MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Incumbent Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey has more campaign money and endorsements than her challenger, but he hopes to close the gap in the final weeks of the Republican primary by attacking her performance as the presiding officer of the Senate.
“I don’t like the job the lieutenant governor is doing,” Stan Cooke said.
Ivey is seeking a second term after a long career in state government. She spent 13 years as one of the top executives of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. Then came election to two terms as state treasurer. In 2010, she upset Democratic Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom and helped Republicans take control of every office elected statewide in Alabama.
Ivey, 69, said that as presiding officer of the state Senate, she’s been proud to work with Republican legislators to reduce the size of state government, bring down unemployment and pass budgets that haven’t required midyear cuts due to overspending. “That used to be an every-other-year occurrence,” she said.
Her 53-year-old opponent is pastor of Kimberly Church of God in Kimberly, district administrator for 10 churches in the area north of Birmingham, and operator of an overseas mission program. He decided to run for lieutenant governor after a losing campaign for Congress.
He said the job of lieutenant governor no longer needs to be a part-time position and the officeholder needs to take a more active role in state government, particularly with recruiting new jobs and helping to find solutions to some of the financial problems facing the state.
“The lieutenant governor can be made to be a full-time job, and I think it should be,” he said.
Ivey said Cooke needs to remember that state’s industrial recruitment efforts are led by the governor and his appointee as state commerce secretary. “There are probably a number of things my opponent needs to be informed about,” she said.
The governor and lieutenant governor don’t run as a team in Alabama, unlike the practice in some other states.
But Ivey said Republican Gov. Robert Bentley has entrusted her with important duties, including leading the commission he appointed in 2011 to find ways to streamline state government and reduce expenses. He also appointed her to the advisory committee that decides which road and bridge projects should share in the $1 billion in the Alabama Transportation Rehabilitation and Improvement Program.
The Legislature last year selected her to lead a task force helping Alabama prepare for the next round of federal military base closures and realignments.
Cooke said Ivey has done a poor job as the Senate’s presiding officer by not following the Senate’s procedural rules and has wasted taxpayer money by hiring a parliamentarian. “I believe she is performing very poorly in that job,” he said in an interview.
Ivey said she decided to hire her own parliamentarian rather than use the secretary of the Senate, like her predecessors had done, because the secretary of the Senate is chosen by the members of the Senate and she wanted independent advice. She hired Richard Allen, a veteran Montgomery lawyer, who has held top positions in the attorney general’s office and served as state prison commissioner. She calls his $23,000 annual salary “a bargain.”
Ivey has lined up endorsements from some of the most influential organizations in Montgomery, including the Business Council of Alabama, the Alabama Retail Association, the Alabama Farmers Federation, and the Alabama Forestry Association. They’ve back up their endorsements with big contributions, including $15,525 from forestry and $25,000 from the farmers’ insurance business, Alfa.
They’ve boosted her fundraising to more than $550,000, which is 10 times what Cooke has raised.
Cooke has endorsements from Conservative Christians of Alabama, the Alabama Tea Party Express and the Alabama Alliance Against Abortion. But they are not groups that pump a lot of money into campaigns.
Cooke’s biggest contribution so far is $15,000 from former state Sen. John Rice’s Stop Common Core Political Action Committee. The PAC gets its money from Rice’s Alabama Foundation for Limited Government. The foundation hasn’t disclosed its sources of revenue, but it has been running ads criticizing the Republican legislative leadership in Montgomery.
Common Core, the education standards that the State Board of Education incorporated into Alabama’s standards, is one of the biggest areas of disagreement between the two candidates.
“I am 100 percent against Common Core. I don’t want to be common with anybody,” Cooke said. He said he would use the lieutenant governor’s power to make sure the Senate votes on whether to repeal Common Core.
Ivey said she understands why some parents are concerned that the federal government might use Common Core to assume a bigger role in Alabama schools, but she said she agrees with the Business Council of Alabama and some other business groups that the decision should be left to the State Board of Education since it sets the standards for public schools. “For right now, I think we have to put that issue on pause as we know it,” she said.
The winner of the Republican primary June 3 will face the Democratic candidate, former state Rep. James Fields of Cullman, in the general election Nov. 4.
Even though he can’t match Ivey’s campaign chest, Cooke predicts voters will seek change on June 3.
“I’m very visionary. I want to think outside the box,” he said.
Ivey predicts voters will stick with what they know.
“I believe Alabamians can say we are better off than when we started because this state was flat broke when we started in 2011,” she said.
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