MONTGOMERY, Ala. — On the Senate floor last week, second-term Sen. Dan Roberts, R-Mountain Brook, said the legislative session that ended Thursday was unlike any he’s experienced.
“Deep and weighty” is how he later described the 14-week session and its headline issues.
“This has been one of the most challenging sessions,” Roberts said. “We started with big bills and continued with significant legislation throughout this session.”
Lawmakers earlier this year approved the most school choice bill in the state’s history; bills targeting the absentee ballot application process and diversity efforts in public education; a quick legislative fix to an unexpected high court ruling on in vitro fertilization; tax credits aimed at getting more people working and a property tax increase cap; record budgets; and a new residential high school in Demopolis.
Yet, the biggest bill of the session might be one that didn’t pass. Since February, a massive lottery and expanded gambling proposal got closer to passage than it has in a quarter of a century. Each chamber approved different versions of a gambling package, but a compromise fell one vote short of passing and going to the ballot for a statewide referrendum. A major ethics reform bill also passed the House in March and was discussed in a Senate before dying in the final days of the session.
“This has been tough,” Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, said about the session. “We didn’t come here to play.”
This was Senate President Pro Tem Greg Reed’s 14th regular session.
“I cannot remember a session where we did more in more different topics than we did this session,” Reed, R-Jasper, told reporters. “And it was all for the benefit of the people of Alabama.”
Speaker of the House Nathaniel Ledbetter said the representatives should be proud of their work.
“I’ve said it before, but I do think this is a momentous session for all we’ve done, and if you look at what we’ve done over the past two sessions, I think they match some quadrenniums, and it’s all attributed to the members.”
Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, called the session “taxing” for Democrats with a lot of red meat in the first five weeks of session.
“At the end of the day, we had some wins, we had some losses, we took it on the chin and we’re big boys and we’ll come back next year,” he said.
Here are some of the biggest issues and bills of the 2024 regular session.
Biggest school choice law to date
After a few years of failed attempts, Gov. Kay Ivey and some legislative leaders made school choice a priority this year, passing the most expansive option for private and home school families to date.
The legislation provides up to $7,000 in tax credits for families to use on private school education or other education options. Home school families can receive up to $2,000 in credits per child, capped at $4,000 per family, under the Creating Hope and Opportunity for Our Students’ Education Act.
A new state fund will be created from which the tax credits will be distributed. Lawmakers will put at least $100 million per year into the fund and it can’t grow to more than $500 million at any time.
The credits begin in the 2025-2026 school year but are limited to families making less than $90,000 for the first two years.
Unexpected IVF fallout
Lawmakers were thrown for a legal loop in late February when the state’s high court ruled that frozen embryos have legal protections, a move that led fertility clinics in the state to stop services to avoid potential lawsuits. Families from across the state rallied at the State House, demanding a legislative fix. In its opinion, the high court cited the state’s 2018 constitutional amendment, pushed by Republicans and approved by voters, that the state recognizes the “rights of unborn children.”
Lawmakers avoided in new legislation any language about when life begins but opted to shield providers from civil lawsuits. Many lawmakers acknowledge that further action will be needed in upcoming sessions.
Big budgets
The Legislature sent Ivey a record $9.3 billion education and $3.3 billion General Fund bills that weren’t significantly different from what she sent it in early February. Most agencies were at least level funded, and many will see a funding increase in fiscal 2025.
They includes 2% increases for teachers and state employees. And while retirees didn’t get a bonus or raise, lawmakers vowed to work on that next year.
The General Fund spending bills include line items for the planned 4,000-bed prison in Escambia County. Early in the session, ADN reported it wasn’t moving forward until additional funds were found.
“That will help us get started and get done in a fiscally responsible way,” Albritton told ADN.
The budgets are a bright spot in the session, he said.
“I do take pride in how we handled our budgets,” Albritton said. “Under the circumstances and under the pressures, political and otherwise, I think we’ve done well with the taxpayers’ money, getting done the hard things so we need to. We don’t have enough to do all of it, but I think we’ve got our priorities correct.”
Education spending bills also included $1 billion for capital projects and equipment along with more discretionary money for local superintendents, Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, noted.
“The funding for summer meals (in 2025) was also significant,” Orr, chairman of the education budget committee, said. ” I was disappointed the House did not want to follow the Senate’s lead in beginning the funding process for retirees. I see this issue as a growing issue given the high inflation that retirees are facing.”
Among agencies seeing some new money is the Alabama Department of Mental Health.
“I was pleased with the $2.5 million that we placed in the budget to fund the 16-bed mental health crisis center to be constructed on Highway 31 in Decatur,” Orr said. “This is important for all of north Alabama.”
