SPECIAL BONUS EDITION!!!
It's a bouncing baby bill!

And now a word…

From Yogi Berra: It’s not over ’til it’s over.

The powerful House of Representatives, of which I am a powerful member, passed a new oil production bill last night. I didn’t get everything I wanted in the bill – for example, it’s a net tax bill and I still support a gross tax – but it is a vast improvement on the current tax law and, frankly, it’s better than the bill Gov. Sarah Palin introduced. So I voted for it.

But the bill went to the state Senate, which can rewrite it in any way its members want in the five days we’ve got left before we reach the limit of this special session. There are changes they could make that would force me to vote against the bill they send back. So it’s like Yogi says.

What we did…

You can read the House bill for yourself. Here are the highlights:

• The tax rate is 25 percent of net profits.
• When the value of a barrel of oil reaches about $53, the tax rate begins to rise at a rate of 4 percent for every $10.
• Taxes can be offset by exploration and development credits, some of which are pretty darn generous.
• Operating expenses in the big North Slope oil fields are capped to limit the amount of creative accounting the companies might do.
• The bill gives the state more authority to decide what deductions will be allowed everywhere.
• Several provisions give the state more information on just how the oil patch operates.

All in all, not a bad bill. As I’ve said before – and will probably continue to say – a tax on the gross value of oil works better for the state. But you can only do what you can do, and I didn’t find any support for a gross tax in the Palin administration and not much support in the legislature. Maybe I’m right and they’re wrong. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. We’ll see.

What we didn’t do

Didn’t do a thing about saving any of the new money the tax bill is supposed to raise. Can’t, really, because this is not an appropriations bill and the only real way to save is to appropriate it to a place where the money is tougher to get at. Right now, that place is either the Constitutional Budget Reserve or the Alaska Permanent Fund. Saving is something I intend to devote a lot of energy to next session, because if we don’t save while there’s a lot of money coming in, we’ll regret it big time when there’s not.

What happens next

We wait to see what the Senate does.

Life at camp

One of the things about being down here for 30 days is that everybody essentially just camps out. You find an apartment or a hotel room and you don’t do much with it because you’re only going to be there 30 days. And, if you’re me, the woman who lets you live with her stays home and you are, as my father would have said, batching it.

Which explains why during at eases in a floor session on a bill worth billions of dollars, I was thinking about when I’d get a chance to do laundry. Seems pretty incongruous, but when your clothes are getting so ripe they might start walking around by themselves, you start to worry. Fortunately, we didn’t have to have another floor session today, so I was able to do my laundry this morning. I’m sure the people who sit near me on the floor are as relieved as I am.

A word about at eases

We absolutely crushed the official 25th Legislature House record for “at eases” during a floor session yesterday. The previous record was 15. According to official statistician Rep. Craig Johnson, we were “at ease” 27 or 28 times during our session yesterday. Johnson couldn’t consult the official record book – really, a pile of yellow Post-Its – because it was in his desk on the House floor. And after being there for seven hours yesterday, nobody, but nobody is interested in going back to the floor right away for anything.

Now, to you out there in the real world, the “at ease” may look like recess at Mr. Harris’ third-grade class. But when the House is moving through a lot of bills, or dealing with one big, complicated bill like yesterday, the “at ease” is invaluable. It gives you a chance to consult with your colleagues, talk with your staff, figure out what an amendment means or even just get up and stretch your legs. There’s a lot that happened in the new oil production tax bill that wouldn’t have happened without the “at ease.”

More later.