State politics can make for strange bedfellows

By By Rep. Ronald Grantland, guest columnist
It is said that politics make strange bedfellows. This certainly is the case as we start the budget process in the new legislative session.
When the governor unveiled his 2011 budget last week, he said that there was “no crisis” in state finances. He said his budgets fully funded state government, and that education and other state efforts would actually get an increase next year. All is well, things are good, ‘nothing to see here’ was the governor’s message.
This came as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the economy and the cuts for schools and important state services. We have $1.4 billion less to spend in education than just two years ago. We’ve suffered two years of proration where everything from textbooks to buses have been zeroed out for schools, and 18 percent has been cut from already strapped budgets. We have seen plans to furlough public health nurses and state troopers in order to make ends meet. So what happened?
When folks looked at his budget, he counted new federal assistance to fill huge holes. This is money that would come from a talked about second round of stimulus. The problem is that this funding has not yet been approved. It has passed the House, and has not been taken up by the Senate. It is simply a hope for assistance, and yet it is there in the governor’s spending plan.
It is downright strange for the governor to look to Washington as the savior for Alabama’s budget crisis. Gov. Riley when he was a congressman, as well as governor, often opposed any kind of spending from Washington.
For example, recently he vigorously fought more than $100 million in additional federal funds that would have allowed expansion and extension of Alabama’s unemployment insurance. During the worst increase in the jobless rate in our state’s history, the governor refused this money that would have helped thousands of families who lost a job through no fault of their own. He opposed it on several grounds, stating that Washington would not dictate how Alabama helped people without work.
Now here he is banking on new stimulus money that has yet to be approved, all the while many of his allies in Congress are adamantly opposed to it.
It is a fact that the first round of economic stimulus saved thousands of Alabama jobs, and kept the worst catastrophe to ever befall education from happening. More than $500 million in emergency funds from the stimulus are going directly to our schools this year and next, saving thousands of teachers and education support staff from being let go. Without this emergency money, the devastation to Alabama’s education couldn’t be recovered in a generation.
However, even with the emergency stimulus funds already approved, we are still in the steepest decline in school funding in our state’s history. All the progress we have made in the past years in elementary reading and math are at-risk. This is why the governor’s ‘no crisis’ is so puzzling.
This is not the end of the strangeness. Now the governor is pushing President Obama’s initiative for something called charter schools, and he does so on the idea that Alabama could get additional federal money as a prize for doing so. The idea that our governor is willing to change Alabama law to suit the president, just for more federal dollars, takes ‘strange bedfellows’ to a whole other level.
The Legislature will craft budgets with the goal of paying our own way, not looking toward Washington as the only way to keep teachers in the classroom and keep vital public services going. And we do this with the understanding that it is the most difficult time, for everyone, that anyone can remember.