Wednesday 1/25/2006 DAILY NEWS DIGEST

MONTGOMERY — A new Wal-Mart Super Center in Demopolis opened Tuesday. That same day, Demopolis Mayor Cecil Williamson said, a Wal-Mart closed in nearby Livingston.

That one-step-forward, one-step-back mentality has dogged rural communities for years, and economic development was one of the chief reasons Williamson, rural officials, professors and legislators were at a press conference Tuesday to support a proposed Center for Rural Alabama.

“Any time we can partner with an agency that has the time and the access to corporate sponsors and funding, we really relish that partnership,” Williamson said.

State Rep. Frank McDaniel, D-Albertville, and Senate President Pro Tem Lowell Barron, D-Fyffe, have introduced bills in their respective houses that would establish a center to coordinate federal and state rural programs, create strategies to assist rural development and keep information on the topic.

“We’ve got pockets in this state, as all of you know, that are doing very well,” Barron said at the press conference. “They’re mostly in urban areas. And we’ve got 1.4 million people living in rural Alabama that aren’t doing so well.”

Barron pushed a similar bill last year, but it did not become law. He estimated the cost of setting up the center at $200,000. That money would come out of the Education Trust Fund budget. Additional money, he said, would be secured through private sources.

Supporters of the center said it not only would help bring business into rural Alabama, but it also would help rural communities survive economic shocks.

While the state has been successful in attracting automobile manufacturers, Tallapoosa County commissioner Thomas Coley said, rural Alabama has faced textile job losses. A center, he said, might help rural communities absorb such blows.

“If that’s our future, what better way for Alabama to be prepared for the next economic hiccup than by having a Center for Rural Alabama?” he said.

Joe Sumners, director of the Economic Development Institute at Auburn University, said “great” programs to help the state’s rural areas already are in place.

“What we lack is a crossroads to give us the biggest bang for our buck,” he said.

The proposal is modeled on centers in North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. Barron cited the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center, which he said has helped to secure loans for more than 1,000 businesses in rural communities, as the model for Alabama to follow.

The president pro tem expects the Senate bill to come to a vote within three weeks. A House hearing on McDaniel’s bill is expected next week.

Several rural communities already have formed a Black Belt Mayors’ Association, which attempts to coordinate strategy for that area, Williamson said.

Her rural communities do not want to become cities like Tuscaloosa, she said.

“We just want to be rural, but we want to be better,” she said.

Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform has called for a rally in Montgomery today to support a constitutional convention.

A public hearing on House Bill 109, which calls for a convention, runs from 8 to 11 this morning in the Capitol Auditorium.

ACCR will rally on the Capitol steps at 11:15 a.m. to present more than 60,000 signatures on a petition to the Legislature for a rewrite of the 1901 constitution. For more information about the group, go to www.constitutionalreform.or

Statehouse lawmakers continue to debate a real no-brainer — whether to remove segregationist language from the state Constitution. Meanwhile, we expect tourism bureaus in Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and — say it ain’t so —Mississippi to continue to gleefully smile.

In 2004, the last go-round at deleting the racist provisions from the Constitution went by the extremely pedestrian name of Amendment 2. After it lost by 1,846 votes, a better handle would have been The Tennessee-Florida-Georgia-Mississippi Tourism Improvement Act.

Perhaps whether a national organization books a convention in Alabama does not hinge on the state’s inability to remove the hate speech from its Constitution, but it most certainly cannot help.

Yet, what we’re hearing from Montgomery is the same tired arguments that confused the debate last time. Removing a 1956 amendment, opponents say, would allow a judge to unilaterally raise taxes to better fund Alabama schools.

Do we really want to go here again?

The 1956 amendment, records and media accounts from the time show, was written as a reaction to the 1954 Supreme Court order to integrate public schools. Alabamians riled by the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision approved an amendment telling any public school that the Legislature reserved the right to pull government funding if it got the notion to obey the high court’s order.

Ugly stuff.

The current debate is whether that section of the Constitution should go away. Foes say doing so will enshrine a right to public education. And what’s the problem?

It seems that timid lawmakers not willing to support editing out all racist language are in a bit of a bind.

They surely can’t publicly support the authors of the 1956 amendment, who were fighting to keep blacks and whites from attending the same public schools.

Who on Goat Hill is ready to stand up and forcefully declare to Alabamians that they have no right to a public education? Which lawmaker will be the first to look hard-working Alabama families in the eye and say that their children aren’t entitled to a public school education?

That leaves the phantom tax Amendment 2 opponents scared folks with in 2004. As Gov. Bob Riley has correctly pointed out, Alabama law prohibits state judges from unilaterally raising taxes for schooling.

It’s way past time for the state to remove this foul-smelling dead letter from its governing document. Both the Democrats who don’t want to talk about it this session and the Republicans who want to only partially edit racist language owe Alabamians an explanation. Either put forth the amendment as offered in 2004 or explain why you won’t.