Alabama

Alabama had the third-worst score of any state for Strength of Disclosure, including a failure to require clients to report bills numbers or compensation received from each of their clients.

In Nov. 2023, the EPA released a draft risk assessment that found the cancer risk from coal ash to be 35 times greater than previously estimated. All of Alabama’s coal ash pits are unlined and all have reported groundwater violations. Yet in Sep. 2023, a spokesperson for Alabama Power, which owns most of the state’s coal ash pits, claimed that the company knew of “no impact to any source of drinking water at or around any Alabama Power ash pond.”

Despite the health risks from coal ash waste, many of Alabama’s most prominent hospitals and health care systems share lobbying firms with Alabama Power, whose coal-fired James H. Miller Generating Station was the single-biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the U.S. from 2015-2022.

To what extent are these hospital lobbyists making it harder to protect Alabamans from coal ash waste and other toxic materials? Alabama makes it hard to know. Lobbyists do not have to disclose the compensation they receive from each of their clients, or the numbers of the bills on which they lobby. This means that a hospital lobbyist could argue against a coal ash clean-up bill, and do it in secret.

Best feature: videos of legislative hearings are searchable by keyword.

Worst feature: clients don’t report bill numbers or even subject areas lobbied upon.

Additional Findings

Website maintained by the Alabama Ethics Commission is user-unfriendly and makes it hard to navigate from one part of the site to another, or between reports for different lobbyists.