MONTGOMERY, Ala. – To say 2024 was an active year in Alabama government and politics would be an understatement!
This week, Alexander had the idea of putting together a “top stories of the year” post, which I don’t believe we’ve done before here at Alabama Daily News. I’m glad he suggested it because the process of reviewing the year has been fun and enriching. There really were some major storylines this past year, including some that led the national news.
Reviewing the major stories of 2024 also gave me great appreciation for how doggedly Mary and Alexander cover state government and politics, to include the Alabama Legislature. And in just a short few months, Trish has racked up a bevy of compelling and useful education stories (in fact, her list has to have it’s own post). Just as important, they’ve reported it all with accuracy, fairness and without agenda. I’m not saying I’m surprised, just proud and grateful.
So join us to remember the most impactful stories of 2024, complete with links, what a big deal they were at the time and how they will inform the politics of 2025.
Happy New Year!
– todd
IVF ruling, response
Alabama lawmakers had to pivot early in the 2024 session to make a quick legal fix to reopen fertility clinics after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos have legal protections. The decision led clinics to close to avoid possible future lawsuits over damaged embryos and propelled a national discussion about IVF protections.
The court cited anti-abortion language in the Alabama Constitution and ruled that an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the death of a minor child, “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
People, mostly women, rallied by the hundreds at the State House, demanding lawmakers provide a legal fix for fertility treatments and shared their personal stories about conceiving.
Alabama Daily News was first to report that legislation was being brought by State Sen. Tim Melson and State Rep. Anthony Daniels to offer protections for IVF clinics and prospective parents in the days after the ruling.
The immunity legislation quickly passed by the Legislature was at the time called a Band-Aid by some, to be revisited later. But Melson, R-Florence, said this he didn’t think additional legislation is needed.
Veterans Affairs debacle
An interagency squabble and a leaked state ethics complaint led to the public and messy removal of the leader of the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs this fall. And it is expected to lead to an agency restructuring in the upcoming legislative session. The VA commissioner is not currently a governor appointee, but is instead selected by the Alabama Veterans Affairs Board. Besides the governor, the board is made up of representatives nominated to the governor from several veterans’ organizations. Gov. Kay Ivey is expected to support legislation to make the commissioner a direct appointment by the governor. The board could be converted to be more advisory, ADN has previously reported.
Davis last summer filed an ethics complaint against Alabama Department of Mental Health Commissioner Kim Boswell and some staff and lobbyists, alleging they improperly killed an inter-agency veterans services agreement because of comments critical of the Mental Health Department made by an ADVA board member at an opioid settlement meeting. The leaked complaint was first reported by Mobile-based Lagniappe, but ADN reporting showed a inaccuracies in what was said in the complaint and what happened at a public meeting and how a board member, later removed by Ivey, had a non-profit agency requesting some of the ARPA grant money in question.Ivey called the complaint “frivolous” and it was later tossed. Then began a months-long saga in which Ivey asked for ADVA Commissioner Davis’ resignation, citing among other things a mishandling of grant funds. Davis initially agreed to resign effective at the end of the year, but later changed his mind, prompting Ivey to ask the board to remove him. When it didn’t side with her, Ivey pulled out her office’s “supreme executive power of the state,” and fired Davis in late October.
This Inside Alabama Politics edition from September 19, now out from behind the paywall, has the most detailed timeline of the ordeal leading up to the resignation request.
Occupational licensure board scrutiny
Alabama lawmakers continued this year efforts began in 2023 to make sure the quasi-government boards that license thousands of Alabama workers, from electrical contractors to massage therapists, are obeying state laws and not overcharging and overburdening licensees.
The new scrutiny recently led to a request that the Alabama attorney general investigate the actions of a Montgomery-based firm that has made running state licensing boards a lucrative cottage industry.
Alabama Daily News recently reported that Smith Warren Management Services billed three state occupational boards nearly $600,000 for additional services outside their regular state contracts since 2020.
Last year, lawmakers began questioning Smith Warren’s management of the Massage Therapy Board, including increased fees and failure to comply with open meeting laws and this year made the rare move to disband the board, folding its responsibility into that of the Alabama Board of Nursing.
Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, will be back in the 2025 session with legislation to consolidate the administrative management of the state’s licensure boards under one office within the Alabama Department of Workforce, currently the Department of Labor.
Prison construction moves forward
The last year saw the state’s new, more than $1 billion mega prison in Elmore County take shape while leaders agreed to move forward with a second 4,000-bed facility in Escambia County, though funding for that site is still being sought.
