President's Message - Summer 2000

Work Left to be Done on Amendment #1

There is work yet to be done. By the time this special edition of The County Commissioner makes its way into your hands, my year as president of this Association will be over. But the most important work of my term will not yet be completed.

That work, the work that has really been our driving force for the last two years, is the passage of Amendment #1 and the issuance of $250 million in bonds to finance the replacement of county bridges and roads.

Yes, the idea that was created during the County Road and Bridge Summit back in February of 1999 is about to come true. But there is a great deal of work yet to be done before election day on November 7, 2000. And it will take all of us to get the job done.

The provisions of Amendment #1 are complicated. As you read in the pages of this magazine you will realize just how complicated. However, it does not make sense to defeat the amendment simply because it is complicated. To do so would be a terrible mistake.

It is hard for most of us to think about a trust fund that has almost two billion -- that's with a B -- dollars in assets -- or corpus. But that is exactly how much money is at stake in this amendment. Right now the state has two trust funds -- The Alabama Trust Fund and the Heritage Trust Fund, both created with revenue from the leasing of oil rights in the Gulf of Mexico. The two funds will merge in the year 2001, creating one fund with almost $2 billion in assets.

I believe we have a responsibility to use that money as wisely as is humanly possible.

When the trust funds were created -- one of them more than two decades ago -- the wisest use of the money was to sock it away in high-yield investments. But today, it really doesn't make much sense to put $2 billion in the bank to earn about 5 or 6 percent interest when our state's infrastructure crumbles around us every day.

The passage of the amendment will head-off a funding problem that awaits the state in the year 2001 when the two trust funds merge into one. Without the passage of this amendment, the state will have a budget shortfall of somewhere between $20 million and $30 million. No one, not even those who are opposing the amendment, has any ideas about how to make up that shortfall, should the amendment fail.

It is important that you realize that this amendment DOES NOT utilize any portion of the corpus -- or the existing revenue -- in the trust fund. That money is absolutely protected and remains in the trust to produce interest that can be spent each year by the state, the counties and the cities. The amendment only allows for less than one-third of the FUTURE royalty payments, which will be made when companies extract oil from the gulf, to be used to pay off the bonds that will finance our bridge program as well as other infrastructure improvements in our state.

As a county commissioner, one of the most important aspects is the construction of $250 million in county roads and bridges. The real focus of the work will be the more than 1,900 county bridges in this state that are posted at weight limits to low for school buses to cross. See ballot wording of proposed Amendment #1 on facing page.

It is deplorable in the year 2000 for Alabama's school children to spend extra time on buses simply because we have a history of state leadership that is so committed to the safe, politically-comfortable path that it cannot find enough money to make the repairs. During this school year alone, the detour miles will cost taxpayers more than $7 million. But the price tag on our children is even larger in terms of lost time at home, exposure to more accidents and fatigue.

Now, there are those who oppose this amendment. They say that investing oil royalty payments in capital improvements is unwise and that we should sock that money away in the bank so it can draw 5 percent interest while our school children sit for hours detouring unsafe bridges.

Those critics will say that we should find some other way to fund these improvements. But those critics are the same persons who would actively oppose a new gasoline tax or an increase in property taxes to fund the construction of the needed county bridges. And they are the same opponents who have failed to come forward with their own program to improve transportation on the local level.

Between now and November there is a lot of work to be done. But the work is necessary and the ultimate outcome is one that will benefit everyone in our state.

It's time for all of us to get to work in support of Amendment #1 and I hope you will join an old has-been president in this important work!