February 16, 2015 Voice Your Opinions! Letters to the editor make a difference. You can send a letter of up to 200 words (shorter letters are more likely to be accepted) to the Alaska Dispatch News by email (letters@alaskadispatch.com); or by fax or mail (call them at 257-4308). Send letters to the Anchorage Press via e-mail editor@anchoragepress.com or by mail to 540 E. Fifth Ave, Anchorage, 99501. Feel free to call us if you need factual information to help you write a letter. Contact the Governor. The Governor can be reached at 269-7450; or www.alaska.gov. Contact us. My office can be reached at: 733 W. 4th Ave, Anchorage, AK 99501; by phone: 269-0106; visit my website at http://gara.akdemocrats.org; or email: Rep.Les.Gara@akleg.gov

Dear Neighbors:

Only in Juneau could you have a $3.5 billion deficit, while some who view themselves as “fiscal conservatives” claim we should keep running a money-losing rocket business that sits idle seven days a week most weeks of every year. Here’s the difficult thing:  you could fire every state employee, every trooper, every social worker and, well, everyone, and only cover roughly half of the deficit. We have to be smart about our budget, and cut things that are not smart. Unwise spending of finite state funds means we will not be able to afford the things that create educational opportunity, protect children from neglect and abuse, and protect the economy from a sea of unemployed people.

In this edition, I’ll let you know a bit of what is happening in Juneau, good and bad, and on our bills, because, well, not everything you care about has a sexy enough angle to make it into the news. 

Budget Choices: Rockets That Catch Fire, Or Schools, Job Training, and Things That Create Opportunity?

I’ve called on Governor Walker to look into selling the state-owned Kodiak rocket launch facility.  That state-owned business has only launched two rockets (three if you count the one that caught fire – feds’ fault, not ours) in the last five years.  That’s 1,825 days that a $225,000/year facility director has been paid to run a launch business that hasn’t launched a rocket, and three days he was paid to watch a rocket launch or catch fire. This is a slight exaggeration since the three launched rockets involved some prep time, although I honestly can’t see how this job is either full-time or worth the handsome salary. Great work for a former Anchorage Assemblyman if you can get it, I guess.

Let’s give you another measure of this facility’s “success”. He’s successfully pitched to get $58.5 million in state money with annual promises of new, lucrative long term launch contracts that never get signed. And his “business” has given nothing back. We’ve spent $1 million on the Rocket Launch chief’s salary in that time.   

To the Governor’s credit, he is looking into possibly selling this “business” to a more efficient private sector buyer. If the annual fluffed promises from those who run this “business” someday become real (they’ve been fake for the past five years) then we should be able to sell this facility, get revenue for it, and reduce further budget bleeding. If they are not, and the private sector sees this project as a boondoggle, then it’s a private sector signal that it will continue to be a money loser. I guess I’m the conservative here. Let’s let the free market value this business. If it has value, let’s sell it. If it doesn’t, let’s stop wasting state money.

Every dollar this facility keeps losing is a dollar that cannot go into job training, education, child protection, safe streets, affordable renewable energy, road maintenance, and the one “mega-project” that makes sense in tight times – analyzing and moving forward with a large diameter pipeline that can bring affordable natural gas to Alaskans, with the excess sold in Asia for export and needed state revenue. I support the Governor’s work on this, and will as long as the project looks realistic.

Bills: Neglected and Abused Foster Youth Hearing; Clamping Down On Negative Attack Ads; And Honoring Veterans

Last week we had hearings on three of our bills. 

One passed committee and should be ready to a push to a floor vote. HB 13, co-sponsored across party lines with Rep. Bob Lynn (R-Anch), would ban political parties from taking out attack ads in the state election guide. Right now they can, and this last election one of the parties did, for the paltry cost of $600, to reach every voter in the state in a state-funded publication. Bob and I just don’t think the state-funded voter guide is a place for attack ads, and now that one party figured out the law allows them to use their space for attacks ads, more parties will use the same loophole in the future unless we pass this bill.

Our Foster Care Reform bill received a hearing Thursday. The bill aims, in a no or low cost manner, to improve educational outcomes for Alaska’s growing number of foster youth (over 2,400 as of this letter). We are the legal guardians of these youth when we take them from their parents. We should give these youth the same chances we want for our own children. 

The bill seeks to get the state to comply with national evidence-based standards that mean getting youth back into a permanent home much more quickly than we do now. Letting youth bounce between foster homes and bounce between schools mid-term just causes continued state-sanctioned, though unintentional, abuse and neglect for youth who already face too much hardship. A more detailed summary of the bill is linked here.

And we were contacted this summer by an Alaska Native Veterans group. They noticed that of all the license plates we allow veterans to purchase to honor their service, there are none to honor those veterans who have received the second, third and fourth highest honors for bravery and merit in the field while in a combat unit. That bill received its first hearing last week and I am promised it will be allowed to come to a committee vote. I and others have co-sponsored it across party lines. We have some fixes to make to the bill’s language, and committee members have some amendments they’d like to consider.

That’s it for now!

As always, let me, or my aides Joe and Molly know if we can help, or if you have any questions.

My Best,