Update on ethics

The ethics bills are supposed to come out of the House Judiciary Committee today. The committee is still working on amendments, so we won’t know what’s in and what’s out until they finish and a new committee substitute is written, so probably not until early next week.

AGIA, the saga continues

The powerful House Special Committee on Oil and Gas, of which I am a powerful member, is slaving away on Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, aka AGIA. (You can read about the broad outlines of AGIA here.) We’ve met every day this week, and will meet tomorrow as well. During that time we: went through the bill line by line, spoke with the staff at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., heard testimony from ExxonMobil, and listened to public testimony, which centered on the need for a project labor agreement and Alaska hire. Saturday, it’s more public testimony. Then we pick up again Monday with testimony by BP.

The likelihood is that this committee will have the bill for another week or 10 days, then move it along to the House Resources Committee. We’ll probably amend it some first. I’ve been focusing on how proposals made for the state pipeline license will be evaluated. There’s been a lot of discussion among the committee members about this, and between us powerful legislators and people from the Palin administration. If I had to guess, I’d say that we will tighten the criteria some, but I’ve been wrong before.

Q: How do you know …

When it’s spring in Juneau?

A: The snow turns to rain.

Don’t forget to vote

The April 3 advisory vote on same-sex partner health benefits is a waste of money.

Specifically, it is a waste of $1.2 million, the amount the division of elections estimates it will cost to hold the election.

What do we get for $1.2 million? The opinions of whoever happens to make it to the voting booth. In other words, a poll, but without the careful selection and wording intended to get an unbiased, accurate answer. So we don’t get much of anything.

And even if it were an accurate poll, $1.2 million is a ridiculous amount of money to spend. An Anchorage pollster I asked said he could do a scientific poll for about $12,000, or 1 percent of what the state will spend.

Six weeks ago, I tried to stop this waste of money with a bill to require a specific appropriation for the election. If the bill had passed, and we had eliminated the funding, there would have been no election. At that time, the elections division estimated that it had already spent $200,000. So we would have saved about $1 million.

The bill went nowhere, and the election machinery ground on.

By Wednesday, when I introduced another bill to appropriate $12,000 for a proper opinion poll, the state had spent another $100,000 or so on the election.

Still, if we abandoned this wasteful election and just paid for the poll, we would save about $900,000. We could save that money for a rainy day. Or we could use it to hire seven new state troopers or nine new correctional officers or four new pipeline corrosion investigators.

But my colleagues seem impervious to my financial concerns and it looks like the special election is going to happen. So I’m going to vote, and I’m going to vote no. I don’t see changing the state constitution to prevent a small number of people from getting health benefits.

Come on out and chat

I hope you are making plans to come to the Spenard Rec Center a week from Saturday and talk with me, Rep. Lindsey Holmes and Sen. Hollis French. We’ll be there from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as will Blazzee the Clown and a bunch of pizza. It’s the only trip home I’ve got planned this session, so if you want to get face to face this is your chance.

Best Wishes,