SPECIAL BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DIME EDITION

We’re Busted! Broke! Skint!

In other words, we’re poor. Poor, poor, poor. In the past six months, the value of a barrel of North Slope crude oil, the stuff that fuels Alaska state budgets, has dropped like a gut-shot rhino. Six months ago a barrel was worth about $135. Today, it’s right around $40. Can you say, “Yikes?” Go ahead. Say it with me. Yikes!

The immediate result of this price plummet is that this year’s budget is now under water. How far? We don’t really know, but the current prediction is that the state will receive $1.4 billion less than we spent in the budget passed last year. And that gap is likely to get bigger.

Bad news? You bet. Want worse? With the world economy floundering, nobody expects any $135-a-barrel days next year, so the prediction is that we’ll have somewhere around $3 billion less than we need to pay for the governor’s proposed budget. And could that number grow, too? You bet.

What, oh what, are we going to do? Don’t know yet. I’d say the chances we are going to cut $4.2 billion – or more -- are so small as to not be worth mentioning. We’ll probably end up spending a big chunk of the savings we just put away last year. But we won’t do it without a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. So stay tuned.

But, By Golly, We Can Afford Hydro

One of the wonderful things about the legislature is that what you do every day doesn’t have to make sense. So even though we’re staring big budget deficits in the eye, in the powerful Legislative Budget and Audit Committee – of which I am a powerful member – we are being asked to spend $100 million for 70-plus renewable energy projects.

Last year, the legislature passed a bill to spend $50 million a year on renewable energy projects for the next five years. I voted for that bill. During the special session, the amount was bumped up by another $50 million. I voted against that addition, on the grounds that we shouldn’t double the price tag of an untried program.

So that’s where the $100 million came from. The Alaska Energy Authority, in a blitzkrieg rarely seen by a bureaucracy, requested proposals, evaluated them, and has now made its recommendations, all in the space of eight months or so.

The problems with this approach are now obvious. We don’t know if what’s been proposed are the best ideas for the areas involved, because we don’t have a statewide energy plan. And we’re not sure that the energy authority, which is undermanned but refuses to ask for more people for political reasons, has either picked the right projects or can monitor them well enough to be sure they actually get built.

We kicked this around for a couple of hours Wednesday night in LB&A without reaching a conclusion. Now, we’re doing a quickie, spot audit of a few of the proposals to test what sort of job the energy authority did in selecting them. In a couple of weeks, we’re supposed to decide what to do.

They say if you do this job long enough, you’re bound to make mistakes. I think voting for this cart-before-the-horse renewable energy bill is one of mine. And, frankly, I don’t know what we should do next. All suggestions gratefully accepted.

Odds & Ends

-- Budget subcommittees are meeting. These are groups of legislators who get to sit near various parts of the budget for a while, and then the Finance Committees do whatever they were going to do in the first place. I am keeping a chair warm in the Transportation, Military and Veterans Affairs and Natural Resources subcommittees. Two of them meet at 7 a.m., so give me a little credit.

-- We passed our first real piece of legislation on Wednesday. It was a resolution reauthorizing a joint legislative committee. Insert you own joke here.

-- I finally ate in the legislative lounge. Eating in the lounge, the parking space with my name on it and pushing the red or green button are about it for perks in this job, so I’ve been missing it. But the problem with eating in the lounge is that the food is very, very good. Which is part of the reason I’ve been looking like one of those big balloons in the Macy’s parade lately. And why I’ve been trying to stay the heck out of the lounge. But they were serving duck the other day, so what could I do?

Best wishes,