Heading for the finish line

Glorioski! It’s the 109^th legislative day, meaning we’ve got just 12 days left in the regular session. Maybe that’s why we’ve got a floor session scheduled on a Saturday, and the bill packets are getting to a size that’s going to require a wheel barrow to move them around. Do we finish our business by the end of Day 121? Well, all we’ve got left is the operating budget, the capital budget, the ethics bill, AGIA, school funding, revenue sharing, senior assistance, Denali KidCare and the 90-day session bill. Should be a piece of cake.

Curing the pink slip blues

Oops. Did I forget the incredibly important bill to change the pink slip date for tenured public school teachers? HB 192 moved out of the House Finance Committee Wednesday and is now in the Rules Committee which decides if it goes to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote. Who knows? It might actually get a floor vote before we get out of Dodge. But even if it should pass the House, it still has to survive a journey through the dreaded Alaska Senate, where many a modest and worthy House bill has suffered a terrible fate.

Gee, AGIA, what’s happening?

Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act is still in the House and Senate finance committees. Lots of talk about turning the state’s “must haves” into “sorta wants,” but the actual amendment process hasn’t begun on either bill (HB 177 in the House; SB 104 in the Senate). The major North Slope oil and gas producers – ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips – are trying to poke holes in the governor’s proposal and the administration is trying to slap a little lathe and plaster on every hole.

90 days to disaster

The bill intended to help the legislature convert to a 90-day session (HB 171) blew up on the House floor on Tuesday, when a majority of the House declined to go along with a Senate scheme to start each session in mid-February. The transition to such a system has constitutional problems, and there’s not really great arguments for starting later in the year. The Senate has refused to take their changes back, so the bill has gone to a conference committee where a few Senators and Representatives will try to work out their differences. Not to worry, though. If no bill passes, we can just start at the usual time next year and quit when we get to 90 days.

Now, for a really difficult subject

I put in a bill on Wednesday (HB 250) to begin trying to deal with a very difficult subject: sexual assaults committed against children by other children. I don’t know about you, but I was surprised to learn that such things happened. But they do, and we’ve got to figure out how to deal with them. My bill, which requires notification of substantiated allegations of such behavior, is just the start.

The bill comes out of the work of a task force that’s been meeting in Anchorage for months, trying to figure out what to do. The task force had a much more elaborate – and expensive – program for dealing with this problem, and we may end up doing what they have suggested. But we’ve got to know a lot more before we get there. So this bill is just a start.

Waiting for the capital budget

The Senate’s version of the capital budget (SB 53) may be released today. But then, it was supposed to have been released on Thursday. That bill will come over to the House, where more will be added. Then it will go to conference or not, depending on how the two bodies are feeling about one another and the apportionment of – dare I call it – pork in the bill. Meanwhile, the conference committee on the operating budget (HB 95) held its first meeting late yesterday.

Yoyo ideology

I saw something I really liked the other day, a reference to the conservative yoyo ideology. Yoyo is, in this context, an acronym for You’re On Your Own.

Best Wishes,