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Alabama Municipal Electric Authority

Good morning!

Here’s your Daily News for Wednesday, July 28.

1. Harris stresses vaccinations, recommends masks again

• State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris recommended Tuesday that even those who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 wear masks indoors as virus cases and hospitalizations rise rapidly across Alabama.
• Harris’ recommendation comes at the same time the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control’s recommendations that vaccinated people should return to wearing masks indoors, including all teachers, staff, students and visitors to schools.
• “For an added layer of protection, especially if you’re vulnerable for your age or have chronic health problems, masks make a whole lot of sense,” Harris said. “… If you’re going to be indoors and mixed with people who’s vaccination status you don’t know or people you know to be unvaccinated, then I think I would wear a mask and I would recommend that others wear a mask in those situations.”
• Alabama no longer has a statewide mask mandate and Gov. Kay Ivey has called for more vaccinations and personal responsibility, not mandates, to slow the virus.
• “Here is the truth: Closing businesses will not defeat COVID-19,” Ivey wrote in a Tuesday opinion column in the Washington Post. “Wearing masks will not defeat COVID-19. And keeping our students from in-classroom learning will not defeat Covid-19.”
• She encouraged people to get vaccinated and said those who spread misinformation about vaccines “are reckless and causing great harm to people.”
• Harris made the new recommendation as the much more highly infectious COVID-19 delta variant spreads across the state and Alabama’s vaccination rate lags behind every other state in the country. Currently, 1.5 million Alabamians have been fully vaccinated, just 37% of the eligible population.
• Read more from Caroline Beck HERE.

2. Some shot incentives offered

• A north Alabama city, state universities and others are offering cash and other perks for people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 despite the governor’s resistance to incentives aimed at improving the state’s worst-in-the-nation inoculation program.
• In Gadsden, which last week began offering $100 cash to residents who get fully vaccinated between July 19 and Oct. 15, 94 people received shots in six days, said Deborah Gaither, director of the Gadsden Etowah County Emergency Management Agency.
• “That’s a really good number,” Gaither said Tuesday, adding: “Some of our pharmacies stated they haven’t given a vaccine in weeks.”
• While some complained about getting vaccinated earlier and not being eligible for the money, Gaither said the city of 35,000 had to do something to boost immunizations since cases of COVID-19 are rising rapidly.
• “We’re at the point now that we’ve got to do whatever it takes to get people vaccinated,” she said. Nearly everyone who is hospitalized or dying now is unvaccinated, officials have said.
• Auburn University, with an enrollment of more than 30,000 students, announced incentives including improved parking, free meals, $1,000 scholarships, priority class registration and lunch for four with the president to students who are fully vaccinated for the fall semester.
• The University of Alabama said it will provide a $20 credit on a student debit card to any student who proves they are vaccinated by Aug. 28, and Montgomery-area government, public schools and the state health department are providing free state fair tickets to people who get fully vaccinated in the capital city.
• Read more from Kim Chandler HERE.

A message from the

Alabama Municipal Electric Authority

• One million Alabamians depend on reliable, affordable, innovative public power.

• Public utilities employ 93,000 people in local jobs across the U.S.

• Revenues from public power utilities go back into the community.

• 2,000 communities large and small across the U.S. trust public power.

• To learn more about AMEA and public power, visit www.AMEA.com.

3. Selma police officer fatally shot in ‘ambush’

• A Selma police officer on break at the apartment complex where he lived was shot to death early Tuesday and a woman was wounded in what a prosecutor described as an ambush.
• Selma Police Officer Marquis Moorer was on duty and went home to get a bite to eat when he was fatally shot, Dallas County District Attorney Michael Jackson said. A woman believed to be his wife or girlfriend was wounded, he said.
• The officer was “ambushed,” according to Jackson.
• Moorer was on a lunch break when shots were fired from outside, Attorney General Steve Marshall said. The officer was killed and another person inside the residence at Selma Square Apartments was wounded, Marshall said in a statement.
• Moorer was “an upstanding officer who took his job seriously,” Jackson said. He was credited with making the city’s first heroin arrest in a decade in 2019, shortly after he joined the police force as a patrol officer.
• “Every day, officers routinely risk their lives simply by putting on their uniforms and performing their duties to protect their fellow citizens,” Marshall said of Moorer’s killing. “We must honor them and never take for granted the sacrifices they make on our behalf. I ask you to join me in prayerful gratitude for Officer Moorer as we hold his loved ones in our hearts.”
• Read more HERE.

4. Infrastructure talks leave Biden’s entire agenda at risk

• President Joe Biden’s latest leap into the Senate’s up-and-down efforts to clinch a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure deal comes with even more at stake than his coveted plans for boosting road, rail and other public works projects.
• The outcome of the infrastructure bargaining, which for weeks has encountered one snag after another, will impact what could be the crown jewel of his legacy. That would be his hopes for a subsequent $3.5 trillion federal infusion for families’ education and health care costs, a Medicare expansion and efforts to curb climate change. (More on this in Inside Alabama Politics)
• Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will need support from every Democratic moderate and progressive to push the $3.5 trillion bill through the 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. If the infrastructure talks implode, it may be harder for moderates — who rank its projects as their top priority — to back the follow-up $3.5 trillion plan, which is already making them wince because of its price tag and likely tax boosts on the wealthy and corporations.
• “I would say that if the bipartisan infrastructure bill falls apart, everything falls apart,” West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of his chamber’s most conservative Democrats, warned reporters this week.
• “If infrastructure collapses, which I hope it does not, you’d have the difficulty of holding some of the Democrats” to back the $3.5 trillion bill, No. 2 House leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday in a brief interview. Party leaders will be able to lose no more than three Democrats to prevail in the 435-member House.
• Read more HERE.

5. Inside Alabama Politics

• Could ‘lost revenue’ be used in prison fix?
• Special session update;
• How would COVID-19 affect a special?
• ‘Legislative blackout’ on campaign fundraising shrinks to 2 weeks;
• What Congressional Democrats’ $3.5T budget package could mean for Alabama Medicaid;
• The List: Who’s Running, Who’s Not;
• Who will be House Education Budget Chair?
• This Matrix lawsuit is a doozy;
• Big Bud’s news;
• Potpourri

Headlines

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