Kay Ivey turns Alabama Education Trust Fund into an ATM for sneaky projects

Alabama’s Education Trust Fund has been hijacked. The ETF is now Gov. Kay Ivey’s ATM.

Lipstick on a pig? Ivey is trying to disguise the whole $311 million hog. And sneak it through as “education funding.”

My colleague Kyle Whitmire has been firing on all cylinders on this issue. Here are some excerpts from his takes:

Ivey hasn’t funded Medicaid expansion because she doesn’t want to. She can’t do it without admitting she was wrong and that’s embarrassing for her.

End of story.

Meanwhile, she’s finding ways to help government contractors get paid and shifting school dollars to private interests that have nothing to do with education.

Ivey’s proposed supplemental Education Trust Fund budget has included more than $300 million of non-education expenses. The document itself obscures what some of them are, but with a little digging we’ve dragged a few of those things into the light.

There’s $25 million for the Montgomery Whitewater project, which her proposal directed through the Montgomery County Commission because putting “whitewater park” in the budget might have given the whole game away.

And there’s $100 million more for prison construction, which it channels through the state’s community college system. I’m not sure when the community college system last built prison facilities, but it seems like it would have been less trouble giving that money directly to the Department of Corrections.

Unless the point was to keep people from seeing her do that very thing.

In addition to those allocations, Ivey has proposed $200 million for the Main Street Alabama program, which helps small towns revitalize their downtown districts.

Because who needs an emergency room nearby when you can have decorative street lamps?

The last credible argument the state could make for not using its budget surpluses to expand Medicaid was that the money was stuck in the Education Trust Fund. That’s one of the two state budgets, the other being the General Fund which pays for just about everything beyond schools. But taxes in the Education Trust Fund are earmarked for education expenses alone.

This has been a blood/brain barrier of Alabama politics — keeping the peace between education interests and general fund interests like prisons and Medicaid for decades.

But now it seems to have been breached.

It was breached on purpose. And it was breached with the intent that regular folks and maybe even lawmakers, too, not understand how big a transfer was happening.

Ivey has made clear what her priorities are.

She’s fine slipping public money to prison construction and a struggling white water boat ride.

But not to Alabamians trapped and drowning in medical expenses they can’t pay.

Read all of Whitmire’s column here

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix.