Read the Jefferson County Memorial Project’s inaugural report, “Jefferson County’s 30 Residents,” for information about the project and stories on the 30 lynching victims in the county.
MONTGOMERY — The Alabama State Senate on Thursday voted along party lines to give final approval to legislation slowing cities’ ability to pass local occupational taxes.
House Bill 147, sponsored by Rep. Chris Sells, R-Greenville, limits municipalities from enacting occupational taxes by requiring any such policy to pass the Legislature as local legislation. Democrats argued strongly against the bill, saying it unfairly hurts the capital
city of Montgomery, which passed an occupational tax last week.
The Senate debated the bill for more than three hours before passing it on a 27-7 vote. It now goes to Gov. Kay Ivey, whose office previously signaled support for it. Read more.
The Birmingham City Council voted Tuesday to modernize its parking system, approving a three-year contract with ParkMobile, an application that allows users to pay for parking with their smartphones. The change, officials stressed, will add to, not replace, the coin-operated meter system used by the city.
ParkMobile will charge a 45-cent processing fee for payments made through its app; 15 cents of that fee will go to the city. Read more.
Jeff Sessions has collected almost a half million dollars in contributions in 2020 as he campaigns to reclaim the U.S. Senate seat he held for two decades before resigning to become U.S. attorney general.
Reports filed Thursday with the Federal Elections Commission showed Sessions with net contributions of $446,866 from Jan. 1 to Feb. 12, far outdistancing six opponents in the March 3 Republican primary for the Senate.
Democrat Doug Jones, the incumbent who is unopposed for the Democratic nomination, led all candidates with contributions of $2.43 million during the first 43 days of this year. Read more.
WBHM
Across Alabama, state inmates are getting GED certificates, learning to fix cars, and even how to code. As Alabama faces mounting pressure to reform its prison system, many state leaders want to increase funding for these educational programs. Read more.
New polling shows that Alabamians overwhelmingly want a statewide lottery and a significant percentage are undecided on how to vote on the March 3 constitutional amendment to reorganize the state board of education. Read more.
MONTGOMERY — A majority of voters are undecided on the Republican race for Supreme Court justice between incumbent Justice Greg Shaw and challenger Sen. Cam Ward, a new Alabama Daily News poll shows. Read more.
Walt Gibbons, director the public works department, said the goal for starting a pilot program is April 1, and it is set to last for six months. Read more.
Jefferson County has prepared a new space at the courthouse for persons to cast absentee ballots for the March 3 presidential primaries. Read more.
Problems like the ones in the Iowa Democratic caucus cannot happen in Alabama because the state holds elections, not closed meetings of political parties to select candidates, the state’s top elections official said Thursday.
“A caucus is not like any election that we have here,” Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said. “A caucus is administered and counted by (political) parties in Iowa and not by the secretary of state. It has nothing to do with the election process in that state.
“People running the election do not do so on a regular basis,” Merrill said.
Read more.
Voterama in Congress
WASHINGTON – Voting 232 for and 183 against, the House on Feb. 13 adopted a measure (HJ Res 79) that would advance the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution by replacing a long-expired deadline for states to vote on ratification with an open-ended deadline.
The ERA states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
Alabama, joined by two other states, filed suit in December to block ratification of the amendment, saying the time for ratification had long since passed. Read more.
U.S. Senator Doug Jones today said that, in the aftermath of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, he’d like to see procedural changes that would streamline the process in the future.
“We’re done, we’re through, we’re moving on. We’re already talking to colleagues about new legislation that we’ll be introducing, one of which may deal with this impeachment,” he said. “I’d like to see some new processes and new rules in place. There’s a lot of talk. There may be some things seen in the next couple or three weeks about that.”
Jones made the remarks after speaking to a full house of Cumberland School of Law students and faculty at Samford University in a talk designed to give the future lawyers from his alma mater insight into how he thought through the process and reached what he said was not a political decision on his part.
Read more.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham is leading a new anti-viral drug trial in Wuhan, China to combat the coronavirus outbreak. Read more.
Three zoning matters approved today by the Jefferson County Commission provide evidence that growth is coming to the northern part of the county.
Commissioners approved one zoning case in Morris and two in Mount Olive. The property at 950 Kimberly Cut-Off Road in Morris set the stage for a two-lot residential subdivision, changing the property from A-1 agricultural to R-1 single family.
One case heard today makes way for a 63-lot subdivision at 4901 and 4851 Newfound Road in Mount Olive, rezoning from I-3 industrial and A-1 agricultural to R-7 planned unit development. The other proposes 204 lots at Brookside Coalburg Road and 3885 Hodges Cemetery Road in Mount Olive, shifting the site from I-3 surface mining and I-3 industrial to R-7 planned unit development.
Read more.
Efforts to establish a pair of new Jefferson County Sheriff’s offices in eastern Birmingham are at least on hold until law enforcement leaders in the city and county demonstrate they are in agreement on the move.
Commissioner Lashunda Scales broached a discussion about the offices. They were on the Jefferson County Commission committee agenda as “substations,” but the discussion shifted to them being offices of the Sheriff’s Department’s Violent Crime Victim Unit, which now is based in the Sheriff’s office downtown.
Scales told her fellow commissioners that Tony Serra, owner of Serra Automotive Management, had agreed to lease a pair of buildings to the Sheriff’s Office for $1 per year. Read more.
The question posed to two classes of college journalism, film and public relations students was this: If you’re the editor of the Los Angeles Times, and you’re directing first-day, deadline coverage of the shocking death of former LA Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant and eight others, do you mention the rape case?
I got a yes – after 10 minutes of noes. The majority view was that discussion of Bryant’s 2003 felony sexual assault charge would be warranted in a few days – after a respectful period had passed to allow the family, the local community and adoring fans to grieve and pay tribute. I didn’t feel then, or now, that I should criticize as journalistically irresponsible any attempt to think ethically and compassionately about a publication decision and who might be harmed by it. We need more of that in media. And it certainly seems out of proportion to brand such a decision as irresponsible after some far more egregious examples of irresponsibility by professional media outlets reporting on the story.
Still, the decision of some news organizations to initially omit this chapter of Bryant’s life, or to give it a mention so brief that it smacked of forced obligation, seems like a failure. Read more.
Alabama faces a shortage of 200,000 highly skilled workers to fulfill industry job predictions by 2025 unless it aligns workforce development programs and collaborations between business and education with what employers will need, said the Business Education Alliance in a report released today.
As Alabama shifts away from an industrial-based to knowledge-based economy, the BEA report stated, 60% of the working population will need to attain college-level degrees or credentials to qualify for jobs in 2025. Data for 2017 showed that 43% of the Alabama workforce possessed a college degree or other post-secondary education. Read more.
Environmental groups in Alabama and elsewhere say they will fight to delay or stop a new federal rule that would remove the 1972 Clean Water Act’s oversight of half the nation’s wetlands and many small streams. The new rule greatly narrows the Obama-era definition of what constitutes waters of the U.S., commonly called WOTUS.
The rule — called the Navigable Waters Protection Rule — was announced today by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler at a homebuilders meeting in Las Vegas. Real estate and farm interests have been major proponents of replacing WOTUS, which the Trump Administration repealed last fall. The new rule is scheduled to be implemented in 60 days, following publication in the Federal Register. Read more.
