Alabama Governor Seeks $800M Bond Program for Prisons

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BRADENTON, Fla. - Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley plans to ask legislators approve an $800 million bond issue for prison construction that he said will pay for itself by closing and consolidating existing facilities.

Bentley, a Republican in his second term, laid out his jail funding initiative Tuesday night in a speech to a joint session of the Legislature.

The plan calls for replacing outdated and overcrowded facilities that are costly to upkeep.

"Funded by an adequate bond issue, we will begin this process within the year," Bentley said. "The money we save with the more efficient prisons will in turn be used to pay off the debt of the construction."

Bentley did not mention the amount of bonds in his speech, although his office later released the figure in a fact sheet on the Alabama Prison Transformation Initiative, which calls for closing 14 major prisons and consolidating operations into four new facilities.

The state's current prison system has nearly double the inmates it was built to house, according to the Decatur Daily.

The governor's plan to address the cost of prison infrastructure is his second major bond-financed initiative.

In 2012, Bentley authorized $1.2 billion of bonds to finance transportation projects across the state.

Bentley also told lawmakers on Tuesday that he will present a balanced budget that includes pay raises for teachers, support personnel, and all state employees "with no strings attached."

In other areas, Bentley talked about concepts that he hoped to fund and implement by 2019, the state's bicentennial and his final year in office.

"Alabama's Great State 2019 Plan sets its sights on educating and training our people, while connecting and constructing basic opportunities for all our citizens," he said.

The plan proposes to bring high-speed Internet service to rural areas of the state, increase funding for medical scholarships and loan forgiveness for medical students who work in underserved communities, and provide college scholarships to low-income students.

Bentley did not say how much the broadband, scholarship, or loan forgiveness programs would cost or exactly how they would be funded.

"Working with private sector [Internet] providers, we will first begin by cutting the bureaucracy that stands in the way of providing broadband access," he said. "We will first work to provide the infrastructure needed to provide broadband."

Installing the infrastructure will allow private providers to offer high-speed Internet access "at a more affordable and manageable cost to our communities," Bentley said.

The Alabama Legislature's annual session runs through early April.

Bentley was scheduled to release his proposed budget for fiscal 2017 on Wednesday.

Lawmakers have already been advised by the Legislative Fiscal Office that the general fund budget is expected to have a shortfall of $95 million.

In 2015, two special sessions were required for legislators to agree on a series of measures to close a shortfall in preparing the current year budget, and to raise about $160 million in new revenue.

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