The Escambia site could be done in two phases, the first of which could begin in May 2025, ADN reported last month. Breaking the project into two phases would allow construction to begin while additional funds are sought. The project is a priority for Senate General Fund budget committee chairman Greg Albritton, who’s district includes Escambia County, and other leaders remain committed to its completion. Albritton and others last year were able to divert additional General Fund money toward the project and securing the undisclosed remaining amount will likely be a goal this year.
In Elmore County, the cost of the newly named Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex skyrocketed from an early estimate of less than $700 million to more than $1 billion.
In 2024, the Alabama Department of Corrections saw some much needed success in recruiting new correctional officers, but it’s clear the department won’t make a mid-2025 court-ordered mandate to increase staff. Meanwhile, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles increased its parole rate in 2024 after years of decline and a record-low. In September, ADOC was housing 20,383 inmates, according to its most recent monthly report. That’s up from 17,769 three years prior when lawmakers approved the new prison construction.
Overtime tax cut bigger than expected
Lawmakers and Gov. Kay Ivey gave some hourly workers a tax cut this year and it was larger than expected. Now, leaders will have to decide if Alabamians get to keep the cut, or some version of it, or do nothing and let it expire after June.
The 2023 legislation, supported by many on both sides of the aisle, took the state’s income tax off hourly workers’ overtime earnings. But the possible impact of the proposal was hard to estimate, lawmakers were told in 2023 and the impact of the cut that went into effect a year ago is much larger than anticipated. Ballparked at around $34 million for 2024, the cut was actually worth an estimated $230.7 million through September, the Alabama Department of Revenue said last month.
That’s nearly $200 million more that working Alabamians got to keep, but it’s potential revenue that would have gone to the state’s Education Trust Fund, which so far this fiscal year has seen a slight decline in revenue, especially in income tax receipts.
House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, D-Huntsville, who sponsored the 2023 bill, has said he’ll file a bill to renew the cut.
In the Alabama Senate, ETF committee chairman Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, moved to cap the tax credit’s impact at $25 million per year. He estimates the cut will cost $345 million by June of this year.
Ivey took that cap off in an executive amendment. Her office recently told ADN it would have been difficult to administer and impossible for employers to know when the cap had been reached.
Messy medical marijuana rollout continues to stall
By 2024’s end, Alabamians came no closer to having access to medical marijuana as the state’s messy rollout, which kicked off in mid-2023 with scoring inconsistencies and transparency concerns, continues to be held up in court amid litigation from companies denied licenses to grow and sell medical cannabis.
Alabama lawmakers first approved the limited use of medical marijuana back in 2021, and established the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission as the body to review, score and select a limited number of companies for licensure.
The AMCC first awarded licenses in June of 2023, but came shy of actually issuing said licenses after flaws in its scoring data were discovered. The body attempted to issue licenses twice more by the end of 2023, but was halted each time by order of a federal court.
The AMCC made some progress in 2024, issuing licenses to nine companies to grow medical marijuana. However, with the two contested licenses – integrator and dispensary licenses – being the only licenses permitting the actual sale of medical marijuana, the aforementioned nine companies will be forced to put the product, once grown, into a “freeze mode,” according to AMCC Chair Rex Vaughn, until litigation is resolved and the sale of said product is permitted.
State lawmakers made some effort in 2024 to restart the medical marijuana process from scratch, with Sen. Tim Melson, R-Florence, filing a bill in April to do just that. Melson’s bill failed to advance beyond a Senate committee, however, with the state’s rollout of medical marijuana still held up in court amid pending litigation as of the first day of 2025.
Medicaid expansion talks grow
While the topic of expanding Medicaid in Alabama has been pushed by state Democrats for years, the Republican-controlled Legislature had largely dismissed the proposal. That is, until January of 2024, when House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, R-Rainsville, spoke positively about the idea of Medicaid expansion, albeit by way of a private-public partnership model.
Not long after, a number of state lawmakers were briefed in February on a private-public partnership model for Medicaid expansion prepared by the Alabama Hospital Association in partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama.
Momentum on expansion continued, with lawmakers from North Carolina and Arkansas – two states that have expanded their Medicaid programs – speaking to a panel of Alabama lawmakers about how expansion benefited their states. Alabama lawmakers, including Republicans, spoke positively about the presentation, and told Alabama Daily News at the time that they remained open to the idea of expansion.
Calls for Medicaid expansion only grew throughout the year as rural hospitals continued to struggle, some of them closing or shuttering services, and some urban hospitals struggling financially, such as Jackson Hospital and Clinic in Montgomery.
Despite the momentum, Gov. Kay Ivey has remained skeptical of expanding Medicaid. Her office confirmed with ADN in May that long-term costs associated with expansion remained a significant concern of hers.
