Georgia state Sen. Carden Summers said he drove around Atlanta before presenting a bill earlier this year that would ban homeless encampments and cut state funding from cities that refuse to enforce the ban.
“I made it a point to ride around almost every night and take 30 minutes and just drive a different route and count the homeless people on the street, living in the corners, living on the edges, living on the sidewalks, living under bridges,” the Republican said last month during a Senate Committee on Government Oversight hearing. “If you were to take your eye off the road and run off the road, you’d wipe out eight to 10 people.”
But Summers did not come up with the bill on his own. It’s almost an exact copy of model legislation published online by the Cicero Institute, a Texas-based think tank that strives to find "entrepreneurial solutions to public problems," according to its LinkedIn page.
