Déjà vu all over again

This is the end of Week 1 of the first legislative session of 2008. I say “first legislative session” because there’s about an 80 percent chance we’ll need a separate session to deal with the gas pipeline licensee that Gov. Sarah Palin is planning to send us under the terms of her AGIA law. The way the timing works, we probably won’t get a licensee to approve until late in this session, and it’s unlikely – although not impossible – that we’ll just get out our rubber stamps. Hence the likelihood of another session.

Getting here

The woman who lets me live with her and I left Anchorage at oh-dark-30 a week ago Thursday for the nearly 800-mile drive to Haines. My plan was to bring a couple of suitcases each. Hers was to bring – shall we say – slightly more luggage than that.

Guess who won.

The trip was actually pretty easy, if long and lonesome. Not many vehicles on the road. The weather was good, although the 40-below at Beaver Creek, where we spent the night, was impressive. The roads were in pretty good shape, except for the stretch between the Canadian border and Kluane Lake. Yukon still hasn’t gotten the hang of paved roads. If you hit some of those frost heaves at highway speeds, there’s a good chance you’d bounce high enough to achieve a low-trajectory orbit around the planet.

We saw some pretty cool sights along the way: Caribou crossing the highway near Mentasta Lodge, Red northern lights through a break in the clouds right around the border. A deer bounding across the road near Kluane Lake. The always reliable bald eagles hanging like so many fruit from tree branches along the Chilkat River just outside of Haines. And lots and lots of cold, barren countryside.

So the next time you’re about to tell somebody what a knucklehead I am, ask yourself this: How many politicians drive 800 miles through the cold, dark and lonely to get to work? That’s gotta count for something.

What we’ll be doing

Spending money. That’s what this session will be about. The current estimate is that we will receive about $5 billion – that’s $5,000,000,000 – more than we’d need to continue the current budget. That’s what we call the surplus. And while the press loves stories like the ill will between the governor and Senate President Lyda Green, the real story is what we do with all this dough.

It’s going to take a major effort to keep it all from being spent. Here’s an example of why.

After my last e-news, a bunch of people wrote back to me. About half of them said they agreed that we should save the surplus. The other half said they agreed, but …some of them thought was should spend more on education. Some liked the governor’s idea of a trust fund for transportation. And so on.

The problem is that in the legislature, no one person gets to decide what the savings exception should be. So once you decide you’re not going to save every dime, you create the conditions for a series of savings exceptions. One group gets the education money. Another the transportation money. And so on. Once you start down the spending road, you don’t stop until you run out of money.

So the surest way to save any of it is to save all of it. To that end, I introduced a bill yesterday to put the entire surplus in the Constitutional Budget Reserve. We owe the reserve about $5 billion, and the law says we should pay it back when we’ve got it. Plus, we’re going to need that money in the not-so-distant future just to pay our basic bills.

I wrote last time about what the governor wants to spend the money on. Other people have big ideas, too. The most recent is to take another look at the Susitna Dam. Is that disco music I hear? Lawmakers decided in the mid-’80s that Susitna was too expensive, and it’s not likely to have gotten any cheaper in the 20 years since.

What I’m doing

It’s actually been pretty busy this week. I’ve taken an ethics class, met with the state’s trade representatives in the Far East, explained my compensation commission bill to the House State Affairs Committee and spent a couple of hours in the first of what looks like many hearings on the state Department of Transportation in the powerful House Transportation Committee, of which I am a powerful member.

Oh, yeah. We’ve had floor sessions every day, too. It’s almost like we’ve got some sort of deadline or something.

I’ve also been introducing a few bills. Here’s a list of what I’ve done so far.

HB 192: Notification to Teachers of Layoff or Nonretention
HB 250: Child Sexual Behavior Problems
HB 260: State Officers Compensation Commission
HB 282: Eligibility on State Boards, Commissions, and Authorities
HB 328: Constitutional Budget Reserve Fund
HB 329: Parental Notification of an Abortion on a Minor

If you see anything that interests you, let me know.

More Later .