Gov. Robert Bentley warned us early, even before he took office that proration was coming. On Monday, the governor ordered an across-the-board cut of 3 percent in the state education budget, and he will cut most agencies in the state General Fund budget 15 percent after working with the Legislature to protect some essential services.

Here, in Dallas County and Selma, we’ll feel those cuts in our public school system, which is already stretched about as far as it will go. School board members in the county and city systems will have to sit down and put pencil to paper to figure out how to squeeze essential services to students out of that proverbial turnip.

On the General Fund budget side, we’ll have to wait to see what the Republican-controlled Legislature comes up with as far as essential services are concerned and how the governor reacts to recommendations from legislators.

You can believe members of the Legislature will not roll back part of the big pay increase they gave themselves in 2007 even when public employees, who have gone without cost-of-living raises, will have to pay more for their insurance and retirement.

We agree with Gov. Bentley when he says, “It would be a good faith effort on their part if some of it, at least for a period of time, were given back, but I’m going to leave that up to them.”

Each legislator will collect of minimum of $52,596 in salary and expenses for 2011.

So, while your child is doing without textbooks because the school system can’t afford them and medicine for AIDS is cut out, so people begin dying of the disease, you can expect legislators to take a yearly cost-of –living raise equal to the increase in the Consumer Price Index. The cost? In 2007, the pay increase voted in by the Legislature raised the minimum pay from $30, 710 to $49,500. The yearly cost-of-living increase now has the minimum at $52,596.

Talk to your lawmakers.