Alabama Legislature sends General Fund to Ivey; education budget near final votes

The Alabama Legislature Tuesday sent a proposed 2025 General Fund budget to Gov. Kay Ivey and is close to giving final approval to next year’s Education Trust Fund budget and a supplemental school funding bill for this year. 

The Senate concurred with mostly-minor House changes to the $3.3 billion budget, which Gov. Kay Ivey said Tuesday she plans to sign, highlighting increases for law enforcement and mental health. 

“This General Fund is solid and will go far in making Alabama the best place to live, work and raise a family,” Ivey said in a statement. 

The budget, which goes into effect on Oct. 1, includes a 2% pay raise for state employees and funding increases for most state agencies. 

The Senate also concurred on a supplemental General Fund bill for the current fiscal year, which had a total of around $256 million as passed second chamber committee.  Most of that spending ($150 million) is going to prison construction. The state is currently erecting a 4,000-bed men’s prison in Elmore County, expected to cost over $1 billion. 

The $9.3 billion Education Trust Fund budget went to a conference committee Tuesday but emerged with bills presented by House Ways and Means Education Committee Chair Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, who sponsored the bills. 

The $9.3 billion ETF includes 2% pay raises for education employees and is about 6.8% bigger than this year’s $8.8 billion budget. It increases funding for local school boards and many education programs, including the Alabama Reading Initiative and the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative.

Garrett said Tuesday the conference committee restored teacher development training in HB 147, the appropriations for the Education Trust Fund Advancement and Technology Fund. There was $2 million allocated in the version that passed the House.

The money did not appear in the version passed by the Senate.

In HB 145, the main education budget, the committee moved moving $1.5 million for School Safety Evaluations, Mapping, and Grants from the Alabama State Department of Education to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.

The committee made more changes to HB 144, which allocates an additional $651 million to education programs in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The changes included reclassing $175,000 for the Alabama Symphony under the Council for the Arts; adding $750,000 for the Principal Leadership and Mentoring Act; over $2 million for the capital fund for the Community College System Capital Fund; over $1 million for the Council of Arts and over $1 million for Historical Commission grant programs.

The committee also removed $5 million from the Education Retirees’ Fund. Alabama education retirees have not had a cost-of-living benefit increase since 2007, due to the cost of such a move. Legislators want the fund over time to be able to regularly issue bonuses for retirees. Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, had earlier criticized the change on the Senate floor. 

“Next year, the education budget is going to start out in this chamber and you bet your bottom dollar we’re going to have a deposit into that retiree trust fund for our retired state educators,” he said.

Orr expressed similar sentiments about employees in the General Fund.

“Did we not go through all the trouble to establish this fund, this trust fund for retirees so that the system would be set up already for the money to flow into the system so that there would be in future years a benefit for Alabama education and general fund retirees?” asked Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Reed, R-Jasper.

Garrett told reporters after the committee adjourned that there had to be $100 million in the Fund before it can be spent. He also said that the money from the $5 million would not be a large amount per retiree.

Garrett said the $5 million was “symbolic.”

The Senate also passed a resolution on studying the state funding formula, which is currently a foundation-like program to one based on student headcount. Garrett told reporters that a similar one was passed in the House.

The conference committee agreed after the House of Representatives adjourned Tuesday. The earliest it could be passed by both chambers is Wednesday.

This story was updated Thursday to correct an attribution.