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Attracting steel mill grand slam for Alabama
The numbers are simply overwhelming… some 29,000 employees will be involved in building the huge facility and when completed it will provide 2,700 permanent high paying jobs. The plant will be located near Calvert in north Mobile County and will be built on a 3,700 acre site. In previous years attracting the likes of Mercedes, Honda, Hyundai were home runs….this was a grand-slam home run. And if you feel the state gave away everything but the kitchen sink to get the plant I will simply say I felt the same way about Mercedes. I wrote columns and TV editorials venting my spleen…but how wrong I was. Certainly much credit must go to Gov. Bob Riley who hung tough throughout all the negotiations. Looking back years from now this may be the biggest feather in his cap during his two terms as governor. * * * It is a game played by political writers and commentators for years. They are constantly looking at the new crop of office holders and wondering which of them has a bright future in the arena. Is there a future governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general in the mix? One of these future "comers" is State Sen. Bradley Byrne, R. Baldwin County. You may not know much about…but you are about to learn a lot.. Byrne is about to take on a most challenging assignment… by an 8-1 vote he was hired as the new chancellor of the troubled two-year colleges in Alabama. It could be a make or break opportunity for his career. Byrne brings a lot to the table. For one, he is most impressive in appearance…he is an honors graduate from Duke University and the University of Alabama Law School…he has a successful law practice in Mobile. On paper, he seems to have a lot going for him. Byrne tiptoed into the political arena when he was elected to the State Board of Education in the mid-1990s, serving two terms. He then was elected to the State Senate in 2002 and reelected in 2006. Certainly this experience will serve him well in his new assignment. No matter, this relatively unknown state senator is about to become a most watched official and how well he peforms in his new assignment will determine how far he might go in the future. There were some who thought it was interesting that Riley would recommend a legislator but there is a slight difference… the moment Byrne becomes chancellor he will resign his seat in the Senate. He will not be a double-dipper. * * * Say what you must about Stan Pate of Tuscaloosa but he knows a thing or two about visual effects. Pate is now on a campaign to get the Legislature to pass a bill legalizing electronic bingo at two Greyhound race tracks and tax the proceeds for Medicaid. To make his point on how much his legislation would generate for Medicaid he held a press conference in Montgomery in which he brought two suit cases…one held $200,000 in cash…the other $800,000. All in $100 bills. The $200,000 represented what the bill would generate for Medicaid and the $800,000 is the matching funds it would generate from the federal goverorment
Be sure he was surrounded by a host of armed security….after all his audience was made up of underpaid newsmen. You can't be too careful.
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