Latest news with #BrianLyman
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit challenging minority representation on Alabama board
The Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama as seen on Feb. 4, 2025. A law that maintains diversity on the Alabama Real Estate Appraisers Board remains after case challenging it is dismissed. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit last week that challenged a state law and administrative regulation requiring the Alabama Real Estate Appraisers Board to have at least two minority members. U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker, Jr. dismissed the case on Friday after both parties agreed to end the proceedings after the plaintiff in the case, American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), objected to being subjected to discovery. With both parties agreeing to end the litigation, Huffaker then agreed to the stipulations from both parties and ended the case with prejudice. The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), a group founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, argued that a 1989 law requiring that 'no less than two of the nine board members shall be of a minority race' on the board violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Huffaker, appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump, dismissed the case without weighing in on the merits of the case after the litigants agreed to end it. Pamela Wyatt, president of the Alabama Association of Real Estate Brokers (AAREB), a mostly-Black organization that intervened to preserve the law, said in a statement that the case 'allowed us to demonstrate how important state laws ensuring diversity on state boards are to people in Alabama.' 'State boards make decisions that affect all Alabamians and should be reflective of the communities they serve,' the statement said. 'For the past three decades, this Alabama law has aimed to ensure that state boards reflect the state's rich diversity, and we are thrilled that this case has been dismissed with prejudice.' The association intervened in the case after Gov. Kay Ivey's office said in court filings that the regulations were an 'unconstitutional requirement that 'she does not—and will not—enforce,'' according to court documents. The governor's office did object to AAER's challenge to inclusivity language in the statute. Blum, the founder of the AAER, brought a lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 to strike down race-conscious college admissions. The AAER sued the state after the appraisers board rejected an application filed by Laura Clark, a member of AAER, because her appointment would have violated state statute that at least two of the board members be nonwhite. Clark, who is white, also serves as the interim president of the Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, a conservative nonprofit law firm that says it advocates for 'limited government, free markets, and strong families.' The AAREB said Alabama's long history of racial discrimination in housing made minority representation on the state appraisal board critical to fairness. 'This particular law is critically important for that organization and many, many, other real estate professionals of color, and people of color in the state, who will suffer immensely if the law is struck down,' said Brooke Menschel, an attorney with Democracy Forward, representing the AAREB, last year. The parties proceeded to discovery last July after Huffaker rejected a request for summary judgment filed by AAER for the court to rule in its favor. AAER was listed as a plaintiff in the case, which subjected it to discovery. That meant opposing counsel could depose the members and staff of the organization and request documents to be used as evidence during litigation. 'Rather than continue to litigate an issue that both plaintiff and defendant agree is unconstitutional, we went ahead and agreed to have the case be dismissed,' said Haley Dutch, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation. In the spring, AAER requested to be removed as a party to the case and have Clark added instead, which would have subjected her to discovery. 'AAER brought this case on Ms. Clark's behalf, relying on the doctrine of associational standing to assert her interests, not its own,' AAER said in a request filed with the court in March to substitute Clark for AAER as the plaintiff. 'AAER is thus not a necessary or indispensable party to the litigation.' Democracy Forward opposed the request. 'It is a fundamental rule of litigation that when you choose to sue you have to expose yourself to discovery,' Democracy Forward said in a filing in April opposing the substitution. 'AAER has a clear choice. If AAER does not want to litigate this case, it may voluntarily dismiss this litigation and Ms. Clark can file a new case if and when she has standing with regard to a live controversy. But if AAER wants to maintain this action, it must sit for a deposition, like all other litigants. It cannot shirk its discovery obligations.' Huffaker rejected the request for substitution. 'What does appear clear is that AAER declared itself the jockey in a race that it started and has ridden this horse in this manner since February 2024,' Huffaker said. 'Clark could have been the jockey from the outset, but AAER chose not to proceed in that manner. Similarly, AAER could have switched riders (i.e., Clark for AAER) well before the amended pleadings deadline.' 'The Court will not tolerate such tactics,' Huffaker added.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The path not taken
