generation investments that resulted from major shifts in the mobility and energy industries, which was why the state was so aggressive in recruiting them — it was potentially now or never. Major manufacturers such as Hyundai, Kia and Qcells become the anchors for the much larger, statewide industry landscape. Recruiting entire supply chains doesn’t happen overnight, and there will likely be a steady pipeline or multiple waves of suppliers over the next decade or more.
As a result, the state’s business recruitment strategy hasn’t so much changed as it has moved to the next phase: focusing on the supplier network and preparing for continued, sustained growth. Georgia has already landed a number of innovative companies in the e-mobility supply chain, from battery and metal recyclers to hydrogen fuel cell producers, on top of other large-scale manufacturers such as SK Battery America and Archer Aviation.
Students at Chattahoochee Technical College
Photo Courtesy of Technical College System of Georgia
The Technical College System of Georgia experienced 10.6 % student growth in 2024. What accounts for the surge of enrollment in the state’s 22 public technical institutions?
Martin: Workforce development starts at the K-12 level by introducing students to the industries and job opportunities near them as well as potential next steps after graduating high school. Local career fairs, industry days and guided tours of regional employers give students the chance to directly engage with jobs they may not have known existed, right in their own backyard.
Georgia Match, which launched in fall 2023, is one of the largest state-run direct admissions initiatives in the nation. It delivers a customized list of in-state universities and colleges that a rising high school senior is eligible to apply for. The program helps reduce barriers to students pursuing further education, such as stress or lack of awareness of all 22 technical colleges and 26 four-year institutions in Georgia.
How does the Technical College System promote economic development in rural areas of the state?
Martin: With 22 institutions in every corner of the state, there is a Technical College System of Georgia campus within commuting range for almost any Georgian. That means that no matter where you go in the state, the local workforce has access to continued education and training, and industry has a local partner for workforce development. That goes a long way in the eighth largest U.S. state by population.
Atlanta and Savannah are rightly viewed as powerful global gateways. What is Georgia’s evolving role in the global economy?
Martin: Georgia is a global gateway for trade, investment and travel, home to the world’s busiest airport, two deepwater ports, an extensive rail network and a robust highway system. More than $198.7 billion in products and tangible goods were imported or exported between Georgia and 222 destinations in 2024.
Connectivity is more than Georgia’s access to international markets, it’s also our location in the heart of the Southeast — one of the fastest growing U.S. markets — and our position as a gateway for products and goods moving to the interior of the U.S., too.
Georgia is also a cultural hub. From the annual Masters tournament to the 1996 Olympics and upcoming World Cup, Georgia is on the map as a premier destination for sporting events. Blockbuster films proudly display the Georgia peach, and music and cultural artists come to Georgia to perform and grow their career.
“Peaches, peanuts, pecans, poultry, and pines”
Photo from Jacqueline Nix/Getty Images
Given the growth of Georgia’s knowledge economy, is it easy for people to forget the importance of the state’s agricultural sector?
Martin: If you ask anyone what they know about Georgia, they’ll probably say peaches, peanuts, pecans, poultry or pines. Agriculture is a foundational part of Georgia’s economy — and still the largest — that contributes tens of billions of dollars to the state’s GDP.
Georgia’s food processing and food and beverage industries evolved out of agriculture, along with the manufacturing of farm equipment and other heavy equipment for construction. It also drives innovations in logistics, namely the state’s 180-million-cubic-square-foot cold storage network and expanded reefer capacity at the Port of Savannah.
Going back decades, Georgia has been ahead of its southern neighbors in recognizing crucial “megatrends” such as air travel, civil rights, technology and workforce development. What are the long-term trends of the future that Georgia is gearing up to tackle?
Martin: Georgia is focused on keeping our current momentum going. We’re working with our communities to rebuild our site portfolio, enhance our infrastructure and innovate in workforce development to position ourselves for continued, sustained growth in all of our key industries.
