Day 72: 'It's almost embarrassing'

Fighting over $10,000.

Good afternoon, Alaska!

In this edition: After two full days of amendments in the House Finance Committee, I’m exhausted! The committee heard and mostly rejected more than 80 amendments, leaving the budget within a rounding error of the roughly $400 million deficit that they began with. Only a handful of relatively small-dollar amendments were approved. Let’s look at the high points: The removal of a “Parental Rights” advocate requested by the governor, a particularly time-consuming amendment that a co-chair called “almost embarrassing” and a welcome comment on the need for adequate pay.

Current mood: 🥱

Heads-up: House Education will be taking public testimony on Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s “Don’t Say Gay”-style bill (House Bill 105) on Thursday night from 5:15 to 8 p.m.

‘It’s almost embarrassing’

The House Finance Committee wrapped up its budget amendment work on Tuesday afternoon after accepting a handful of amendments, withdrawing some others and rejecting a vast majority of the rest. The pall of the state’s revised revenue forecast hung over much of the last two days with the committee’s Republicans frequently lamenting that while they really do care about the issues covered by the amendments brought by the Minority Coalition—senior services, disability services, education, snow plowing and prosecutors—they just didn’t have the money to pay for them.

We heard at least one “regretfully no” vote cast on the amendments.

The frustration among the Minority Coalition’s members bubbled over at times, with them pointing out that the money would be there if not for the Republican-led House Majority prioritizing industry-friendly spending and a large dividend that’s generally believed to be unsustainable without significant changes to the state’s budget picture.

At the end of the day, the budget moved very little with just a few hundred thousand dollar-changes up and down, including a particularly time-consuming amendment that ended up adding just $10,000. The final breakdowns of the updated budget have yet to be rolled out, but it’s likely that it’ll be close to the $400 million-plus deficit that they had before heading into the budget amendment process.

You can find my thread covering most of the amendment process from Tuesday here, but here’s a rundown of the high points:

‘Parental Rights’ advocate nixed

There were a few times in the process that the committee’s five Republicans saw themselves get rolled when the Majority’s two non-Republicans—Dillingham independent Rep. Bryce Edgmon and Nome Democratic Rep. Neal Foster, who both got co-Chair positions as part of their membership in the majority—sided with the Minority Coalition’s independent and Democratic legislators. It was a good reminder of the kinds of concessions you have to make to hold a majority, reminiscent of the many times Democrat-led Bipartisan Majority of the past saw their proposals get quashed when majority Republicans sided with minority Republicans.

Aside from the shift we talked about yesterday that moved $5 million from the state’s effort to take over federal permitting to the Head Start program, the most significant rolling of the Republicans came when they deleted $209,000 that Gov. Mike Dunleavy requested for a “Parental Rights in Education Advocate” in the Department of Law.

While his Don’t Say “Don’t Say Gay bill” bill might not be going anywhere fast, the governor’s culture-war-y agenda can be found pretty much everywhere, including the budget. The position is essentially designed to help parents start out the process of suing school districts over the notification requirements before sex and gender are taught in schools, which currently gives parents a two-week notification to opt out their students (Dunleavy’s bill seeks to change sex and gender discussions to an opt-in process and would also redefined the state’s teen dating violence and sex abuse awareness program into sex ed that’d also fall under the opt-in process). The state wouldn’t be set up to be the active litigator on the cases, but it seems like chilling lawsuits against school districts are the point (it’s also in Dunleavy’s bill).

Most Republicans spoke in favor of the spending to address what they said is one of the most pressing issues in the state with former teacher Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk claiming that schools are trying to take over the role of parents now, though others some conceded they hadn’t heard it being an issue with their constituents.

Rep. Foster was joined by the committee’s independents and Democrats in saying that he didn’t think the state getting involved in potential litigation against school districts was a particularly good way of solving whatever problem they may have.

