SPECIAL LEAP DAY EDITION!!!

On the necessity of trust

My office looks like a tribe of Bedouins has been camped in it for a week. Camels and all. I have piles of information on gasline proposals. On state revenue. On proposed spending. On streets that need repair in Anchorage. On whether auto dealers should have to put a little sticker in the windows of used cars. On why we should pay $51 million to build a new health sciences building at UAA.  You name it, and a report or a brochure or a bill on it has found its way into my digs. And my digs weren’t so big to begin with.

One thing I’ve learned in going on two sessions of being a powerful state legislator is this: There are a lot of issues. Each issue has a lot of information attached to it. The result is, you can never know it all.

So, on some things you just have to trust people. That happened to me on Wednesday, when a bill by Reps. John Coghill and Les Gara came to the floor. The bill was 29 pages of law trying to prevent identity theft and to help citizens repair the damage when their identities are stolen.

If you’re not one of the sponsors of a bill, or someone who really opposes it, the way you find out about it is if it passes through a committee you’re on. This bill didn’t pass through any of my committees. I’d been aware of the bill, and gotten some messages from people and groups supporting it. But I wasn’t really schooled up on it. So I had to trust that Coghill and Gara, who are both hard-working, principled people, knew what they were doing.

Turns out, everyone on the House floor that day either knew a lot more than I did, or trusted the two of them. The bill passed unanimously and without a single amendment.

Would I have known more if this session wasn’t supposed to last only 90 days? Don’t know. Maybe. But, probably, there are going to always be bills on which I’m going to have to trust other people. Who knows, there might be some on which other people have to trust me.

Scary thought, isn’t it?

On the radio

If you listen to Anchorage radio, you can hear me running my mouth from 4 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. most Fridays on the Mike Porcaro Show on 650, KENI. Mike and I chat about the week’s doings, and I try to answer questions from callers.

And if you’re looking for a wider variety of voices, you can listen to my colleagues on something called The Demo Memo, hosted by Aaron Selbig, which airs 4:30 p.m. each Friday on KUDO, 1080 on your AM dial.

About free pizza

I took a bunch of gas about not taking free stuff from special interests and then turning around and offering free pizza to constituents.

“Why would a self-conscious, ethical constituent who admires your efforts to stay aloof from influence peddlers by avoiding receptions then turn around and eat your pizza at the Spenard Rec Center?” one of my readers asked.

Fair question. Ethics often involve making decisions in situations that aren’t clear-cut. So I thought I’d tell you about where the pizza money comes from and let you decide.

Campaign fundraising is an inexact science. Sometimes you don’t raise enough. Sometimes you raise more than you spend; particularly if, like me, you’re a cheapskate. You can’t just leave the extra in your campaign account for the next go-round. (No, I don’t know why. It’s just the law.) You can leave a couple of grand in start-up funds, but you have to disappear the rest. You can pro-rate it and return it to your contributors. (I would have sent a check for $18.75 to each of my around 400 contributors, not something I thought was worthwhile.) You can give it to a political party or a charity. You can take it as personal income. (Yeah, I know. But like I said, it’s the law.) Or you can put it in something called a POET account.

I gave some of mine to a part of the Democratic Party that was a big help to me in my campaign, then put the rest -- $6,000 -- into a POET.

POET stands for Public Office Expense Term. It is, as the name implies, money I’m supposed to use in ways that have to do with being in public office. One of those ways is communicating with constituents. I use it for mailers telling the voters of District 25 what’s up. And I use it to pay for pizza and soda pop at my once-a-session constituent meeting, under the theory that if citizens are going to give up part of a Saturday to come talk to me, they shouldn’t have to go hungry while they do it.

So that’s where the pizza dough – sorry, couldn’t help myself -- comes from. If you think it’s an ethical conflict, don’t eat the pizza or drink the pop. And you probably shouldn’t laugh at the clown, either. But do come to the constituent meeting. It’s tomorrow from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Spenard Rec Center.

What I’ve been up to

• My bill to establish a state salary commission passed out of the Senate State Affairs Committee on Tuesday. Next stop: Senate Finance.
• The House version of the operating budget will be on the floor the start of next week. I’m planning to try to put some savings in it. We’ll see.
• My bill to make members of boards and commissions quit when they file for public offices has made it to the House State Affairs Committee.
• And in my abundant spare time, I’m doing final edits on my next mystery novel.

Th-th-th-that’s all for now.

Best wishes,