We’ll accomplish our goals by doing what we’ve always done: taking a collaborative approach and being strong partners to supporting our industries and their growth trajectories. Supporting healthy existing industries and staying connected to key players across the economic development landscape, including site selectors, is a key part of that strategy. We are topping off one decade of excellence with all the keys to success to support another decade or more of excellence to come.”
Business Advocates Praise Kemp’s Tort Reform Law
by RON STARNER
Of all the reasons cited by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for why the Peach State needed to pass tort reform, getting out of hell was not one of them — but it could have been.
Just a few months after the American Tort Reform Foundation named Georgia the No.4 “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation, Kemp signed into law sweeping legislation that overhauls the state’s court system to “balance the scales so that both the plaintiff and the defense have a fair playing field in the courtroom,” the governor said.
In an email exchange with Site Selection, Kemp wrote that “the legislative package delivering tort reform was born out of nearly two years of conversations with small business owners, stakeholder groups and hardworking Georgians who have felt the pain of rising liability insurance costs due to Georgia’s litigation climate.”
At the time the governor requested the review, Georgia was ranked the No. 1 Judicial Hellhole in America — an ignominious distinction the Peach State bore in 2022 and 2023. Wayne Satterfield, a partner and attorney with Hall Booth Smith in Atlanta, told Site Selection that Georgia’s legal environment had driven many companies, including insurers, out of the state because they could no longer afford to do business in Georgia.
“The biggest issues in Georgia were negligent security liability, the collateral source rule and the seat belt rule,” says Satterfield. “Property owners were being held liable for the conduct of third-party criminal acts, driving insurers out of the state. With collateral source, an injured plaintiff could put forward medical bills as evidence of damages regardless of whether an insurance company or another party had already paid those bills. That allowed for inflated judgments. And under the seat belt rule, we could not tell a jury that the plaintiff was not wearing a seat belt at the time of an accident.”
Kemp said the time was long overdue for Georgia to reform its tort law. “My common-sense tort reform package rewrites certain procedural and substantive rules to balance the scales” and create a level playing field, he said. “The main provisions of the bill address negligent security claims and how a jury assesses damages in a personal injury case.” The biggest change, he said, is that the law “narrows negligent security claims to instances within the business owner’s control.”
Additional provisions in the bill permit defendants to request trial bifurcation, “end the practice of attorneys collecting compensation on the same case twice, prevent judge shopping and ensure transparency in third-party litigation funding,” the governor noted. “These much-needed reforms strike the right balance by protecting every Georgian’s constitutional right to civil justice while also bringing Georgia more in line with the legal environments of our neighboring states that we compete with for jobs and investment.”
One of those neighbors is Florida, which passed its own set of tort reform measures two years ago. Gov. Ron DeSantis says that, since Florida adopted sweeping tort reform, his state has seen major insurance companies come back into the market and had 11 new property insurers enter the state and start underwriting property protection policies.
“The main provisions of the bill address negligent security claims and how a jury assesses damages in a personal injury case.”
— Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp
Not everyone was a fan of Florida and Georgia passing tort reform. Opponents included large injury law firms, consumer advocacy groups and parents’ groups that advocate on behalf of child sex trafficking victims. John Morgan, who runs the nation’s largest injury law firm, was especially vocal in his opposition to the Georgia bill. “They passed tort reform under false premises and empty promises,” he said on the X social media platform a few days after the bill passed.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and small business groups, however, applauded the bill. In a letter to the editor of the Peachtree City Citizen newspaper, small business owner Daniel Mundy said the law’s passage provides needed relief. “At JM Rolloff Containers, a business I co-founded in Peachtree City in 2014 that now serves multiple counties and employs 10 people, we’ve seen the cost of insuring our dump trucks rise from $2,000 a vehicle in 2014 to nearly $20,000 per vehicle in our current policy,” he wrote. “In addition to rate increases, we’ve seen fewer available insurance options and lower profits as a consequence of lawsuit abuse impacting our business.”