Lake Martin outside of Dadeville is seen on May 25, 2025. A nonprofit maintains a trail in and around the lake that is free to the public. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) My wife and I spent the Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend hiking near Lake Martin in Dadeville. From a stunning view of the lake, we walked through a canopied forest with all kinds of rocks, ridges and flora. The trail took us to the lake shore, where we took in the vistas and the $1 million homes all around them. It's a reminder of how many natural jewels we have in Alabama. And it's free. All you have to do is drive there and start walking. No painful real estate investment required. I really needed that reminder after a long and bruising session in the Alabama Legislature. Any session of any lawmaking body anywhere means fighting over bills that could prove helpful or destructive to their interests. We see more of it because Alabama's constitution makes certain the interests of a few powerful elites always take precedence over public concern. Worse, a growing number of lawmakers view themselves less as representatives of their communities than lobbyists for whatever right-wing zealots reside there. So we get bills that could have subjected librarians to criminal prosecutions (not passed); would have required mandatory performances or broadcasts of the Star-Spangled Banner (a constitutional amendment, mind you, also not passed) and allowed local governments to separate men and women for whatever reason they deem fit (that one did pass, and within the first 10 days of the legislative session). Meanwhile, Alabama can't run safe prisons; rural residents struggle to access health care and our lax gun laws have created nation-leading rates of firearm deaths. The Legislature didn't spend nearly the time on these issues that they should have. Lawmakers did pass bills extending Medicaid coverage to pregnant people and making it a state crime to possess devices that convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones. Good steps. But just steps. Not the comprehensive, thorough fixes these issues demand. Maybe the political lift is too tough. Perhaps lawmakers don't see them as problems. The prison crisis persists because far too many people think prisoners deserve to live in violence and terror, not thinking about the safety of prison staff or what happens to the rest of us when those people brutalized in the system get out. But there's a larger problem preventing us from finding solutions. Alabama politics has no concept of the common good. We'd live in a much different landscape if it did. For one thing, Alabama's top income earners would pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the bottom income earners, and not the other way around. The no-questions-asked attitude our lawmakers take to any request from Corrections would apply to Medicaid expansion. Right now, that's a nonstarter for most Republicans in the Legislature. Even though it will improve health and create jobs. And even though the state's largest insurer supports a version of it. We wouldn't send $180 million out of public school classrooms for 'nonpublic education purposes.' Most of that will go to private school tuition for the wealthy. Instead, the state might finally overhaul a Jim Crow-era tax system that denies poor and rural school districts adequate resources. Certainly, we wouldn't burn down public safety to satisfy a few paranoid gun owners. Or deny lifesaving health care for transgender youth for a handful of fertility-obsessed weirdos. Or rage at people coming to our state from foreign countries, trying to build better lives. All too often, the state's leaders see policy as a zero-sum game: if this person wins, someone has to lose. If I'm a winner, I need to push someone down. But that's not the case. And we know that from the things Alabama has done right. Expanding Medicaid access for pregnant people will be good for everyone. Doctors will be able to catch and treat more pregnancy complications before they become fatal. Infant and maternal mortality will drop. We have one of the nation's best pre-K programs, thanks in no small part to years of investment in it. One wishes lawmakers wouldn't have stopped the push to make pre-K universal. But it's still changing lives and leading to improved school outcomes around the state. And we have state parks, in Dadeville and elsewhere. Alabama government can help people. And there are issues that lawmakers, even those ostensibly allergic to any kind of government spending, will turn out their pockets for. But all too often, we funnel taxpayer money toward wealthy companies that don't need the help; wealthy families who don't need the help, and an incarceration system that punishes without rehabilitating. These are choices. They are not inevitable. But all too often, our leaders see their jobs as protecting the privileged, not making a government as good as its people, or as inspiring as its landscapes. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Goodbye to Twinkle Cavanaugh, the regulator who did little regulating
The Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama as seen on Feb. 4, 2025. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh is a political pioneer of sorts. In her campaigns for the Alabama Power Rubber Stamp Squad — excuse me, the Public Service Commission — Cavanaugh had one message: Being a conservative Republican is the only qualification for office. She trumpeted her opposition to abortion rights, even snagging Mike Huckabee to back her up on that. Later on, she campaigned for re-election in part on her opposition to 'socialism and liberal 'woke' ideas.' What did any of this have to do with the Public Service Commission? Zero. The PSC, at least on paper, regulates utilities. It does not restrict abortion. Or college courses. Cavanaugh could have just as easily campaigned on disappointment in Auburn's 2012 football season. The PSC has as much power over Gene Chizik as women's health. Once she became a regulator — first as a member and then as president — Cavanaugh proved a doormat for the utilities. She supported the rate stabilization and equalization process. That guarantees Alabama Power a profit and shields it from questions about its decisions. Rates went up with hardly a peep from the commission. Terry Dunn, a fellow Republican on the PSC, wanted Alabama Power to explain how it charged customers. Cavanaugh signed onto a cosmetic change to the process that did little to shake the status quo. Or lower your power bill. Alabamians pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the South. Both in our homes and our businesses. There could be non-mercenary reasons for that. But we can't say for certain. Cavanaugh and her colleagues, ostensibly tasked with protecting the public from high prices, showed no interest in learning why our rates are high, much less confronting power suppliers about them. The PSC in 2015 trumpeted an Alabama Power rate adjustment that would have saved customers – by the utility's own calculations – one penny a day over a year. Cavanaugh used that opportunity not to call for further reductions, but to bash the federal government. That was always the real target of her ire. In turning aside a challenge from Dunn in the GOP primary for PSC president in 2016, she lambasted Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing coal emissions and improving public health. She also prevailed in a general election contest against Democrat Laura Casey in 2020, whose platform included calls to make the rate process more transparent. In each election, Cavanaugh showed far more interest in attacking national Democratic figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than in making electricity in Alabama affordable. The PSC's low profile helped her. So did straight-ticket voting. It allows a parakeet with an R next to its name to win an Alabama state office. But Cavanaugh showed that embracing an extreme form of political peacocking meant one didn't even have to bother with the pretense of using public office to advance the public good. She loved Trump, jobs and burning coal. She hated abortion, the 'woke agenda' and Democrats. When conservative media turned to new targets, so did she. Her political agenda always seemed to be whatever Fox News happened to be discussing in the moment. And as it turned out, hating the right things could land you a job that had nothing to do with those things. An electricity regulator could ignore the power bills in mailboxes in Linden, Alabaster or Dothan so long as she shook her finger at a young woman seeking reproductive health care. These politics of conservative hallucination used to stand out. Now it's common practice. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, our putative governor-in-waiting, plans to campaign against Joe Biden, who is not on the 2026 ballot. He says he will stand with veterans, which should be news to officers who were up for promotion back in 2023. (Or to 80,000 VA workers who could lose their jobs in August.) He claims that tariffs Trump has imposed will help Alabama farmers, even as China's retaliatory tariffs threaten a major market for them. And of course, he attacks DEI and 'woke' ideas of inclusiveness and human decency, attacks that are sure to be repeated ad nauseam in the coming year in ads showing Tuberville holding guns, walking into a church, or walking into a church with a gun. GOP primary voters ask for nothing more. After all, they don't care that Trump has 34 felony convictions. Or that he bungled the COVID response. Or that his tariffs are threatening the economy. He wears his hatred of their perceived enemies like a maroon stovepipe hat. As long as that's visible, they will tolerate all his incompetence and corruption. Cavanaugh is now going to work for Trump, serving as Alabama's 'director of rural development' in the state. Considering the administration's antipathy toward public investment and infrastructure, I would expect her to do little in the way of developing rural areas. But she can still talk about how much she dislikes abortion. Because in Alabama politics, performative hatred matters more than accomplishment. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
How we reported 'Blood Money'
