Ivey releases proposed state budgets

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Lawmakers are often running in Montgomery having finished the first week of this year’s legislative session. It’s a week that saw the announcement of Gov. Kay Ivey’s budget proposal, along with the first bills starting to make their way through the legislative process. We talk about that with Todd Stacy, host of Capital Journal on Alabama Public Television. He spoke with WBHM’s Andrew Yeager.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Ivey released her proposed budget to lawmakers this week. What are some of the highlights? And let’s start with the education budget.

Right, Education Trust Fund — that pays for the range of education programs from Pre-K all the way through higher ed. Her proposal is $10.4 billion. That would be a new record for the state. It’s also a 5.75% increase over the current fiscal year. It includes a 2% pay raise for teachers and other education employees. And just by category, you’re talking about $5.8 billion for K through 12 schools. That’s a 6% increase over the current fiscal year. Universities would get $1.8 billion. That’s almost a 6% increase. Increases for community colleges, increases for the state Department of Education, First Class Pre-K.

So you’re seeing increases across the board. That shows the health of the budget. That means we’ve had a lot of good revenue coming in and everybody likes that. People love to get pay raises. You might see some changes to this, but I expect to see five to six percent increases across the board as it goes through the process.

Let’s look to the other side, the general fund side. What is Ivey proposing there?

Not as rosy in the General Fund, and that’s kind of historically been the case. You’re looking at a $3.6 billion budget proposal from the governor. That’s a slight decrease from the current fiscal year, less than 1%. So about even funded. It also includes a 2% pay raise for state employees, which when you talk about teachers and state employees, they really want to keep giving pay raises because of the state of the economy, inflation, affordability, things like that.

The two biggest things that take up the General Fund are Medicaid and corrections. This budget calls for $1.1 billion for Medicaid. That’s level funded. And $867 million towards the Department of Corrections. Also that is the exact same amount it got in the current year’s budget. So level funding pretty much across the board in the General Fund. Again, no growth there, but that was expected.

A bill is through a House committee that would expand how the death penalty could be used in Alabama. Todd, what would this bill do?

This bill came up last year but did not make it through the process. It would allow for the death penalty for anyone convicted of rape or sodomy of a child under 12 years old. We normally associate the death penalty for death, for murder, and things like that. So that’s kind of the question. It’s not just Alabama. Multiple states are dealing with this. It kind of came out of that child sex trafficking ring that was reported out of Bibb County.

And so it’s kind of a constitutional question here. And I think it will go to the Supreme Court, meaning we think about cruel and unusual punishment. What the sponsors argue is that the more states that put this into law, it becomes less unusual. And so that’s gonna be a constitutional questions. You hear a lot of pushback from Democrats on the committee. I do expect this to actually make it through and become law. But again, this is going to be a question for the Supreme Court with Alabama and other states pushing these measures.

Finally, a Senate committee gave the go-ahead to a bill that would increase penalties for those who injure a public official. Give us the overview of this measure.

It’s a bill from Sen. Chris Elliott from down in Baldwin County. And there are already protections on the books for police officers, firefighters, nurses, things like that for assault. If you assault a cop, if you assault a first responder, things like that, there were special penalties for that. This brings in other public officials like elected officials into that.

There was a incident down there in Bay Minette, in his district, where, I think it was a city councilman or a county commissioner, somebody just got assaulted and beat up pretty bad. And so I think it’s kind of in response to that. It just brings other public officials under the same law that has protections for police, first responders, things like that.