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Alabama NewsAlabama Politics
Alabama Legislative Session Ends in Failure
By Gary Palmer
Posted on: June 8, 2007
To no one’s surprise, the politicians in the Alabama State Legislature have just concluded another legislative session without keeping some major campaign promises they made during the 2006 elections. If grades were given out for keeping promises, this Legislature should get an ‘F’ minus.
There is no question that voters will remember the 2007 Legislative Session. The question is what will they remember about it?
One thing that voters will not forget about this session is the 62 percent pay raise that jacked legislators’ pay from a base of $30,410 all the way up to $49,250 with automatic annual increases from now on. While the size of the pay raise angered just about every voter in the state, what rankled people the most was the automatic annual raise based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index. Based on the inflation rate for the last four years, by the election in 2010 legislators will be getting paid about $55,000 per year.
The 2007 session will also be remembered for the campaign promises that were broken.
To start with, both the Democrats and Republicans made promises to Alabama voters during the 2006 election indicating what they would do if elected. Both parties put those promises in writing and released them to the public. The Democrats even gave their campaign promises a title that has both legal and religious meaning. They called it Covenant for the Future.
According to Webster’s dictionary, a covenant is “a binding and solemn agreement made by two or more individuals, parties, etc. to do or keep from doing a specified thing.” The Democratic Party made a “covenant” with the people of Alabama that if the voters gave them control of the state Legislature they would enact some very specific legislation.
Sometimes politicians and party faithful get upset when their favorite political party gets singled out, but the truth of the matter is that the Democrats have super majorities in both the State House and Senate. There is no escaping the fact that with a 63 – 42 majority in the House and a 23 – 12 majority in the Senate, there is absolutely no reason why the Democrats could not deliver on the covenant they made with the people of Alabama.
They made a covenant to end the practice of PAC-to-PAC transfers. Quoting directly from the Alabama Democratic Party’s Covenant for the Future, they promised to “Stop all PAC to PAC transfers.” Instead, they came up with a sorry proposal in the Senate that simply reroutes the money.
They made a covenant to require lobbyists to fully disclose what they spend wining and dining elected and appointed officials. That bill never saw the light of day.
They made a covenant to “eliminate all ‘pork’ projects from state budgets,” yet the budgets they passed have millions of dollars in pork funding that all the legislators, Democrats and Republicans will spend.
They made a covenant to “stop annual property tax increases,” to “eliminate the sales tax on food” and to “further reduce the state income tax on all working families.” But Paul Hubbert wouldn’t let them do that because they need that money to cover the third straight pay raise they gave education employees and retirees, some of whom are serving in the state Legislature. This brings me to perhaps the biggest issue that voters will remember about this legislative session … double-dipping.
As this column has pointed out many times before, the Alabama State Legislature is a virtual den of politicians with conflicts of interest. This point was proven last fall when Brett Blackledge of The Birmingham News exposed the fact that from 2002 to 2006 at least 43 state legislators or their spouses were employed by two-year colleges.
But double-dipping is not limited to state legislators employed by two-year colleges. Other state legislators and/or their spouses are getting paid by other government agencies as well, some of whom are tied to Alabama’s K-12 public education system. Consequently, some of this group of legislators not only voted themselves a legislative pay raise, they voted themselves another pay raise when they voted to raise education employee pay by seven percent. As it is often said, it is good money if you can get it and some double-dipping legislators are getting more than their fair share of the taxpayers’ money.
Even though polls show that almost 96 percent of Alabamians believe legislators should not personally gain from their service as a legislator, efforts to ban double-dipping in the Legislature got nowhere. In fact, a bill requiring legislators to fully disclose all their state and local government contracts and jobs was defeated. Had it passed, “The Public Employment Right to Know Act” would have required all elected officials in Alabama and their immediate family members to file a disclosure which would be posted on the state’s website when they also hold a state job or receive a state contract.
The 2007 Alabama Legislative Session will go down as a memorable session, but for all the wrong reasons…a massive pay raise, broken promises and most of all, perpetuating and protecting the practice of double-dipping from the taxpayers’ wallets.
The final analysis of the 2007 Legislative Session is that once again the legislators, particularly the Democrat majority, failed to keep faith with the people of Alabama.
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