Special One Third Done Edition!!!

The Cruise Ships Do Not Dock In Spenard

Seriously. In all the years I’ve lived there, not one cruise ship has ever docked in Spenard. Or even sailed up Chester Creek. But despite these facts, I am getting a ton of e-mails these days exhorting me to support HB134.

The bill is more fallout from the cruise ship initiative passed by voters in 2006. One provision of the hydra-headed initiative sets up a program to measure pollutants the ships dump into the water. The program would take effect next year. The cruise ship industry thinks the standards are too strict. Thus HB134, which would relax them. And what the cruise ship industry doesn’t like, people in the tourism industry don’t like. Thus, the many, many e-mails.

The industry has been trying to change provisions of the initiative since the day after it passed. I’ve been dug in against those changes because the legislature isn’t supposed to change an initiative in the first two years after it passes. That time limit is up now. So I’m willing to listen to the arguments on this bill, and to the many other changes the industry and its supporters will no doubt want.

Doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll vote for any of them or all of them. But the ball’s back in the legislature’s court now, which means its part of my job description again.

30 Days Does Not A Session Make

But it does make one-third of a session, and we passed the 30-day mark on Wednesday.

Have we done one-third of our work?

Of course not. But that’s not the way a session works. Particularly a first session, when a lot of time is spent just getting bills ready to go to the floor for a vote. And then the same getting ready happens in the Senate before anything goes to a conference committee or, miracle of miracles, actually becomes law.

All of this takes time. To do it properly, it takes more time than we’ve got if we stick to the 90-day session limit.

There are predictable results of the 90-day session, none of them, in my view, good. Bills aren’t perfected before they are sent along from one committee to the next. The public doesn’t have much time to review a bill or comment on it. We have to have special sessions for anything that takes more than cursory work. (There have been four special sessions in my two years in the House.)  More and more bills require more than one session to get through the legislature.

This makes a process that is by no means perfect even messier. But until we suck it up and go back to the 120-day session – which in some cases isn’t even long enough – we’ll just have to suffer the consequences. Those of us who are in the legislature, and those of you who aren’t.

Sarah Who? Oh, That Sarah

One of the outcomes of Gov. Sarah Palin’s fling with national politics is that my former employer, The Anchorage Daily News, seems to have decided that state politics is all Sarah Palin all the time.

Nothing wrong with that in some ways. Palin is a figure that draws strong emotions, both pro and con, from a lot of people. And it is no doubt much cooler to be writing about Palin’s proposed trip to rural villages with Billy Graham’s kid or her latest interview with Fox News than the dreary facts of the state’s finances.

But the truth is that there’s a lot going on right now that has nothing to do with Palin, and when the press stops paying attention – the Daily News doesn’t even have a reporter in Juneau at the moment – then the citizens find out too late or not at all.

Odds & Ends

• The powerful Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, of which I am a member who isn’t quite as powerful as he thought he was, voted to spend just south of $100 million on 70-plus renewable energy projects on Tuesday. The vote was 8-2. I was one of the two voting against.

• The Palin administration announced $445 million in cuts to the governor’s proposed budget for next year. The good news – or bad, depending on how you look at it – is that most of the cuts aren’t really cuts. The real cuts seem to be a $25 million reduction in the amount for renewable energy projects next year, and $20 million in cuts to everything else.

• Okay, all you pizza hounds, don’t forget: Rep. Lindsey Holmes, Sen. Hollis French and I are treating our constituents to pizza and conversation at our annual get-together from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on March 14 at the Spenard Rec Center. So be sure to show up. Even I can only eat so much pizza.

Best wishes,