Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Changing the legislative landscape

  This third year of the quadrennium regular session of the Alabama Legislature has recently gotten a lot more complex. These next four months will be trying times for our lawmakers. They will not only have to deal with a beleaguered General Fund Budget that has to feed a money-eating monster named Medicaid; they have an overcrowding problem in the state prisons to deal with as well as major public school systems being taken over by the state because of mismanagement and underfunding.

  They now have been dealt a body blow that affects their own backyards. They will have to draw new legislative lines that will need to be in effect by June because legislative elections essentially begin this June. The primaries for 2018 political offices will be held in early June next year. All 105 House seats and all 35 Senate seats are up for election.