The U.S. Chamber said the average consumer benefits greatly from tort reform. “In 2022 alone, Georgia’s tort costs reached nearly $20 billion, translating to an average of $5,050 per household,” the chamber noted. “Small businesses, which bear nearly half of these costs, are particularly vulnerable.”
Satterfield says insurance rates have been “skyrocketing” in Georgia since 2005, the last time the Peach State attempted to change tort law. “The problem was that it went through several rounds of judicial review by the Georgia Supreme Court, and it got watered down,” he says. “Rates became unaffordable for companies, and they began pulling out of the state, leading many insurers to pull out.”
Satterfield says Georgia lawmakers and Gov. Kemp got it right this time. “You will see a stabilization of the market and a decrease in premiums across the board,” says Satterfield. “You will see a decrease in large verdicts — or what are sometimes called nuclear verdicts. As these verdicts decrease and the settlements go down, the market will stabilize, insurers will come back into the market and [they will] lower their rates.”
Kemp says another winner will be Georgia’s business climate. “When site selectors are asked, Georgia has consistently been ranked the No. 1 state in the nation to do business, but we have been aware that one area our state underperformed in was providing access to a balanced legal environment,” he noted. “This common-sense tort reform package removes that blemish, increases our competitive edge and solidifies our top state ranking for years to come.”
AN OPEN DOOR TO THE SKIES
MGA’S SCHOOL OF AVIATION
TRAINS A NEW GENERATION
Certified Flight Instructor Rey Drumgoole
Photo by Dalton Barlow
It is an eerily dark morning above Eastman, Georgia, so cloudy that the 6,500-ft. runway at Heart of Georgia Regional Airport remains obscured throughout some nervous, final moments in the back seat of a twin-engine Piper Seminole.
“There it is,” murmurs pilot Rey Drumgoole, 25, as he breaks through the darkness just 600 feet above the asphalt. Less than a minute later, Drumgoole sets the Piper down about as soft and sweet as a ripe Georgia peach.
“I like flying in challenging weather,” Drumgoole says. “You get to really assess your skills and see how good you actually are.”
Drumgoole, from the small Georgia town of Eatonton, is a certified flight instructor at Middle Georgia State University (MGA), having secured the coveted spot after graduating last December with a four-year degree from MGA’s School of Aviation. The sprawling aviation campus is anchored at Heart of Georgia Regional, some 50 miles southeast of Macon. As an instructor, Drumgoole is accumulating cockpit hours toward a planned career of flying for the airlines. Less than half a year since graduation, he’s already being courted by regional carriers associated with United and American Airlines.
“Most of our students have jobs lined up even before they graduate,” says Adon Clark, the aviation school’s dean. Clark says that, counting graduates from the school’s aircraft maintenance and air traffic control programs, close to 90% settle and work within a 100-mile radius of Macon.
“Our mechanics are high wage earners,” he says. “Obviously, the pilots are, as well. They’re contributing to the tax base of Georgia, the local areas where they live and the entire state, which makes it easy for me to justify the state subsidies we receive. This is not,” says Clark, a no-nonsense former military man, “a feel-good program. It’s a program that puts people in jobs.”
An Affordable Alternative
MGA’s School of Aviation is one of less than a dozen in the country with FAA-certified programs in maintenance, flight training and traffic control. And the scrappy, expanding program is gaining on its rivals, which include the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — known as “the Harvard of the Sky” — and the better-known flight schools at the University of North Dakota, Purdue and Auburn. Enrollment, according to Clark, has grown from 320 students 10 years ago to 1,500 today. The school has thus embarked on a $16 million expansion that includes a new maintenance training hangar, new classroom and office space, a fitness gym and dormitory upgrades.
Clark says a major draw for prospective pilots — who must pay out of pocket for their training flights — is MGA’s relative affordability, as little as less than $87 per flight hour.
