Alaska lawmakers try to broker budget funding compromise amid war-driven funding dispute
- Alaska Beacon
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
By James Brooks
Alaska Beacon
Alaska legislators have sidetracked a bill originally intended for the legislative fast track.
In a pair of votes Wednesday, the Alaska House and Senate voted to send House Bill 289, the state’s supplemental budget bill, to a conference committee empowered to iron out differences between two different versions respectively enacted by the House and Senate.
Lawmakers took that unusual action after the House failed to approve a Senate-passed plan to pay for the bill with more than $373 million from the state’s principal savings account, the Constitutional Budget Reserve.
The committee is scheduled to hold its first meeting at 3:45 p.m. Thursday.
HB 289 is intended to fund expenses in the current state fiscal year that were incurred after lawmakers adjourned last year’s legislative session.
That includes money needed to respond to last summer’s wildfires and ex-Typhoon Halong, which devastated Western Alaska in the fall.
One key item in the bill — $70.2 million intended to unlock federal construction grants — is time sensitive. For months, the state’s construction industry has been lobbying for fast action on that money, saying that without surety on federal grants, they cannot make hiring and purchasing decisions for this summer’s construction season.
In February, the House passed a version of HB 289 with more than $500 million in expenses and proposed to pay for it by spending from the reserve.
It takes 30 votes in the House and 15 votes in the Senate to unlock the reserve. This month, in order to meet the threshold in the Senate, lawmakers there cut the bill to slightly over $373 million.
That earned unanimous support in the Senate, but not in the House, which is controlled by a 21-person multipartisan majority coalition. Meeting the 30-vote threshold would require some support from the 19-person, all-Republican House minority caucus.
For more than a week, that caucus has been united in opposition to spending from savings, saying that a forecast boon to state finances — caused by higher oil prices amid the Iran war — should be enough to pay for the extra spending.
Members of the House majority, meanwhile, have been just as adamant in their position that it is unwise to rely on war-driven oil prices.
Sens. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel; Bert Stedman, R-Sitka; and Mike Cronk, R-Tok, were appointed to represent the Senate on the committee. Reps. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage; Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage; and Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks; will represent the House.
Cronk and Stapp are members of their respective minority caucuses; the other four lawmakers are representing their respective majority caucuses.
Additional meetings are expected after Thursday’s initial organizational hearing.
• James Brooks Cascade is a longtime Alaska reporter who lives in Juneau. He previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
