Few phrases had lodged themselves in Alabama’s political vocabulary quite like “double-dipping.” It surfaced in campaign ads, floor debates and State House hallway conversations. Yet for all its currency, the term meant strikingly different things to the lawmakers, educators, lobbyists and attorneys who used it, as a wide-ranging survey of officials across the state made plain.
At its simplest, a double-dipper was described as a public employee who also held elected office, drawing two government paychecks at the same time. But almost no one who weighed in was content to leave the definition there.
The educators in the crosshairs
Much of the debate centered on teachers and two-year college employees who served in the Legislature. State Sen. Rusty Glover of Mobile, who identified himself as the only K-12 teacher then serving, said he was docked roughly $13,000 in teaching pay for the days he spent in session, and warned that the lost retirement contributions would follow him for years. In his view, the abuses lay elsewhere, among employees who were not docked when they were away in Montgomery.
That distinction, between those who lost pay and those who did not, ran through many of the responses. State Rep. Spencer Collier of Bayou La Batre, a former state trooper, argued that the answer was enforcement, not a blanket ban. “The ethics law says you can’t draw pay at the same time during the same hours,” Collier said. “We just need to enforce what’s in place.” He pointed to Glover, who he said lost several hundred dollars a day teaching at Mary G. Montgomery High School in Semmes, as an example of someone plainly not gaming the system.
A conflict of interest, critics said
Others saw a deeper problem. Randy McKinney, a Gulf Shores real estate executive who sat on the state Board of Education, said Alabama needed 140 legislators “that do not have a conflict of interest.” He complained that lawmakers who drew salaries from the two- and four-year college systems were, in effect, voting on the budgets of their own employers.
Mark Erwin, a Mobile attorney and local Republican chairman, put the objection in blunt terms, likening it to “a member of Congress with a part-time gig with the FBI.” Chris Pringle, a former Mobile legislator, pointed to the Alabama Constitution’s prohibition on holding two offices of profit under the state and argued the ban should reach contracts as well as salaries.
A defense of working two jobs
Not everyone accepted the premise. Danny Goodwin, a teachers’ representative from Mobile, noted that nearly every legislator held a second job of some kind and asked why educators alone should be singled out. If lawmakers were “lawyers, insurance salesmen, farmers, car dealers,” he said, they all voted on matters touching their own interests.
Vance McCrary, a Mobile attorney, went further, calling the campaign against educators “a thinly veiled attempt to take a shot” at the state teachers’ union. His family, he said, had gotten ahead precisely because his parents worked multiple jobs, in what he called “the good ole’ American way.”
The reformers’ case
The push to bar public employees from the Legislature had its champions, too. Luther Strange, then a Republican attorney, laid out a four-part argument: that double-dipping eroded public trust, disrupted classrooms when teacher-legislators were away for days at a time, demoralized full-time educators and wasted taxpayers’ money. “Alabamians deserve honest and open public officials,” he said.
Bradley Byrne, the chancellor of the state’s two-year college system, offered perhaps the most operational definition. For his purposes, a double-dipper was anyone drawing pay or expense reimbursement from another entity “when that person is supposed to be working for a college or agency in the System.” A second job on nights or weekends was fine, he said, so long as it did not interfere.
No easy answers
Several veterans of Montgomery recalled a time when the line had been benign. Al Pennington, a Mobile attorney, remembered when the phrase simply described a retiree drawing a pension while taking a new government job. George Callahan, a former state senator from Theodore, described holding two jobs, one by day and one by night, under an attorney general’s opinion that found no violation because the hours did not overlap. Former legislator Mary S. Zoghby, meanwhile, used the occasion to note an odder wrinkle: the Constitution still set legislative salaries at $10 a day, a figure she said ought to be modernized.
If the survey settled anything, it was that Alabama had no single, agreed-upon meaning for its favorite political epithet, only a spectrum of views running from “there is no such thing” to “any person having two jobs with the state.”