Nevertheless, amid a year that was defined by Medicaid unwinding, which included the purge of nearly 300,000 Medicaid recipients in the state after the expiration of pandemic-era federal protections, supporters of expansion did not let up. In December, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama gave a strong pitch to expand Medicaid, with Ted Hosp, vice president of government relations for BCBSA, speaking to the economic, workforce and health benefits the state might see with expansion at the Association of County Commissions of Alabama’s legislative conference in Montgomery.
Alabama’s ballot harvesting measure adopted, challenged
A Republican-led effort to combat “ballot harvesting” was achieved in Alabama with the passage of Senate Bill 1 in March, over the opposition of Democrats and voter outreach groups.
The bill, which Alabama Republicans had pushed for unsuccessfully the year prior, makes it a Class B felony – punishable with up to 20 years in prison – for an Alabamian to pay another person for assistance with an absentee ballot application. Lesser penalties were also established for other instances of assisting others with absentee ballot applications, and exemptions were included for family members and those with disabilities.
Republicans championed the measure as a tool to prevent voter fraud and ballot harvesting, or the collection of absentee ballots by third parties, whereas Democrats and some civic groups expressed concerns that the law could further reduce voter turnout, with the most-recent election at the time, the 2022 midterm elections, having the lowest voter turnout in at least 36 years.
Not long after the bill’s passage, a number of organizations in the state, including the League of Women Voters and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, halted their voter outreach operations amid fear of prosecution under the new law.
As early as April, however, the law was challenged in court by those same organizations, and in September, ahead of the 2024 elections, a federal judge agreed with some claims of the plaintiffs and issued a limited injunction, preventing the enforcement of certain components of the law as it would apply to disabled voters.
Under the direction of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the state appealed the judge’s decision, however, the legality of the law continues to be litigated in federal court.
Democrats flip congressional district in historic victory
While the 2024 election saw Republicans win handily, taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats did manage a historic win in Alabama after Shomari Figures, a Democrat from Mobile, flipped Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, turning the district blue for only the second time since 1963.
Figures defeated his Republican opponent Caroleene Dobson after securing 54.6% of the vote, a victory brought on by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that saw Alabama’s congressional district map redrawn to more equally distribute its Black population.
While the U.S. Congress will see Republicans hold a narrow majority of 219-215 when they reconvene in January, Alabama will have two of its seven districts represented by a Democrat.
The race to represent District 2 was by far the most expensive race in the state during the 2024 election cycle, with Figures raising $2.1 million and spending $1.7 million, and Dobson, $1.4 million and spending $3 million.
Figures ran heavily on increasing access to health care, as well as to abortion, specifically by pledging to fight to restore the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, and Dobson, on deregulation and border security. The two candidates also differed heavily on education, with Figures advocating for increases to public school funding, and Dobson, for expanding school choice, or allowing public education dollars to be used on public school alternatives like private or home schooling.
While the makeup of the new District 2 made a Democratic victory more likely based on past voting data, the race’s outcome was far from certain, with a number of political experts predicting a Republican victory to still be possible.
Alabama Democrats had another win earlier in 2024 when in a special Alabama House election Marilyn Lands, a Democrat, flipped Alabama House District 10 in North Alabama running heavily on reproductive rights.
Inter-party challenge sees Congressional Republican switch district, oust incumbent
In what has been described as a political upset, U.S. Rep. Barry Moore of Enterprise defeated his Republican congressional colleague Rep. Jerry Carl in the Republican primary election in March.
Moore, who has represented District 2 since 2021, announced that he would challenge Carl for District 1 after the U.S. Supreme Court imposed a new congressional district map on the state. That new map, imposed after the state’s previous map was ruled to likely violate the Voting Rights Act, put Moore’s hometown in District 1 rather than District 2 and pitted the two two-term Republicans against each other.
In Mobile, the two sparred in a heated debate in January. While both largely agreed with each other on the issues, where the two diverged was with their opinion on the House Freedom Caucus, a coalition of right-wing Republicans that aggressively advocate for reduced federal spending and deregulation.
Moore, a member of the Freedom Caucus, called them patriots, whereas Carl called them “disruptive and harmful to this country.”
The two also differed on continuing financial support for Ukraine, with Moore more skeptical of continuing to fund its military efforts to combat Russia’s invasion, and Carl, more supportive of funding Ukraine.
A poll of GOP primary voters conducted shortly before the primary election in March showed Carl leading Moore with 43% to Moore’s 35%.
Alabama Daily News’ Mary Sell and Alexander Willis contributed to this report.