Workforce bills
Ivey and legislative leadership this year said they wanted to focus on improving the state’s workforce participation rate. In March, they introduced a seven-bill package they hope will remove barriers to employment.
Dubbed “Working for Alabama,” the package included a number of measures designed to offset costs for employers that invest in child care for workers and developers who build affordable workforce housing.
The child care tax credit program, for instance, would offset tax liabilities for employers who invest in expanding child care, capped at $15 million for its first year, and topping out at $20 million in 2027.
Not all bills in the package offered tax credits, with one – the Alabama Workforce Pathways Act – offering high school students more opportunities to study career tech. Another, the Alabama Growth Alliance Act, which will create a public corporation comprised of business experts to make workforce recommendations to the Legislature.
“The child care tax credit, the pathway diploma, I think it’s going to be a big deal, and I think it’s going to help in multiple ways,” Ledbetter said.
Two bills did not make it out of the legislative process, however, bills that would have created innovation districts where counties and municipalities could create public corporations that could acquire property and collect taxes.
Property tax increase cap
At least for the next three years, property tax increases can’t be more than 7%, per a bill sent to Ivey and sponsored by Rep. Phillip Pettus, R-Green Hill, and Sen. David Sessions, R-Grand Bay.
The bill was amended several times in the legislative process, including increasing the cap, to address some of the concerns of local governments and school systems who said the bill cuts their potential funding.
The law will expire in 2027 unless extended by lawmakers.
It awaits Ivey’s signature.
Anti-DEI measures
Following other Republican-controlled states, the Legislature this session set out to limit diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on college campuses. Passed in March, Alabama’s new law prohibits public universities, as well as K-12 schools and state agencies, from funding DEI programs. The law defines programs, classes and events as those where attendance is based on sex, gender identity and ethnicity.
The new law also says public schools and agencies can’t teach “divisive concepts” including that any individual “should accept, acknowledge, affirm, or assent to a sense of guilt, complicity, or a need to apologize on the basis of his or her race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Republicans said the law is needed to prevent indoctrination that leads to deepening divisions among groups. Democrats said the law will stifle diversity efforts.
Democrats were able to add some amendments to the bill — one of the wins Singleton referred to. He successfully amended the bill to remove from that list of divisive concepts that “slavery and racism are aligned with the founding principles of the United States.”
Other Democrat successes Singleton mentioned to reporters Thursday evening included blocking bills to fine cities more for removing Confederate monuments and persecuting librarians for housing books considered obscene.
Absentee ballot applications
Among the first bills to be filed this legislative session, Senate Bill 1 was an effort to target ballot harvesting, and makes it a Class B felony for an Alabamian to pay another person for assistance with an absentee ballot, punishable with up to 20 years in prison.
Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, had sponsored a near-identical bill in 2023 that ultimately failed to make it through the legislative process, but vowed that the bill would return the following year.
Making good on his promise, SB1 was filed well ahead of this year’s session, this time by Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, and moved quickly through both chambers, though not without strong opposition from House and Senate Democrats.
Democrats argued that the severe criminal penalties could have a chilling effect on voter participation, particularly with organizations that assist the elderly and disabled with filling out absentee ballots. As the bill made its way through both chambers, exclusions were included for those with disabilities.
Democrats ultimately found the exclusions insufficient, but with a strong Republican majority in both chambers, the bill advanced through both chambers and was signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey on March 20.
First-grade readiness
After several years, legislation to require a first-grade readiness assessment for young students who want to skip kindergarten.
Alabama currently doesn’t require kindergarten and Rep. Pebblin Warren, D-Tuskegee, has tried for years to change that. Republicans, including Gov. Kay Ivey, joined the effort in 2023. Warren’s bill was carried in the Senate by Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva.
Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham successfully proposed an amendment to push the requirement for the readiness test to the 2026-2027 school year.
Public records deadline
Ivey has already signed a new public records law that for the first time puts on paper when government agencies have to respond to an Alabama citizen’s request for documents.
“The public needs to be able to access public records and not be put off by government bureaucrats who want to play God with records that are not theirs to withhold,” Orr told ADN. “Granted, there are abuses out there and hopefully this new law will thwart those who want to make unreasonable and frivolous demands.
Under previous law, there was no required time frame for responses. Under the new law, public entities have 10 business days to acknowledge the request and 15 business days to either deny or fulfill it. Agencies have the ability to extend the time by 15 business day increments.
Alabama Daily News’ Alexander Willis and Anna Barrett contributed to this report.