Special Midweek edition!

We’re on Easter break after Thursday’s floor session and the woman who lets me live with her and I are getting out of Juneau for a few days. So here is this abbreviated week’s update.

See you later, ethics

On Monday, the House unanimously approved its omnibus ethics bill, HB 109. It contains parts of 13 bills, as well as some of the more than 50 amendments that were offered in the State Affairs and Judiciary committees. It’s not a perfect bill, but it does make the ethics laws stronger. The bill has gone to the Senate, which will do who knows what, and then probably to a conference committee to iron out the differences of opinion between us and them. So we’ll most likely be seeing the bill again on the House floor later in the session.

Au revoir, 90-day session

On Tuesday, we passed a bill, HB 171, to make a 90-day session work. That was mostly changing the dates of when reports are due to us, but it does provide for a February starting date every other year. I don’t think the 90-day session is a good idea, but the voters approved it and now we’ve got to try to make it work. I was particularly happy with an amendment by Harry Crawford and others that took out the automatic repeal of the 90-day session after two years had passed.

Bye, bye AGIA

Also on Tuesday, the powerful Oil and Gas Committee, of which I am a powerful member, passed out its version of Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, HB 177. The short version is that the governor gave us a pretty good bill and we made it better, and we did it in a workmanlike, bipartisan way. (We also got a pretty funky song out of it.) But the bill is not well liked by the North Slope oil and gas producers and their allies in the legislature, so it’s a good bet that mischief will be done somewhere along the way.

Go away, cruise ship initiative changes

I’m wrestling with another bill to change the cruise ship initiative, this one in the powerful Economic Development, Trade and Tourism Committee. The bill, HB 217, would eliminate the requirement that cruise ship personnel who sell shore-side tours to passengers declare how much of their payment is going into the cruise line’s pocket. I don’t support the bill, because I don’t think we should be making significant changes to laws passed by initiative unless they pose a serious threat to the state. I’m also unhappy with the cruise ship industry, which is trying to nibble the initiative to death using arguments they could have made to the voters but didn’t. Looks like we’ll be voting on the bill next Tuesday, so stay tuned.

Farewell, constituent meeting

Sen. Hollis French, Rep. Lindsey Holmes, Blazzee the Clown and I had a lot of fun with about 100 people who came out to eat pizza and talk politics at the Spenard Rec Center last weekend. If you weren’t there, you missed the party of the year, if not the century. I heard about lots of issues that are important to people in our House district and, let me tell you, that Blazzee really knows his way around a balloon animal.

Best Wishes,