The 2026 Alabama legislative session begins Tuesday

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State lawmakers will return to Montgomery Tuesday to kick off the 2026 legislative session. It’s the final session for Gov. Kay Ivey. It also comes against the backdrop of statewide elections this fall. For a look ahead to what to expect this session we turn to 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.

As I mentioned, this is an election year. Is the tenor or feel of a session any different with those elections looming?

It always is a little bit different. For one thing, they start earlier. So it’s starting on Tuesday. That’s early. The sessions usually begin in February. But in election years, they’re a month early. And part of the reason for that is they want to get out early. They want to go home and campaign. And you mentioned the fall elections. For most members, they’re more worried about their primaries, which are scheduled for late May. So they want to get the business of the legislative session done, get back home and campaign to get reelected.

Let’s talk money. As I recall, these last few years have brought fairly healthy budgets. What’s the budget outlook seem to be this year?

They’re healthy still. And you’re right. We’ve had a remarkable run of the last several years of not just healthy budgets, but record budgets. Now part of that’s been propped up by a lot of the federal relief money, not just direct spending, but money that goes into savings accounts and therefore the state gets interest off of that. That gets infused into the budgets. We all know that’s going away. But the state revenues are healthy.

On the education side, we’ve been talking with Chairman Arthur Orr of the education budget (committee). He’s optimistic. He thinks there’s room for not just teacher pay raises, but for the state to help subsidize some of the increased insurance costs that teachers and other education workers are going to face. Usually, that’s a choice between one or the other. If they’re able to do both, that shows you how healthy the education budget is.

General fund not quite as healthy. I mean, it’s going to be fine for this current fiscal year and probably fine for the next. But it’s on the general fund side that in the years to come people are starting to get worried because of those reduced infusions of cash from the feds but also increased costs from building these prisons, from increased costs on health care, Medicaid, mental health. The costs go up and if the revenues don’t also go up, you get in trouble.

So for right now, the budgets look great. It’s in the two, three years out that they’re starting to get worried. And, of course, everybody is going to be crossing their fingers to hope that a recession doesn’t set in, something they can’t really control, but it certainly would impact state budgets down the line.

The Republicans remain in firm control of the legislature. Beyond money, what kind of priorities are they talking about?

One thing that the speaker has been talking about is career and technical education. They’ve made a big push the last several years on the Literacy Act, especially in the younger grades, the Numeracy Act getting math and science scores up, and that’s had some real impact. The speaker’s been talking about, look, let’s do the same thing on career and technological education, especially in middle grades, getting students into some of those career pathways, especially those that maybe don’t need or want to go to college, can get started on a beneficial career earlier in the process. I look for that to be talked about plenty.

You’re also going to see a lot of local legislation. They got caught up last year in a filibuster where a lot local bills weren’t able to pass. “All politics is local” as Tip O’Neill used to say, and so you’ve got to take care of your folks back home.

Democrats certainly have a tougher row to hoe in the legislature, but they still have things that they want to accomplish. What sort of issues do you hear from Democrats?

They’re obviously, as the Republicans are a super majority, they are super minority. And so, anything they do, they really do have to work with Republicans to figure out how to pass that. And they’ve been clever about it.

I was talking with House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels. He acknowledges that. They’ve got to figure out how to work the Republicans on things. One bill that he wants to bring — you may remember they eliminated income tax on overtime wages worked. That was a couple of years ago. The law expired. It’s sunsetted, by design. They had some revenue problems. It kind of caused the state more than they thought.

But now, on the national level, in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans have cut income tax on overtime on the federal level. So that’s putting pressure on Republicans. So I think Democrats, you may see Leader Daniels bring that bill back. It may look different than it did in the past, but they want to focus on kitchen table issues, whether it’s health care, groceries. A lot of families are feeling squeezed. Democrats really want to focus on those things. And what’s better than an overtime wage tax cut for something like that? So I think you may see that and other issues really impacting families.

Taking a step back, what are the big things you’ll be watching for over the next few weeks to months?

In terms of issues, I’m curious about the [Alabama] High School Athletic Association. There was a lot of frustration expressed by Republicans, really all lawmakers, over the CHOOSE Act and how the athletic association was mandating that anybody taking CHOOSES Act money to go to a private school had to sit out a year of athletic participation. That’s now on hold because a judge put it on hold, but generated a lot of frustration amongst lawmakers because they did not intend that to be the case when they passed the CHOOSE Act. So I don’t know if it’s going to be in the form of a bill or what, but I do think there’s a lot talk around reforming the athletic association, and that may be a multi-year project.

There’s frustration by lawmakers about the West Alabama Corridor and how much money it’s costing because there is no federal match. And we’ve bonded out a lot of our spending power on that. So you could see some legislation regarding that as well.

These are not sexy issues. It’s not gambling. You probably won’t see a big gambling push this year. But state government sometimes should be boring. When it gets dramatic, sometimes there’s a problem.

But this is an election year. As you mentioned, it’s Kay Ivey’s last session as governor. So we’re looking forward to what she says tomorrow night. And by the way, I encourage folks to watch. We’ve got the State of the State. We’re airing that live on Alabama Public Television. Our coverage begins at 5.30 on Tuesday night. So I hope you’ll tune in for that.