Special End of Session Edition!

Well, we're done. On time – barely – but way, way, way over budget. Here are some thoughts on what we did – and didn't – do.

What we did:

AGIA

A week after Gov. Sarah Palin's press conference to celebrate the passage of her Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, we finally passed the bill (HB 177). Like many other issues, AGIA got caught up in end-of-the-session shenanigans, but finally passed in much the form Palin wanted. The final kerfuffle was about requiring a project labor agreement, which got taken out of the bill in the House Finance Committee. But we got it back in on the House floor, something that wouldn't have happened without lots of help from the governor's office.

As I've been saying all along, AGIA doesn't guarantee a gas pipeline. It's just a procedure to get us closer to one. The next step is to solicit applications, evaluate them and pick a winner. We legislators will probably be faced with accepting or rejecting the winning application when we come back here next January.

Ethics

Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. So the successful passage of the big bill o' ethics (HB 109) was the result of lots of work by lots of people. Among late changes to the bill was the Senate's so-called Happy Meal amendment, that requires lobbyists to report any food or drink they buy legislators that's worth more than $15. I think that one amendment will do more to change the culture here than anything else in the bill, and I'm all about changing the culture. Why, I actually made it through an entire session without allowing a lobbyist to buy me a single thing.

Education funding, retirement funding, revenue sharing

A one-year fix is better than no fix at all. Now, we'll see if yet another task force can straighten out education funding, which would relax the political death grip on retirement funding plans. Don't hold your breath, though, since education funding is as complicated as a bunch of wily politicians and jargon-spouting bureaucrats can make it. Plus, it has a poisonous legislative history that pits urban and rural school districts – and legislators – against each other. Not a recipe for a swift and even-handed solution.

And revenue sharing? Well, there's money for it this year, but I think attempts to give permanent funding to cities and towns are unlikely to succeed. We're not always going to have the big bucks we had this year, so deeding $50 million a year to local governments doesn't seem that smart to me. But the idea has a few powerful backers in the legislature, and sometimes that's all it takes.

Denali KidCare

We passed a law that adds about 1,300 children to Denali KidCare, the state program that provides free health insurance to children and pregnant mothers from low income families. That costs about $600 a kid because the feds pay 70 percent of the cost.

What we didn't do:

Spending discipline

We didn't show a lick of it. Total spending this session is somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion dollars, with somewhere between $8 billion or $9 billion of that state money. (These numbers are rough. It'll take a couple of months to untangle exactly what we did.) In the process of doing all this spending, we blew through the $1.35 billion surplus from the current fiscal year, and spent most of the expected surplus from next year. Early in the session, I filed a bill (HB 115) to move the $1.35 billion to the state's savings account because I was afraid that if we didn't, we'd spend it. And we did just that.

Senior assistance

A bad brew of ideology, political posturing and sheer wooly-headedness sent a program to give money to the poorest old people down the chute. When somebody said you shouldn't watch the making of laws or sausages, this is exactly the sort of thing he was talking about. I'm hoping to help bring it back next year, but it's a darn shame we couldn't get it together to do the right thing on this.

Any of my bills

Didn't get a single one passed. Zero. Zip. Nada. I guess being a powerful member of the powerful oil and gas committee just wasn't enough. But, as sports fans the world over know, there's always next year.

E you later, alligator

And, for the E-news, there's always next week or next month. I'll be setting up shop on the third floor of the Anchorage Legislative Information Office, where I'll be working on a few bills (like HB 250 and HB 260) and trying to help my constituents navigate the maze-like corridors of government. I'll let you know how things are going from time to time. And you can let me know what you're thinking, too.

Best Wishes,