On Tuesday, a statewide amendment will appear on the ballot.
It will be on both Republican and Democratic primary ballots. Alabamians can vote "yes" or "no" on Statewide Amendment 1. It reads as followed:
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 2022, to amend Section 71.01 authorizing the Legislature to sign and transmit local laws or constitutional amendments before the transmission of basic appropriations. (Proposed by Act 2023-562)
Many people may question what exactly this amendment means. Essentially, the proposed amendment makes a technical change in the way the Alabama Legislature moves a bill from committee to the floor for a vote.
"It's very much inside baseball. If you've been to Montgomery, you sometimes hear the house and senate vote on something called BIR, budget isolation resolution. It's just a technical voting step that really should not apply to local bills, bills that only affect one county or one city," said Sonny Brasfield, Association of County Commissions of Alabama Executive Director.
The amendment, if passed, would state that local bills can come up at any point during the process, rather than have to jump through a procedural hoop, Brasfield explained.
According to Alabama's constitution, it states the first bills that can pass the legislature every year are the budgets.
"Here we sit now in the middle of the session and plenty of bills have passed the House and Senate. How do they do that? The legislature passes a resolution before they vote on the bill that says we're going to take this bill up ahead of the budget even though we are not supposed to," said Brasfield.
Brasfield said this has been going on for decades.
When Brasfield was asked about the advantage of voting yes, he responded, "In the legislature, members are sometimes reluctant to vote on bills that affect other counties. If there's a local bill for Jefferson County, almost always the members of the delegation say just let the Jefferson County delegation vote on this. The problem with that is you don't get enough votes to pass the BIR hurdle and get the bill up, so Jefferson County has to ask other counties to vote on their local bills which doesn't make very much sense."
Brasfield also weighed in or the advantage of voting "no" to this amendment.
"If you want the budget procedures to apply to local bills, then you would vote against this amendment. What happens, sometimes there are bill legal questions about whether there were enough votes to adopt that resolution and let the bill come up. Those questions don't generally come up until years after a bill is passed, so that's what we've dealt with over the years, has been ok this resolution was passed at a time that maybe a quorum didn't vote on the resolution, so it generates lots of questions about bills many times years after they pass."
The language on the amendment can be confusing. Brasfield said a common problem with constitutional amendments is that they are almost always technical.
"Because we have to jump over the constitutional hoops. I think what this amendment points out is that most people don't know much about the innerworkings of the legislature and the procedures the legislature has to follow. Those of us that do this every day know what BIR means, the public doesn't," said Brasfield. "I don't know how to solve that. There are constitutional requirements you have got to explain what the amendment does in order to put it on the ballot, when you explain what it does and people's eyes glaze over and I get it."
On March 5, if voters approve the amendment, the election results would be certified and it would become part of the state's constitution. Brasfield said that process can take a few weeks.