SPECIAL PERILS OF 90 DAYS EDITION

The people who really do the work are...

In the hubbub of the session’s opening week, I forgot to mention the invaluable people who try to keep me organized and functioning. That’s a monumental task, considering the raw material they have to work with.

Faithful readers will remember the lovely and talented Priya Keane, who is back for her third session working for me. I’ve heard rumors that the Vatican is already making plans to make her a saint. Ms. Keane is a lifelong Alaskan, and a graduate of West High and UCLA.

Joining the Doogan menagerie is the lovely and talented Charles Boyle, who is new to legislative staff work. Boyle is a graduate of Wasilla High and Johns Hopkins University.

It should be no surprise that each of these people is half of my age and twice my IQ, which means that the good work done in this office is theirs and the crabby old guy mistakes are mine.

A disquisition on the 90-day session

There’s a lot of back and forth about the 90-day session. People who are actually involved in trying to make the legislature work think a 120-day session would work better. I’m one of those. Generally, the shorter the session, the less time legislators have to think, to discuss things among themselves, and to listen to the voters. That shifts power toward bureaucrats, and special interests who can afford lobbyists. I don’t know what you think about representative government, but I don’t think shifting power to bureaucrats and lobbyists is a good thing.

Well, you might say: Work harder. That doesn’t solve the “no-time-to-think” problem, but maybe if I spent more time working, I’d get more done. The problem there is that it assumes this job is like making widgets: Sitting at the widget-making machine 10 hours a day will result in more widgets than sitting at the machine 8 hours a day.

But we’re not making widgets here. We’re making laws and spending money. And that requires listening to a lot of people, both in the office and in the committee rooms.

As an example, take Wednesday.

I got up a 7 a.m. so I could be dressed and caffeinated and walk to the Capitol by 8:30 a.m. for my first meeting of the day.  I met with representatives of the Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special Education. They want some laws changed and more money spent.

At 9 a.m., the Commissioner of Labor came in to talk about his department’s budget and the work he’s been doing on vocational education.

At 9:30, a representative of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute arrived to talk about more funding to sell Alaska salmon.

I finished that at 9:45 a.m., which meant I had time to talk for a few minutes with a fellow I know from the North Slope Borough mayor’s office about what the borough is doing to deal with accelerating attempts to use the federal Endangered Species Act to keep borough residents from making their lives better.

So I was late to my 10 a.m. pre-session caucus, the gathering we have to talk about what bills we’ll be voting on, and to swap information on what’s been happening.

At 10:30 a.m., I on was on the floor for a session of the state House. We didn’t vote on any bills, but there were some read across and assigned to committees, along with the rest of the usual business of a floor session.

I went right from the floor to the Minority Leader’s office, where I discussed with her and the other Democrats on Finance who would be primarily responsible for keeping the caucus members up to speed on the operating and capital budgets, which bills we expected to see in the committee and so on.

That went on long enough that I missed a meeting with the Alaska Travel Industry Association about tourism funding. Fortunately, my staff took the meeting, but I hate to miss meetings even if I have a good excuse.

By now it was past noon. My plan was to eat lunch. But a reporter cornered me to ask what I thought about the cleft stick we’re in on state spending: Oil production goes down every year while spending goes up. We chewed that around for a while, which cut my lunch hour down to a brisk 20 minutes.

At 1:30 p.m., I was in the regular Finance Committee meeting, this one on the education and labor department budgets.

That went longer than scheduled, so I was late to my 3:30 p.m. meeting of the Finance subcommittee on the Department of Administration budget.

That ended around 5 p.m. I took a few minutes to talk with my staff about what they’ve learned that day and what we all were doing the next day. I also made a couple of telephone calls, and for the first time all day, read the newspapers.

Then I was off to dinner with one of my colleagues who has actually been in the legislature an even shorter time than I have, trying – among other things – to help him understand the often-confusing rules-of-the-road here.

From there, I walked to my apartment. I reckon it was 8:30 p.m. by the time I got there. I spent the next two hours doing some of the reading that goes with the job, and hit the sack at 10:30 p.m. Counting walking time and a minimum of life maintenance, that made Wednesday a 15-hour day.

This wasn’t an extraordinary day by any means. But it gives you a glimpse of what a legislative day is like, and why I think 90 of them aren’t enough time for me to do my job as well as I’d like to.

Best wishes,