Rep. Andy Josephson, who sponsored the amendment, also pointed out that a vast majority of the disputes likely to come across this proposed position’s radar would actually be well within the state law and regulations for schools. He doubted it’d likely cool tempers as the supporters suggested and noted that the claims that parental rights are being eroded in Alaska simply isn’t supported by reality.

Rep. Sara Hannan, a Juneau Democrat and former teacher, said there’s already an appropriate channel for parents to express their dissatisfaction if they believe schools are falling out of compliance with state law.

“If communities are dissatisfied,” she said, “then throw the bums out, elect a new school board, fire the superintendent, hire one that is responsive and make sure your school district is complying with state law."

The amendment was defeated 6-5.

It’s almost embarrassing

One of the most time-consuming amendments came over a proposal to put $50,000 into signage up for the easement to Campbell Lake, which is part of a long-running feud between Jeff Landfield of the Alaska Landmine and former state Sen. Natasha von Imhof. Basically, the South Anchorage lake has been long treated as a private lake by the folks living around the lake even though it’s technically public, receives public funding and has a public easement that happens to cross von Imhof’s property.

The proposal came from Rep. Andy Josephson and found a smattering of support among the committee’s Republicans, who said they were very concerned about the public access to public lands. It, however, triggered a painfully long discussion about how much such signs would actually cost and whether the state should be involved in funding something like that in the first place. We have a deficit after all!

The debate required several lengthy breaks to try to get an answer, which it never sounded like they really did. That resulted in several legislators approving a scaled-back request for $10,000 for the signs with the expectation that someone else, maybe Anchorage, would pay for the difference if it ends up costing more. Yeah…

House Finance Committee co-Chair Rep. DeLena Johnson was one of the votes against the measure, calling the whole thing a waste of time.

“It’s almost embarrassing to me that this is the kind of thing that as a legislator I’m dealing with. $10,000 to talk about something when we have a near-billion dollar deficit? We have many, many lakes across Alaska and just because this is something that’s been brought up over and over in a blog and really become a political clash,” she said. “As a legislator, I’m just slightly disturbed that we're even spending time today working on something like this when we have so many other much more important issues before us.”

Rep. Edgmon agreed with his co-Chair’s assessment and voted against the measure, as did Fairbanks Rep. Will Stapp and Rep. Cronk, who said that he’d already voted against a lot of things that were a lot more important than easement signs.

A useful exercise

The process wrapped up with a series of amendments that were targeting long-vacant positions for deletion. Most of the attempts were either withdrawn or voted down based on additional late-arriving information from the state about the positions. Some positions were wrongly tagged in the state’s system, others were in the process of being filled and some were being used to fill gaps elsewhere in government.

It was, frankly, a revealing process that Rep. Alyse Galvin, I-Anchorage, pointed out laid bare just how Alaska’s accounting system is just “really strange.” She said she appreciated the exercise but said could use more context because, “As far as I know, this may be one the most important things we should be having in place.”

There’s not a ton to report out of those amendments, but there was an interesting exchange over an amendment to cut a juvenile probation officer that’s been vacant for more than four years. Rep. Will Stapp, the Fairbanks Republican who oversees the corrections budget, said it’s already been slated for deletion by the administration, but noted that this particular job title has one of the highest vacancy rates of any job in the state at 65%. The position has a total compensation package of $70,000.

“The real reason that position is so vacant is we effectively don’t pay enough,” he said, explaining the state’s long-running difficulty in filling several positions in corrections. “In my opinion it just shows sometimes when you ask someone to do a really hard job, you have to ensure you pay them adequately.”

Hey! Good to hear someone gets it.

What’s next

The amendments now need to be incorporated into the budget bill itself, a process that can take a day or two for drafters to complete depending on what else is going on in the building. We’ll probably see the bill advance out of committee by the end of this week, setting up what will likely be a lengthy floor debate on the legislation—which will include a new round of amendments, including whatever the far-right legislators who really aren’t represented on this committee might have in mind—next week.

Stay tuned!