Legislature leaves governor with no-pay-raise education budget

April 04--MONTGOMERY -- In an early-evening game of chicken, the Alabama Legislature gave its final approval to a $5.93 billion education budget for 2015 -- and abruptly went home for the year.

The last-minute vote left Gov. Robert Bentley with few options. He could approve the budget, which doesn't have the 2 percent teacher pay raise he lobbied for. Or he could veto the budget and convene a special session of the Legislature so lawmakers could start again.

"I think there are going to be a lot of disappointed teachers out there," Bentley said shortly before the budget vote. The governor also refused to rule out a special session.

The state's two budgets -- one for education and another for all other state agencies -- are among the few bills the Legislature absolutely must pass in its yearly 30-day session. As lawmakers met for Day 30 Thursday morning, the legislators and Bentley seemed to be still at odds on education funding.

Most of the items in the massive funding plan were settled. The budget included more money for middle school teachers and for the buses run by long-suffering school systems, which have complained about rising fuel costs for years. The state's growing pre-kindergarten system got a $10 million boost, to $38 million.

Agreement fell apart, however, on the issue of teacher compensation. In his State of the State address at the start of the session, Bentley called for a 2 percent pay raise for teachers. In budget hearings, officials from the state's teacher health insurance plan, the Public Education Employee Health Insurance Program, pointed out that the program would need a large influx of money. Part of PEEHIP's problem was due to rising costs under the Affordable Care Act, officials said. Most of it was due to a rising number of retirees and a shrinking number of active employees paying into the system.

The state's contribution to PEEHIP would have to go up, officials said, if lawmakers didn't want to pass the cost along to teachers.

After debating a number of options, including a one-time bonus, lawmakers from both chambers agreed to fully fund PEEHIP -- and put off teacher raises for a brighter year.

"We heard the cries of teachers and support personnel, who do a great job in our state," said Sen. Del Marsh, R-Anniston, the president pro tempore of the Senate. "They explained how important PEEHIP was to them, and retirees as well. We fully funded it."

Throughout the session, the Legislature's Democratic minority maintained there was enough money for both PEEHIP funding and a pay raise. That put them in the unusual position of being lined up with Republican Bentley, who said he had a plan to raise money for both. He said that if the budget came to him without the pay raise, he'd send it back with an "executive amendment" -- essentially, a suggested change and the threat of a veto.

"A 2 percent pay raise is not unreasonable," Bentley said late Thursday afternoon. "I believe we have the money. They should send me the budget. We have the executive amendments ready."

To get to the governor's desk, the budget needed one final vote of approval from the House of Representatives. House members held off on the budget vote until around 7 p.m., then voted to approve the bill. Shortly afterward, they adjourned for the year.

Minutes later, the Senate adjourned as well, leaving undone several bills they'd expected to vote on before the session's end. The abrupt adjournment of both bodies closed off the possibility that the Legislature would debate the budget again. Bentley would have to accept the bill or re-convene lawmakers for a do-over on the budget.

Marsh said he moved for adjournment after hearing that Bentley had sent the budget back to the Senate with a demand for a 2 percent raise. Marsh maintains the raise would have been fiscally irresponsible.

Senators had planned to take up a bill to make the sources of lethal injection drugs confidential -- something state officials claim they need to continue conducting executions. Also awaiting a vote were a bill to create a database to track high-interest payday loans and a bill to allow non-profit organizations to run spay-and-neuter clinics. Those bills died when the Senate closed its doors.

Adjourning early also kept the Senate from agreeing with a House version of a measure that would repair what some see as gaps in the state's Open Meetings Act.

"The governor's actions destroyed the Open Meetings law, his action possibly destroyed the deal with the death penalty bill, the database, all of those in my opinion were unfortunately the fault of the governor and his staff," Marsh said.

The events unfolded so fast that not all lawmakers, in the minutes after adjournment, knew for sure why things had shut down. Still, sponsors of some of the hardest-fought bills were clearly upset.

"We were that close," said Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, sponsor of both the spay-neuter and the payday-loan bills. Todd said she'd worked for two years to get the database bill through.

"We've been fighting every lobbyist in Montgomery," she said. "The people want it."

Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, carried the death penalty secrecy bill in the Senate. Without the bill, he said, the state may not be able to carry out executions for a full year, for lack of lethal injection drugs. Ward cited disagreements between senators as the main cause of the bill's derailment. The bill was brought up and postponed three times before the adjournment Thursday, as senators worked out disagreements about other bills.

"It was totally a result of infighting," he said. "I don't think there were policy concerns."

Marsh said senators did pass one of his highest-priority bills -- a "revolving door" ethics bill that would prohibit lawmakers from lobbying either house of the Legislature for two years after they leave office. A loophole in current law allows former House members to immediately lobby the Senate, and vice versa.

Marsh's bill was the first item he introduced at the beginning of the session, and the last to pass the Senate Thursday.

Critics of Bentley's budget approach claimed his budget numbers violated the "rolling reserve" law, set up three years ago to prevent mid-year funding crises in the education budget. The law places a cap on total spending in the education budget, based on an average of growth from past years. The cap was intended to keep the budget, which is based on volatile sales and income tax revenues, from collapsing when the economy doesn't perform well.

Critics of the Bentley budget claim the governor got around the cap by moving around certain tax revenues that don't count against the cap. Bentley countered Thursday that the House and Senate budgets did the same thing his budget did, but to different degrees. Some Democrats claim the GOP leadership in both chambers have simply been ignoring the cap.

"The rolling reserve does not work, and everybody knows the rolling reserve does not work," said Rep. Merika Coleman-Evans, D-Birmingham.

Reached for comment after the vote, Bentley spokeswoman Jennifer Ardis said the governor had nothing to add to what he'd said earlier that day, when asked if he'd reconvene the Legislature.

"I'm making no commitments one way or the other on whether we'll have a special session," Bentley said at the time. "We'll see what happens."

Capitol & statewide reporter Tim Lockette: 256-294-4193. On Twitter @TLockette_Star.

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