SPECIAL $50 BUYS A LOT OF TOP RAMEN EDITION

In the land of wining and dining

After several indictments and other such problems, the legislature in 2007 passed a wholesale rewrite of the state’s ethics laws. One of the provisions said that any lobbyist who paid more than $15 to feed a legislator has to report that.

Remember: The law doesn’t say a lobbyist can’t pay more than $15 to wine and dine a legislator. It just says that if the tab is $15 or more, the lobbyist has to report it. The idea was, and is, that citizens should know who is getting extra access to legislators by buying them dinner.

Sen. Hollis French was primarily responsible for this. I had a small part in holding his coat. And life went on.

Now, for reasons that make no sense to me at all, there’s a bill that would, among other things, raise the reporting threshold to $50.

This is wrong on so many levels. I’d detail why moving the reporting level up is a bad idea, but any third grader would know why it’s a bad idea.

It’s too bad, because the change is part of a bill that makes it clear that legislators and their staffs can help constituents when they run into a sometimes wrong-headed bureaucracy. I’m not endorsing the specifics of the bill, but I don’t want to see it die completely because a few legislators on one committee made a bad decision on an unrelated issue.

The bill is now in the House Finance Committee, of which I am a not-very-powerful member. So I hope it gets a hearing, and I’m preparing an amendment to make sure that there’s no backsliding on reporting of the money lobbyists spend on food for legislators. In fact, to heck with this $15 limit.  I think I’ll see if my colleagues will strengthen the law to be sure every dime is reported.

In the land of the budget subcommittee

We’ve been doing something called “subcommittee budget closeouts” in the House Finance Committee. The governor’s operating budget, which pays for state operations year to year, is divided by department – revenue, public safety and so on – and reviewed by a group of legislators. Some of the legislators are Finance Committee members and some aren’t, but the groups are officially designated as subcommittees of Finance. For the record, I was on the subcommittees for the Department of Administration, Military and Veterans’ Affairs and Natural Resources.

(This year, one agency – the University of Alaska – had its initial work-up done by what’s called a committee of the whole, the entire Finance Committee meeting as a subcommittee. And no, I don’t know how a full committee can be a subcommittee.)

When the review of a particular budget is finished, the subcommittee writes a report that recommends how much that agency should get for the next budget year. Then all of those recommendations are put together and the process is repeated in the whole Finance Committee.

The system has strengths and weaknesses. The main strength is that people who aren’t on Finance get to put in their two-cent’s-worth on budgets they are interested in early in the process.

The main weakness is shared by the entire budget process: Legislators only look at specific spending increases – what are called increments in budget-speak – and decreases – called decrements. Since there are always more increments than decrements, the system is far more likely to raise the overall budget than lower it. Even if the new spending is only for things like higher health care costs or legally required negotiated pay raises, the budget goes up. For the past six or seven years, the budget has gone up an average of 10 percent a year.

There’s a lot of talk these days about changing this system, mainly because legislators are increasingly worried about the fact the budget keeps going up while oil production, which provided 85 or 90 percent of state revenue, keeps going down. I know I’m worried, and if I could use a magic wand I would change the way we budget into a system that would require every dollar to be looked at anew every year. But, oddly enough, my seat on the Finance Committee did not come with a magic wand.

So this year we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing: looking at increments and decrements. So you can bet the budget we write will be higher than the last budget the legislature wrote.

Odds & Ends

•         The House Democratic Caucus, of which I am a not-particularly-important member, said good-bye to its press secretary, Frank Ameduri, last week. Among his many other talents, Frank is one of the funniest people I know. Fortunately, his replacement, Ron Clarke, is pretty funny himself. So if nothing else, I’ll continue to be amused.

•         Mother Nature wasn’t kind to people trying to get to Juneau earlier in the week. Low-lying fog sent flight after flight to Sitka, to Anchorage and, in at least once case, on to Seattle. Committee meetings were cancelled and floor sessions were scrapped. Ah, life in Alaska.

•         My bill to ban cell phones while driving is taking water in the House Transportation Committee, but Alaskans seem to agree with me. A new Dittman poll asked if respondents agreed that talking on a cell phone while driving should illegal, 61 percent said yes.

•         There will be no e-news next week. The legislature will be slowed to a crawl by Thursday, when many legislators are going to Washington, D.C., to talk about energy. Most of the rest of us are taking the break to head home, which is what I’m doing. So no e-news. I’d give you a refund, except that your subscription turns out to be free.

Best wishes,