|
The
24-hour rule
Soon, probably
early next week, the House and Senate will agree to disagree on the
state operating budget (HB
95). A conference committee will be appointed to try to work out
the differences, and the 24-hour rule will go into
effect.
What’s the
24-hour rule? Well, for most of the session a committee has to
notify the public that it plans to hear a specific bill for the
first time at least five days before the hearing. The 24-hour rule
shortens that notice time to - all together now - 24 hours.
Actually, I’m told it shortens it to 11:59 p.m. the day before the
hearing, so the notice can be a lot shorter than 24
hours.
The rationale for
this is that once the budget conference committee is meeting, things
have to start moving faster since, as a practical matter, once the
budgets are passed the legislature doesn’t have a lot of reason to
hang around. Is that really a good enough reason to sharply reduce
the amount of public notice that’s given? I’m skeptical, but I’m
willing to see how it works this session before making up my
mind.
Godzilla:
The operating budget
I voted against
the operating budget when it came to the House floor, and I’ll
probably vote against it again when it comes back to the floor. The
budget is simply too big. The version the Senate is sending back
costs about $9 billion. That’s roughly $1.7 billion in federal funds
and $7.2 billion in state funds. Of the state funds, $3.4 billion
are general funds.
That’s not all
the spending, of course. There’s roughly $300 million still in play
for things like municipal revenue sharing and higher education
funding.
But even without
these items, general fund spending has gone up some 60 percent in
the past two years of fat oil revenues. And now, of course, the
state is forecasting lower revenues, as this story
in the Anchorage Daily News details. I’m against handing money out
and then taking it back a year or two later. Yo-yo budgeting just
isn’t smart public policy.
Godzilla
II: The capital budget
Oh, yeah. There
will also be a capital budget, spending for construction and other
so-called one-time expenditures. Size? Unknown. Contents? Unknown.
Estimated time of arrival? The very last minute.
Remember
ethics?
The House’s Great
Big Bill O’ Ethics (HB
109) has been sitting in the Senate State Affairs Committee for
something more than two weeks now, while the three-headed monster
(the House leadership, the Senate leadership and the governor’s
office) tries to figure out the politics of passing
it.
Technically, the
ethics bill should be a Senate bill, since the Senate sent a couple
of titles over before the House passed its bill. But the House
ignored those titles - a breach of both procedure and protocol - and
put out its own bill, using the title of a governor’s bill. The word
is the House Republican leadership did that so that Senate Democrats
couldn’t claim credit for ethics reform, even though those Democrats
- particularly Sen. Hollis
French - were pushing for such reform long before it became
politically expedient to do so.
Apparently,
compromise on this point is elusive, so just when an ethics bill, or
bills, will pass is anybody’s guess.
The
continuing saga of AGIA
The Senate
Judiciary Committee passed out its version (SB
104) of Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement
Act on Thursday. The House Resources Committee is scheduled to
pass out its version (HB
177) the middle of next week. Each bill goes to the respective
Finance Committees where, the conventional Capitol hallway wisdom
says, Very Bad Things (VBTs) will
happen.
What VBTs? Well,
the purpose of AGIA is to put pressure on the North Slope oil producers to commit the gas
they control to a pipeline project. (For my scintillating analysis
of the whole magilla, see this op-ed
in the Anchorage Daily News. You can also see the Voice of the Oil
Industry’s churlish response here
- the second item down.) To do that, certain parts of the bill have
to remain largely untouched. Those include the $500 million the
state will ante up, a list of so-called must haves, the criteria by
which proposals will be evaluated, and the exclusivity of the deal
between the state and the licensee. The administration probably has
a longer list, but I think every one would agree these are the
biggies. (And if they don’t, I’m sure I’ll hear from them soon after
this e-news is sent.)
So, eliminating
any of these would be a VBT. Substantially altering them would be a
VBT. And there are, no doubt, other VBTs that people much smarter
than me are thinking about right now.
Make no mistake.
This is a high risk, high return, high stakes situation with many,
many complexities. It will border on the miraculous if a bill is
passed without an all-in, tag-team, steel-cage grudge
match.
AGIA:
The reception
House Democrats were invited
over to the governor’s place Tuesday evening to talk about AGIA.
Some of the talk Tuesday evening was about the political work that
needs to be done to get a bill passed, since not every vote will
actually be decided strictly on the merits. (Yeah, I know it’s hard
to believe, but trust me.) The next day, the governor
said at a press conference she wasn’t going to play politics on
the bill, which, of course, is a way of playing politics on the
bill. (Sorry, but if you think very hard about this stuff, your
brain turns into a pretzel.) Let’s all hope that whatever the
governor does, or doesn’t do, or does while she’s saying she isn’t
doing it, is successful. Otherwise, we’ll be right back where we
started on the gas pipeline: Nowhere.
Best
wishes,
| 