“We try to keep them affordable because we have a lot of first-generation students,” he says. “It’s still expensive, don’t get me wrong. But for a four-year degree it’s probably about $120,000, whereas at some other institutions you’re talking $300,000 to $400,000, which is just out of reach for a lot of people.”
Like Drumgoole, Jack Armit graduated last December and swiftly joined the ranks of the school’s flight instructors. Combined with Georgia’s lottery-funded, merit-based HOPE Scholarship, the modest flight training fees enabled the 22-year-old from Kennesaw to pursue his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot. He’s on a career path with Georgia-based Delta.
“I don’t have a lot of family money,” he says, “so MGA was a no-brainer. It’s just so much cheaper compared to anywhere else.”
Location, Location
MGA’s fleet of training aircraft numbers in the mid-50s, about 40 of which, says Clark, are in service at any given time. With training flights taking off beginning at 6:00am and throughout the day, Heart of Georgia Regional has become — as incongruous as it may seem — Georgia’s third-busiest airport, behind only Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International and suburban Atlanta’s DeKalb Peachtree Airport in Chamblee (Site Selection Founder and lifelong pilot Mac Conway’s home base). Clark believes the remote location in Eastman, population 6,000, is to the school’s advantage.
“I tell prospective faculty members that the good news is that we’re two-and-a-half hours from anything, like the mountains or the beach. The bad news is, we’re two-and-a-half hours from anything. But if we were trying to do this in Atlanta airspace,” he says, “our students would eat up half their flight time waiting on the ground for clearance. Here, there aren’t a bunch of congested areas that we have to avoid. And if, God forbid, we had an engine failure and had to put a plane down somewhere, there’s plenty of wide-open space to do it.”
And being “two hours from anything” serves to limit distractions.
“Being in the middle of nowhere,” says Drumgoole, “helps keep you locked in. It’s really helped me because there’s so much time you need to study. Not everyone can do this,” he’s learned. “It’s not easy becoming a pilot.”
A maintenance training hangar at MGA
Photo by Gary Daughters
Where Big Dreams Become Reality: A Rural Georgia Town Forges New Directions in Agriculture
4Fungi’s Regenerative, a pioneering agricultural enterprise based in rural Metter, Georgia, is the embodiment of the notion that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
“There’s value in everything,” says Denis Lepine, a native Canadian and the company’s chief operating officer. “You just have to poke the bear a little bit. Ag waste,” he says, “doesn’t have to be waste. It’s potential. It’s energy waiting to be transformed.”
Pecan shells, peanut shells, cotton gin waste. All are fair game for 4Fungi’s Regenerative and its revolutionary campaign to turn all manner of agricultural waste into marketable commodities.
Those Georgia-sourced pecan shells? They can substitute for wood chips in grilling and be refined as smoky accents for use in cocktails.
“Ag waste doesn’t have to be waste.”
Photo Courtesy of 4Fungi’s Regenerative
“The first time I bought pecan shells,” says Lepine, “I remember the grower saying, ‘You’re going to pay me for this?’ And I said, ‘Yes, because I’m going to make money from it.’ We’re actually buying their trash. There’s a lot of things we can do with it.”
Cotton gin waste, it turns out, works as a substrate for growing mushrooms, from which the name 4Fungi’s comes. Organically grown mushrooms and mushroom snacks remain the cornerstone of the enterprise, even as it evolves into new directions and products.
“We created 4Fungi’s to look at mushroom farming,” Lepine says. “But then I started noticing that a lot of the substrate for growing mushrooms is sourced from all over the world, mostly from China. With so many people trying to grow mushrooms, we asked ourselves, ‘is there something we could do here locally to support the circular economy?’ So, we’re supplying mushroom growers across the country with a regenerative, circular economy mushroom substrate.
“And that substrate,” he’s learned, “can also be used for pet bedding, bioplastics and other uses that we’re uncovering all the time.”
