It took two special sessions to get on the same page, but lawmakers and the governor have approved a 1.7 billion dollar general fund budget. 

 

They found an additional 185 million dollars, mostly funded through money from the education budget and increasing the cigarette tax. 

 

“This is certainly not what we asked for. The bottom line really was about 285 million dollars to really do it as well as we possibly could in this session,” said Gov. Bentley. 

 

The governor commended those lawmakers who stood with him on the need for new revenue this year. 

 

The budget manages to level fund prisons, medicaid and the courts.

 

The new revenue was never a popular stance and this isn’t a permanent fix.

 

“We still have a long way to go to fundamentally change but we’re going in the right direction. We’re somewhat combining the budgets. This is something we probably will look at down the road but we had to have some more revenue,” said Bentley. 

 

While he campaigned for these policies all year, political analyst Steve Flowers says this isn’t a huge win for the governor. 

 

“He started out in January with 3 to 500 million dollars in taxes, maybe 8 different proposals. One of them was a cigarette tax, which he wanted a dollar. So out of 8 proposals he offered in January he got one fourth of one of them,” said Flowers.