Barbed wire seen behind a fence at an Alabama reporting the "Blood Money" series, reporter Beth Shelburne obtained documents and data from the Alabama Department of Corrections and the Alabama Department of Finance to find stories that might otherwise go untold. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) The crisis inside the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has generated extensive reporting on escalating prison violence and deaths, the proliferation of contraband drugs, and squalid conditions inside overcrowded and understaffed facilities. These factors led the U.S. Department of Justice to conclude Alabama prison conditions violate prisoners' Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, leading to a lawsuit in 2020. Since then, the state of Alabama has spent over $39 million defending ADOC in a handful of complex lawsuits, including the one filed by the DOJ. But these cases represent only a fraction of litigation involving ADOC. During the last decade, an increasing number of individual civil rights lawsuits have been filed against correctional officers and prison administrators over wrongful deaths, failure to protect from violence and excessive force. Unlike the DOJ lawsuit or other large class-action lawsuits, individual lawsuits filed by incarcerated people or their families receive little attention or oversight. These individual lawsuits were the focus of the reporting for this series. We wanted to figure out just how many lawsuits were being litigated against employees of ADOC every year, and learn more about the nature of the lawsuits, the outcomes, and the cost to taxpayers. Just how much public money was ADOC spending on these lawsuits, not just in settlements to plaintiffs, but paying private lawyers to defend sued officers? And beyond settlement payments, was any systemic change resulting from these lawsuits? First, we had to recognize an important distinction in how Alabama pays for legal services. When an entire state agency is named in a lawsuit, like in the DOJ's lawsuit against ADOC, legal services are paid for out of Alabama's General Fund budget. But when state employees are sued as individuals, the General Liability Trust Fund (GLTF) is used to pay for their legal defense and any monetary settlement for the plaintiff. This use of the GLTF was the subject of our reporting. We filed an open records request with Alabama's Department of Finance, asking for a spreadsheet of records connected to all transactions out of the GLTF, as well as total yearly use of the fund by ADOC dating back to 2013. In the spreadsheet, transactions were categorized as either legal expenses or indemnity payments, also known as settlement payments. The transaction records included corresponding case names and numbers, which allowed us to connect each transaction to specific lawsuits. We then located the lawsuits in federal court records, and through reviewing the records, were able to pinpoint lawsuits involving ADOC employees. This is how we identified the 124 lawsuits against ADOC employees that resulted in settlements between 2020-2024. The 124 lawsuits ending in settlement in this five-year period gave us a fixed group of cases to study, not only to help identify issues and trends in the allegations, but also in the amount of time and money spent on the litigation. Through this project, we aimed to increase transparency and accountability regarding ADOC's increasing use of public resources and taxpayer dollars. And in an effort to deepen our understanding of the crisis inside Alabama prisons, we also wanted to report on the lawsuits themselves, and the human beings involved, to lessen the abstractions of incarceration and illuminate what would otherwise remain unseen, unheard and unknown.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alabama Senate OKs program for high school dropouts to earn diplomas
Rep. Matt Woods, R-Jasper, stands in the Alabama House of Representatives on May 8, 2024 at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) The Alabama Senate passed a bill Tuesday to create a program allowing high school dropouts to get their diplomas through the Adult Education Division of the Alabama Community College System. HB 266, sponsored by Rep. Matt Woods, R-Jasper, would be known as the Restoring Educational Advancement of Completing High School (REACH) Act. A 17-year-old student can leave high school early if their parents agree and after an exit meeting. The exit interview informs the parent or guardian about the potential negative impacts of dropping out, such as lower future earnings and a higher chance of unemployment, and the student is provided with information on the 'detrimental impacts and effects of early withdrawal.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE The REACH Act would require students to be provided with information during the exit interview on options available after dropping out, and require local education boards to report to the Alabama State Department of Education on student withdrawal rates. The bill passed with no discussion on a 34-0 vote and goes to Gov. Kay Ivey. The Alabama Community College System endorsed the bill at its March meeting. Boone Kinard, executive director of external affairs, said then that more students would be able to take advantage of the system's adult education program, and the 'State Department of Education to get better data.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
