This is an opinion column.

In Montgomery, there are a million dead ends to stop a bill but only one narrow path to becoming a law. Or so they say.

But look more closely at the legislative highway mortality statistics and you’ll see something worse.

Bad bills — bills that calcify our state’s bad ideas, that repeat old mistakes, that tilt again at that old foil the U.S. Constitution — sail through on a legislative express lane.

Good bills — things that are virtually guaranteed to make Alabama better — die like roadkill.

This is a story of two bills before the Alabama Senate’s Government Affairs Committee. One will survive and go to the full state Senate for further consideration. The other is stalled and probably dead.

The first is a revision of Alabama’s misguided and misshapen monuments law.

The second is a revision of Alabama’s Open Records Act.

You can probably guess already which is which.

The monuments bill is a rewrite of a flawed law that’s only three years old, and state Sen. Gerald Allen sponsored both the original and the update.

Three years ago he pushed through the monuments bill which protects Confederate monuments from being torn down, moved or altered. Birmingham fought the law in court and lost — sort of.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the city had broken the law when it built four plywood walls around a Confederate monument in Linn Park. But the court also said there was nothing for the state to do but levy a one-time $25,000 fine the city could easily pay. The state couldn’t make Birmingham put things back the way they were.

Even if you support the law, you have to admit it failed in its purpose. It failed because it’s impossible to have foresight when you don’t have forethought.

Now Allen wants to pass a new monuments bill. This one would impose a $5,000 fine every day a local government didn’t return a monument to its original condition — a punishment to make a city like Birmingham hurt until it surrenders.

On Tuesday, the Government Affairs Committee chairman, state Sen. Jimmy Holley, R-Elba, put Allen’s bill first on the agenda. There was some brief opposition from state Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, D-Birmingham, before it passed the committee on a 9-1 vote. It now goes to the full Senate for consideration.

It’s a good thing the Alabama Legislature long ago made giving its members a speeding ticket illegal during the session, or Allen would be broke.

I’d like to tell you the open records bill, sponsored by state Sen. Cam Ward, was next. But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t third.

It wasn’t fourth.

Instead, Holley — who has discretion here — put the open records bill 11th on the calendar when he knew the committee meeting had a hard one-hour stop time.

I suppose putting it dead last would have been a little too obvious.

But when the committee finally did get to Ward’s bill, Holley did something else — he called three other bills out of order ahead of it.

That left all of five minutes for Ward and state Rep. Tracy Estes to argue for the bill before Holley carried it over.

And carrying it over — that’s one of those concrete barriers. It’s the same barrier this same bill hit last year. It means it’s not dead, but it’s dying.

Ward gave an impassioned speech.

“These records don’t belong to you and me,” Ward said. “They belong to taxpayers. And why do we keep putting up barriers for people getting access to records they should have access to?”

Alabama has a 20th century open records law for 21st century technology, Ward said, and while I agree with the sentiment, I’d argue the existing law didn’t work so well then, either. Alabama has had one of the worst transparency laws in the country, consistently falling at or near the bottom in national rankings.

Ward’s bill is patterned after similar laws in adjacent states, including Florida, which has among the best sunshine laws in the country.

“If this bill works in other states, why doesn’t it work here?” Ward asked. “What are we afraid of?”

Fourteen other people had signed up to speak. The committee meeting room and an overflow room across the hall were packed, mostly with people interested in the bill.

Holley carried it over, anyway. The chairman promised in the meeting to call the bill first in the committee’s next meeting — which curiously is Super Tuesday when all those reporters in the back of the room will likely be busy doing other things.

And after the meeting, Holley told reporters he wasn’t sure whether he’d call the bill next week or not.

“We got railroaded today,” an angry Ward said after the meeting.

The open records rewrite isn’t dead yet.

But it’s dying, broken and bleeding in the road, run over by so many cowardly lawmakers in a hurry to be on their way.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.