Dear Friends and Neighbors,

As of last night, the Legislature will be on fast forward. The Senate appointed their conference committee members on the Operating Budget, which invokes the 24-hour rule. This rule allows bills to move very quickly through the legislature. It’s a way to make sure we get things done, but it’s also an opportunity for bad legislation to move forward without the usual scrutiny.

Depending on what you are trying to do, the 24-hour rule can be both good and bad. The one thing that’s for sure is we need to be on our toes because the end of the session is near.

Shortchanging our Schools

Very late last night, the House passed HB 278, an omnibus education bill, despite deep dissatisfaction on both sides of the aisle. For me, the bill contained too many bad provisions and simply was not good enough for our schools, students and families. We can do better.

After six hours of debate and amendments, the bill still did not contain enough funding to prevent teacher and staff cuts, which leads to increased class sizes. It allowed for back door vouchers by allowing public money to private schools, created an unfair system for teacher tenure, and allowed state overreach into district personnel decisions.

My fellow caucus members and a few majority members tried to amend the bill to make it a true education reform bill that will help our schools. Here are the amendments that were successful:

•  Stripping out provisions that would have stretched out payments to the teachers’ retirement fund for decades rather than paying them off sooner.  This would have ultimately led to billions in additional future costs and negatively impacted the state’s credit rating.

•  Restoring a mechanism to compensate for higher costs in rural Alaska and providing for a one-time grant to schools of $30 million.

•  Allowing highly skilled students to test out of certain subjects, saving schools money and students’ time and effort.

Check out these short You-Tube clips of the House Minority Press Conference on the education bill. Click on the video to follow the link to You-Tube.

Rep Guttenberg: We’ve devalued our oil and are passing that burden on to our children

Rep Guttenberg: Innovation comes from the classroom not the Legislature

Capital Budget: Senate Version

The Senate Finance Committee released its first draft of the Fiscal Year 2015 Capital Budget yesterday. By the time you read this, the Senate Finance Committee will have amended it again, but here are some projects in our district included in the bill as it presently stands:

•  St. Mary’s High School Gymnasium

•  Ester Volunteer Fire Department Wildfire Water Storage Tank

•  UAF Engineering Building

•  Technology and Safety Upgrades for Fairbanks Schools

•  Hooper Bay Small Boat Harbor

•  Mountain Village Renovation of Clinic and VPSO Housing

•  KSKO-FM McGrath Translator Upgrades

•  Heat Recovery Systems for Emmonak, Nunam Iqua, and St. Mary’s

•  FNSB Ambulance Replacement

There are still a lot of good projects the House can add. I will be working over these next two weeks to see if we can include a few more. Stay tuned.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to call my office and share your ideas.