By Avery Dame

Metro/State Editor

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Candidates and officials at the Save PACT meeting Monday night agreed on one thing: the state should fulfill the contracts it signed with Alabama residents and those who hold the contracts.

However, solutions as to how the state should go about fulfilling these contracts were varied. Around 130 people turned out at the County Courthouse Annex in downtown Tuscaloosa to hear the five legislators and four candidates speak.

Democrat Jeremy Sherer, who is running for treasurer, said there are no easy problems or solutions for the problems faced by the Prepaid Affordable College Tuition plan.

“PACT cannot be solved by any one person,” he said.

Sherer proposed using funds from the state’s $400 million Unclaimed Property Fund, which the treasurer controls, to pay for PACT.

Former state treasurer George Wallace, Jr. said the PACT program, begun during his second term as treasurer, was one of the most important public policy initiatives he’s been involved in.

He said the state of the PACT program is what drove him to run as a Republican for state treasurer.

“But this program meant so much to me to me since we birthed it in 1990, I heard Momma call,” he said.

Wallace advocated for annually finding funds to shore up the program until the market improves, taking funding from different sources such as the Unclaimed Property Fund and unused stimulus funds. He said PACT also could save money by tightening costs internally.

Charley Grimsley, a former state conservation commissioner who will be running for state treasurer as a Democrat, emphasized the economic benefit that PACT’s possible college graduates could bring.

Grimsley compared the PACT members to an industry, noting that given the money the future graduated could bring to Alabama the state legislature would be going into special session just to find a way to bring them to the state.

Grimsley compared his plan to save the PACT program to a recipe, with many elements needed. One of these ingredients was raising tuition for out-of-state students.

These students currently don’t pay enough to for universities to break even covering the cost of educating them, according to him. By raising the cost of out-of-state tuition, tuition for in-state students can be kept low.

Gubernatorial candidate Rep. Robert Bentley, R-Tuscaloosa, said he wanted the legislature to pass a joint resolution committing to solve the problem. This resolution, he said, would force the state to deal with the problem. However, Bentley also said that though he was committed to paying all the contracts, he said the program must be closed.

Bentley proposed borrowing funds from the Alabama Trust Fund to pay off the current PACT contracts, which would then be paid back with the existing PACT funds.

Sherer said he was not in favor of Bentley’s proposal because the trust fund also pays for Medicare and taking funds from the fund could start a political fight. The unclaimed property fund, in comparison, is “a non-political source of revenue,” he said.

For Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Tuscaloosa, there were more than just political considerations to solving PACT.

“I do feel it’s a moral obligation, as a member of the Alabama Legislature, to solve this issue,” he said.

Grimsley put the problem in stronger terms.

“We’re talking about stealing kid’s dreams,” Grimsley said.

Sen. Phil Poole, D-Tuscaloosa, Rep. Christopher England, D-Tuscaloosa, and Rep. Alan Harper, D-Tuscaloosa, also spoke at the event.

Doug Hall, a PACT contract holder who attended the meeting, said he thought it showed local politicians there was a big interest in the issue. He first enrolled his daughter, who is currently a senior at Northridge High School, in the program at three years old.

“I think it has to do with a child’s future,” he said, ”and you can’t put a value on that.”