SPECIAL I’M TOO TIRED TO SLEEP EDITION

Judges and administrators and politicians, oh my

As faithful readers know, I don’t go to receptions. Something about eating other people’s food and drinking their booze seems wrong to me, since the people picking up the tab will, sooner or later, want something from me. But I did let the Alaska Court System buy me breakfast Wednesday. The state Supreme Court and the system’s top administrators were in town that day because Chief Justice Walter Carpeneti was giving the annual State of the Judiciary speech to the legislature.

In one way, the event is a lot like eating breakfast with your high school teachers. Judges, particularly Supreme Court judges, get to decide if the laws we pass are, well, legal. In another way, the event is like the judges eating breakfast with their parents, since we’re the ones who decide how much the court system gets to spend every year. So there’s always a lot of interesting give and take.

This year’s breakfast was more interesting than most, because the court has undergone a major makeover in the past two years. Three of the five justices have changed in that time. That’s the equivalent of 24 of the 40 House seats turning over from one election to the next. The court seems to be handling the change well, but it’ll take some time to figure out what sort of court we’ve got.

There’s one thing we know for sure, though. This is the first time in state history that two of the five justices are women. That’s pretty much got to make the court more sensible.

It’s a tax giveaway! No, it’s a jobs bill!

The attempt by some legislators to hand money back to the oil industry got going in earnest this week with hearings on a bill to do just that in the House Resources Committee. The bill has a good chance of passing that particular committee because it’s sponsored by Rep. Craig Johnson, who is one of the committee’s chairmen.

The original pitch was that state taxes are so high that oil companies are doing less work here, which put more Alaskans out of work.  You probably see the TV ads that claim that by an outfit called the Alliance. That pitch didn’t get anywhere here because, in fact, more companies employed more people in the oil patch in the year just past.

So now the giveaway is being touted as an Alaska hire bill.

How does that work? Well, the oil patch has never been a bastion of Alaska hire. And, if you listen to the accents on any flight from Seattle to Anchorage, you’ll know that’s true. Somewhere in the vicinity of three of every 10 jobs in the industry goes to an Outsider. Johnson’s bill is being rewritten at the moment, but he says the new version will pay companies to hire Alaskans by lowering the companies’ taxes.

Couple of problems with that.

Local hire attempts have a long and innovative history in Alaska, and there’s not one of them that survived the courts. This one is not any more likely to survive, since various sections of the U.S. Constitution guarantee citizens the same legal status no matter where they live. Paying companies to discriminate against non-Alaskans isn’t likely to fare any better.

Then there’s the fact that the estimates of how much each job would cost the state in lost tax revenue start at $100,000 and go up from there.

Finally, all that lost revenue equates to fewer cops, fewer teachers, worse roads and so on, not just this year but few every year after. In a state where we know revenue is falling every year, should we really be allowing a money grab by the oil industry?

Stay tuned on this one.

Major maintenance bill needs major maintenance

Gov. Sean Parnell didn’t have the best week. He got into a wrangle with legislative leaders on how big the capital budget should be. (It should be no surprise legislators want it to be bigger.) His main opposition in the already started campaign for governor, Ralph Samuels, came to town and got a dandy picture on the front page of the local paper. And his $100 million gotta-have-it-in-a-hurry bill to pay for major maintenance of state facilities blew up on the pad in the House Finance Committee on Wednesday.

The bill is simple enough in concept. State agencies own a bunch of buildings that need work. We’ve got some extra money thanks to higher oil prices and higher oil taxes. Plus, the claim is, you do it fast and people get jobs that much quicker. (I’m a bit skeptical on the last part but, hey, some people will claim anything. It’s an election year.)

Anyway, what arrived at the Finance Committee on Wednesday was underwhelming. A bunch of agencies weren’t ready to talk about what they planned to spend their share of the dough on. And those who were had a pretty plastic definition of major maintenance. There were a lot of garden-variety capital projects in the lists, and at least a clutch of employee salaries.

For these reasons, and maybe some others, the meeting was pretty salty in spots. And everyone came away thinking the bill wasn’t ready for prime time. Maybe the Parnell Administration will get its act together – it is one of the governor’s major initiatives after all. If not, there was talk before the meeting ended about making the bill into a flat-out capital budget and the devil with major maintenance. And as I may have mentioned, legislators do like to spend money.

Pizza and politics again

Here’s an early warning alert for this session’s constituent meeting/pizza party featuring Sen. Hollis French, Rep. Lindsey Holmes and yours truly. We’re gathering from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on March 14 at Romig Middle School to hear what you’ve got to say about what the legislature’s been up to and what you’d like to see happen in the session’s final month. Plus you get to eat pizza and, hopefully, get to meet a professional clown. So mark your calendars.

Best wishes,