SPECIAL NOTHING IS SETTLED YET EDITION

17 days and counting

We have 17 days left in the legislative session, always assuming that we are trying to finish in 90 days. As is usual, nothing of any substance has been decided. Here are the big pieces that are in play.

The operating budget, a little $8 billion-and-change bill, has been through both the House and the Senate.  On Monday everyone expects a conference committee will be named to iron out differences between what the House has done and what the Senate has done. In addition, the naming of the conference will initiate the period when bills can be heard with only 24-hours notice. As you might expect, that means the pace of everything will speed up.

The capital budget is still shrouded in secrecy, locked in the tender mercies of the Senate Finance Committee. Rumors swirl – Will it be $300 million? Will it be $1 billion-plus? – while the powerbrokers in the House and Senate try to hammer out a deal. Ideally, from their point of view, a nice, quiet deal will be made, everybody will join hands, and choruses of “Kumbaya” will be sung, while millions of dollars fall gently on the deserving.

The supplemental budget – more spending in the current fiscal year – has also moved from the House to the Senate. It’s more than $1.5 billion, but most of it is school funding – $1.1 billion – and the final payback to the Constitutional Budget Reserve – $400 billion. Unless something weird happens – always a possibility in the waning days of a session – this bill could go quietly.

Also yet to be unveiled is a bond proposition rumored to be hundreds of millions of dollars in size, to include big-ticket educational items like the life sciences building in Fairbanks, a new gym in Anchorage, the new state library, archive and museum in Juneau and a handful of $30 million-plus schools in rural Alaska.

That’s the dough, more or less. On legislation not festooned with dollar signs, there’s still a chance we’ll decouple oil and gas taxes, tighten up rules for disclosing campaign spending, change the rules for criminal investigation and prosecution and hand out a lot more money in the hopes that somebody, anybody, will find and develop more natural gas in Cook Inlet.

Of the major bills that started the session, it looks less and less like there will be any increase in scholarships for Alaska students. And we’re still scuffling along on two big plans to build pipelines – a big line and a bullet line – to move natural gas off the North Slope, neither of which is, at this moment, likely to pencil out.

In other words, business as usual in the Alaska Legislature less than three weeks before what’s supposed to be our drop dead date.

Evening floor sessions: Hiss, boo!

I hate evening floor sessions. I should be tucked up in my jammies and Bunny slippers, watching reruns of “Bones” and instead I’m sitting on the floor of the House in my monkey suit voting on a bill to regularize the rates and terms of criminal fines.

Super important legislation, to be sure, but couldn’t we be dealing with it in the morning, when I’m feeling fit and sassy?

Apparently not. For some reason, we had two evening floor session this week. Why?

Well, it wasn’t because we had to come to grips with important and controversial public policy issues. Or at least not too many of them. On Monday, we voted on:

• HB 326 Supplemental/Other Appropriations

• HB 3 Requirements for Driver’s License/I.D.

• HJR 53 Honor and Remember Flag

• HJR 49 Opposing EPA Clean Air Act Regulations

The supplemental was important but not controversial; the two resolutions were neither. The only one with any pop to it was the driver’s license bill, and it failed.

Wednesday was even tamer. We passed:

• HB 202 Residential Sprinkler Systems

• HB 52 Post-trial Juror Counseling

• HB 314 Workers’ Compensation

• HB 386 Citations

• SB 274 William Jack Hernandez Fish Hatchery

• HJR 51 Proposed Fed. Mortgage Licensing Regs

I mean, really. Couldn’t these pretty ordinary bills have been dispatched during regular working hours? Did we really have to do this in the evening, instead of letting me watch Emily Deschanel?

So why did we? I guess you’d have to ask the Speaker of the House, who schedules these things. Maybe he’s not an Emily Deschanel fan. As if any adult male could not be.

Odds & Ends

• My bill to ban talking on a cell phone while driving is dead as Methuselah. The autopsy will show that it died of equal parts opposition and too-many-committees, too-little-time. If the voters decide to send me back to the legislature, I’ll try again next session.

• The constituent meeting/pizza party that got weathered out in March has been rescheduled for April 24. Hopefully, Sen. Hollis French, Rep. Lindsey Holmes and I will be back from the legislative wars by then, and we’ll be able to talk with you and maybe eat a slice of pizza. It’ll be from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at Romig Middle School. Hope to see you there.

• The Anchorage Park Foundation is giving people the chance to get involved this summer. You can volunteer in local parks through the neighborhood park fix-it program, apply for funding for improvements through their Challenge Grant Campaign or have your teen try for a summer job in the Youth Employment in Parks program.

Best wishes,