An Emerging Hub for Innovators
Now in the midst of a $27 million expansion that’s projected to create 50 new jobs, 4 Fungi’s Regenerative began in 2022 as an offshoot of Better Fresh Farms, a sustainable indoor food grower and the anchor tenant at Metter’s Georgia Grown Innovation Center (GGIC). Established in 2020 through a partnership between the City of Metter, the Business Innovation Group at nearby Georgia Southern University and Georgia Grown — a branding and economic development initiative under the Georgia Department of Agriculture — GGIC has had a transformative impact on the regional agricultural landscape by incubating innovative businesses and fostering collaborations among growers, producers and distributors.
Heidi Jeffers conceived of the Center shortly after taking over as director of economic development for the City of Metter in 2017. Matthew Kulinksi, director of Georgia Grown, and Commissioner of Agriculture Gary Black both bought in. Georgia Southern performed a feasibility study, and the Center was off and running.
“The program has really taken off.”
— Heidi Jeffers, Director of Economic Development, City of Metter
“We renovated a 25,000-sq.ft. building, a former boat factory,” Jeffers recently told Site Selection. “It turned out beautifully. We started with 14 clients in October 2020, and now with our partnership with Georgia Grown, we’re up to 339. The program has really taken off.”
GGIC offers its member clients office and production space and access to mentoring, workshops and networking events. Specialized expertise can be obtained from faculty and students from Georgia Southern. In addition to supporting the regional ag economy, the center has served to energize downtown Metter.
“We’re looking to spread this model to other parts of the state,” says Kulinski. “It’s a new way of thinking, of using agriculture as an economic development tool in some of our small, rural communities. In just the next few years,” he says, “you’ll be hearing about places beyond Metter.”
Georgia Grown’s Matthew Kulinski addresses a workshop at GGIC.
Photo courtesy of Georgia Grown Innovation Center
Caption: Students at Gwinnett Technical College in Lawrenceville, Georgia
Photo courtesy of Technical College System of Georgia
A Ticket to Opportunity: Georgia Match invites more high school seniors to try college.
Ask any high school senior, or the parents of one, and they’re likely to testify to the stress involved in getting into college. From assessing where to apply to navigating complex and demanding application processes — all while balancing coursework and senior social life amid increased competition for coveted college and university slots — it can add up to emotional and informational overload. And that doesn’t even account for being rejected.
Launched in 2023 by the Georgia Student Finance Commission (GSFC) in collaboration with the University System of Georgia (USG) and the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), Georgia Match aims to reduce barriers to higher education and to encourage more students to pursue postsecondary opportunities.
“Georgia Match is a great example of the historic success we can achieve when stakeholders across the educational spectrum work together,” says Gov. Brian Kemp. “This program ensures that every high school student in our state knows where they have options to learn and succeed here in the No. 1 state for business.”
Each October, high school seniors receive letters signed by the governor listing colleges where they are deemed as provisionally eligible for admission, based on records submitted by their high schools.
“Last fall, we sent out close to 140,000 letters,” says Derek Dabrowiak, assistant commissioner for student affairs and secondary initiatives for the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), which plays a central role in administering Georgia Match. The goal, he explains, is to democratize college access and increase admissions by directly partnering with students, some of whom might not have even considered post-secondary education.
“When they graduate high school, about 50% of our students either go to work, go out of state or go into the military,” Dabrowiak says. “And so, it was really trying to encourage those who hadn’t thought of going to college that it’s a possibility, and that we’re willing to work with them to get them through the process.”
It’s for that reason that all seniors, regardless of GPA, receive provisional offers to each of the 22 institutions comprising the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG). Students with higher GPAs receive the same for up to 23 University System of Georgia Institutions for which they might qualify. An online portal through which they can submit applications helps students assess potential fits by providing information on program offerings, tuition and boarding costs, and other considerations.
“We’ve seen a really good response in activating students’ interest,” says Dabrowiak, citing the recent 10.6% increase in statewide college admissions. “It’s all about letting them know that ‘Hey, you can do this, and we’re here to help you through it.’ ”
