The issues that defeated local legislators played such an active role in shaping over the campaign season are still issues. But now, they’re a little less politicized.

With the Nov. 2 election already becoming a memory and the legislative season looming after the first of the year, the new crop of local delegates have definite opinions on how they will represent their districts on some of the biggest talking points that were dominated by the outgoing incumbents.

In the Alabama Senate District 4 race, Democratic majority leader Zeb Little had interjected his position into the county’s water utility controversy, pledging to use legislative means, if necessary, to dissolve the Governmental Utility Services Corporation of Cullman County (GUSC) and the South Cumberland Cooperative District (SCCD).

The April formation of both those boards outraged many county voters, who spoke at the polls in the June primary when both incumbent associate county commissioners saw resounding defeat at the hands of new party opposition critical of the hasty manner in which the utilities appeared to have been created.

Now that Little’s pledge to put the dissolution of the utilities to a county referendum is off the table, his successor — Republican Paul Bussman — said he has no problem looking at involving the state legislature in doing something similar, if the newly-composed Cullman County Commission, along with the judicial process, does not take care of the issue first.

“The first thing I think the new county commission has got to look at is to take the steps they think are necessary to clear up the situation,” said Bussman Friday. “Hopefully, they can clear it up when the new commission takes office. If that doesn’t happen, then the courts will likely take steps to try to rectify it — I think that is what we have been seeing happen, and is still going on. But if that doesn’t clear anything up — and they [the county commissioners] come to me and ask me to come and do something on a statewide amendment, well, it’s very clear that I will do whatever I need to do or that I have to do to honor the people’s wishes.

“And,” he added, “that could be a number of things. A state constitutional amendment is just one of those things. There are other options we might have to consider. And if the county commission requests that I get involved earlier and try to be a mediator between them and the water boards, then I would be happy to try to play a role in clearing everything up without going to any more legal expense than we’ve gone to. I hope clearer heads will prevail, and I think it’s pretty obvious where the county commission is going to go with this. I hope these utility boards [the GUSC and SCCD boards] will realize that.”

Newly-elected Republican District 12 Rep. Mac Buttram, who defeated one-term incumbent James Fields in the general election, shared a similar view, stating that he hoped the entire issue can be resolved without extraordinary legislative measures.

“As I understand it, that’s in the courts,” he said. “And if the courts don’t decide it in favor of returning it [the county water department] to the county commission — which I expect them to do; all indications are that it would have already been done without the appeals — I would be in favor of legislation that reverses that. But, I believe it’s an issue that’s being settled and handled in the appropriate way at this point.”

Bussman and Buttram, new legislators who represent essentially two-thirds of Cullman County’s legislative delegation, also hold similar opinions on where the legislature may go with another issue Little had made a talking point during his summer campaign: the possible conversion of the Cullman County Commission from a three-member governing body to a five-member one.

Little, along with Fields and Republican District 11 Rep. Jeremy Oden, had participated in a series of recent countywide public meetings addressing that possibility. Bussman said the issue is still an important one to the local delegation — although direction on any change in the commission’s structure would need to led by the commissioners themselves. Buttram agreed, but added that the campaign season had obscured any meaningful estimation of just how many county residents truly want to see such a major shift.

A day after his victory over Fields, Buttram said the five-member commission idea now can chart a course dictated not by political necessity, but by a freer exchange of public thought.

“Zeb presented it in a political sense and not in a realistic sense,” said Buttram. “And we’re going to have to look at it realistically. Because it’s not as simple as saying ‘we’re going to have a five-member commission.’ There are a lot of things about it that would have to be figured out in detail, beyond just whether we want to do it or not. I don’t know that what we saw at the meetings [over the summer], where you probably only heard from two hundred or so people, was completely representative of all the people of Cullman County.”

Buttram did offer legislative support for such a shift — if it is generated through local interest and comes before the legislative delegation through local representative mechanisms.

“We just elected two commissioners who are going to serve for four years. People elected them for four-year terms. And they will serve that, unless they request that something be introduced earlier,” he said. “But the commission issue is something that people have talked to me about, and that we will talk about, if there continues to be interest in the five-member commission. And if it is something that our county commission decides to do, I will support it in the legislature.”

Bussman pledged similar early support for the idea Friday.

“If that’s what the citizens of Cullman County want to do, and they think it’s financially feasible, we’ll [the legislative delegation] do anything they would ask us to do and we’ll be more than happy to work with the new county commission,  absolutely,” he said. “I think that’s a local-rule issue, and if they want to do that, then they would of course have investigated all the possibilities on it, and gotten all the details worked out. Then they would come to us and ask us to do whatever we needed to do statewide to make it happen. But it should definitely originate from them, and then come that way to us.”

Campaign politics have brought immense attention to the most emotionally-charged issues of local interest — such as the summer’s water wars — but Buttram said he intends to go to Montgomery with a larger agenda that considers ongoing needs the people who elected him are expecting he’ll address.

“I want to keep people informed about what I am there to do,” Buttram said. “Jobs and the economy — that’s what I campaigned on; that’s a priority. And we’ve got to come up with something that’s going to help all of Alabama, and especially Cullman County. That’s what the people who sent me there have asked me to do, and that’s what I have promised.”

Bussman said Tuesday’s historic Republican realignment of the state legislature will mean instant accountability for himself and other newly-elected officials who saw the nationwide wave of anti-Democratic incumbent sentiment play out in state and local races.

“We’ve got a lot of things to do,” Bussman said. “We have got to get busy on it and move forward as quickly as possible, and the very first thing we’ve got to prove to the citizens who elected us is that we are going to be a trustworthy body.”

To that end, Bussman speculated that Gov. Bob Riley may call the new legislature into session before the end of 2010 in order to deal with perhaps the most notable of its perennially-stillborn promises: ethics reform and campaign finance.

“When I was in Montgomery yesterday [Thursday] with the Republican caucus, we soon found that there’s a very good enthusiasm for ethics reform, and we want to do that before the [2011] session starts,” Bussman said. “And I’m very excited about that, because people realize that we’ve got to clean up the current mess down there before we start doing business.

“I’m understanding that there’s a possibility that Governor Riley could call a special session before the end of the year — and there’re several of us who’re very interested in doing this, too, in a way that will be at no cost to the taxpayer. Several of us are encouraging everybody to consider that we should go down to a special session without charging it to the public, and to do this as a token measure that will demonstrate the kind of trust we intend to establish for those who’ve put us into office.”

If a special session does materialize before the end of this year, Bussman said Alabama’s convoluted and much-abused legal environment — which allows campaign funding sources to be obscured from their ultimate recipients through the use of Political Action Committee (PAC) swaps — will hopefully be the first vestige of the old regime to fall.

“There’s several pieces of legislation that the Republicans have tried to put in over the last year or two, and the ranking party would not let it come out of committee,” said Bussman. “PAC-to-PAC transfers; campaign finance issues — a lot of it has not seen the light of day because of the Democratic-controlled legislature. There’s a very good chance that we will pass very good comprehensive ethics reform in a special session, and i’m cautiously optimistic — really, more than cautiously optimistic — that we will get that done. We want PAC-toPAC to be the first legislation that comes out of this session.”

‰Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.