About Alabama — State budgets complete but what’s the plan?

On its last session day, the Alabama Legislature completed work on the two large state budgets for the coming fiscal year. These were hard budgets to put together. Gone are the millions of federal stimulus dollars that propped up state finances for the past three years, and state revenues in 2012 are expected to be lower than in fiscal 2008.

The 2012 Education Trust Fund budget of $5.6 billion is 17 percent below the amount spent four years earlier. In the $1.8 billion General Fund budget, prisons and Medicaid consume 23 percent more than they did in 2008, but the remaining general government programs were allocated 28 percent less than in 2008. Tax dollars and spending programs had to be moved around to make the budgets balance.

The Legislature deserves credit for finishing these difficult budgets on time and setting an example with a budget 36 percent lower than 2008’s. However, Alabama law calls for the governor and Legislature to develop the budget as a plan for providing state services. What is the plan contained in the 2012 budget?

As yet, we know little about it. Only an expert could follow the 187 pages of appropriation decisions itemized in the budget bills or even add up the money invested in some services because agencies receive funding in multiple ways. Nor do the budget bills tell us what the state expects to accomplish with the billions of taxpayer dollars it is investing.

For example, the 2012 budgets of education agencies are about a billion dollars below 2008 spending. How will this affect test scores and graduation rates in public schools or tuition levels in colleges and universities? More than $63 million of highway revenues are being transferred to fund the court system and the Department of Public Safety. What will this mean for the maintenance of roads and bridges? What are the state’s strategies for controlling Medicaid and prison costs, which are almost $200 million higher in 2012 than in 2008?

The governor should provide answers early next year when he presents a four-year state plan as required by law. That plan ought to help us understand how our tax dollars are being used to make Alabama a better place to live, work and do business.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Jim Williams is executive director for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. Jim may be contacted at jwwillia@samford.edu.