Despite serving in a superminority in the Alabama Legislature, Marilyn Lands was able to get meaningful legislation passed and serve her district.
It’s hard for Democrats in the Alabama Legislature to get much done.
Being in a superminority can make life tough because there’s a tendency to never give the other side a win. Even if the bill is good. Even if the public support is there. Even if the political risk is zero.
You have to be an excellent salesperson and an even better negotiator to get anything through.
Marilyn Lands is both.
Lands not only got a major piece of legislation—the Alabama Maternal Healthcare Act—through the Legislature and signed into law, she did so without a single vote against it. Because it was a good bill. One she worked to build bipartisan support for.
“The thing I am most proud of is the Alabama Maternal Healthcare Act that we passed unanimously in both houses was signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey,” Lands said recently during an interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast. “It provides presumptive eligibility to Medicaid for pregnant women. This is so important because women do not get into that vital prenatal care early enough here. Eleven percent of Alabama women receive no prenatal care. So this allows you not to have to wait until your Medicaid paperwork is completed and all of that, which can take up to two months. If you’re pregnant and you want a doctor’s appointment, you’ll get that appointment and you’ll get grace for up to 60 days until all of that paperwork’s completed. So this is actually saving lives.”
That’s the sort of work Lands says she’s still focused on as she runs for re-election in House District 10 in the Madison area—working across the aisle and with her colleagues in the Democratic Party to address the state’s most pressing needs. Lands said it’s not always easy, and there are certainly many disagreements during negotiations, but ultimately, they find common ground on problems they know have to be solved.
One of the biggest in the upcoming session will be mental health, particularly among schoolchildren. Alabama’s sheriffs are complaining to anyone who will listen about the number of inmates being essentially housed in their jails who should instead be patients at a mental health care facility. Many of those people could have been helped much earlier in life if school personnel had the proper training.
Lands, a licensed professional counselor, said she’s currently working on a mental health pilot program that will focus on second-graders. The goal, she said, will be to catch mental health issues and provide children with solutions—helping them work through anger, depression and anxiety so those issues don’t linger and grow into larger problems as they become teenagers and adults.
“We are seeing a lot more children with outbursts in the classroom, with a lot of anger in the classroom, and the teachers are really not prepared to handle those kinds of things,” Lands said. “We’re seeing kids who have a panic attack in the classroom and the teachers don’t have the mental health training necessary to help them with that right on the spot.
“One of the ideas I’m working on is to designate some of the continuing ed hours that our teachers get each year to mental health first aid or some kind of mental health training. I think it’s a very simple, very fundamental fact that a lot of people don’t realize that depression often looks like anger, particularly in our boys. And they get labeled as a problematic child, but in reality what you’ve got is a depressed child. And so the earlier that we can recognize what’s really going on, then the earlier we can intervene and prevent that problem from getting worse over time.”
In addition to health care issues, including addressing the skyrocketing costs of care, and mental health training, Lands said that if re-elected, she would also focus on initiatives to lower the costs of everyday purchases.