Rep. Mike Doogan in Juneau - Legislative Newsletter

My most recent e-news was last Friday. Saturday, we pulled the plug on the special session. It’s like I’ve always heard: In comedy, timing is everything.

What did we do in 117 days of sessions – 90 days of regular and 27 of special? We introduced 477 bills and resolutions. (Some were duplicates, introduced in both houses.) We passed 40 bills and an equal number of resolutions.

Only the bills really count. (Resolutions are notes we send to the Congress, the federal government and, all too often, to ourselves.) Some, like the capital budget (SB 46), are important. Others, like Alaska Public Gardens Day, less so.

SB 46 – actually HCS CSSB 46(FIN) – is just a skosh less than $4,000,000,000, the biggest such budget in history. It is 180 pages of projects both humongous -- $65,600,000 to start the spending on a dam on the Susitna River -- and small -- $5,000 for English language equipment at Kasuun Elementary School.

Some of this spending is important. Some is not. And no two legislators would agree which is which.

But regardless of the merits of each bit of spending, the total was more than I could stomach. So I was one of seven House members to vote “no”.

I’ve done that before, to no avail. Spending keeps going up, and oil revenue – the money that pays for more than 90 percent of the budgets – keeps dropping.

One way to measure the difference is how much a barrel of oil has to be worth to pay for what the state spends. In fiscal year 2010, the value of a barrel had to average $64 to break even. In FY11, the break-even was $77 a barrel. For the budget we just passed, it is $83 a barrel PLUS the extra money that was added to the capital budget by the Senate and House.

Anybody who knows anything about the state’s finances should be worried. I am. And you should be, too.

Now what? Well, it appears that we are not going into another special session to try to save the coastal zone management system. But there’s still a chance we will meet again before January on the governor’s harebrained scheme to give billions of dollars back to the oil industry.

That’s the thing about the Alaska legislature. Never a dull moment.