In the main meeting room of the Mendenhall Valley Public Library, the ideas being shared sounded like a page from an Alaska history book: school taxes, income taxes, the birth of the Permanent Fund, the founding of the Alaska Marine Highway.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, about 80 Juneau residents gathered to hear from the borough\u2019s delegation to the Alaska Legislature and offer their own comments on how to solve a state deficit that moves closer to $4 billion per year with every day that oil prices stay below $30 per barrel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and I think this is a really critical year,\u201d Rep. Sam Kito III, D-Juneau, told the assembled crowd.<\/p>\n
Rep. Cathy Mu\u00f1oz, R-Juneau, and Sen. Dennis Egan, D-Juneau, each shared the floor with Kito as the trio solicited comments from the audience and told Juneauites how they see the state\u2019s budget picture.<\/p>\n
Many in the audience wore gray hair and remembered the years before 1980, when the state levied an income tax.<\/p>\n
\u201cI paid income taxes before,\u201d said one woman in a purple vest. \u201cI\u2019d be happy to pay them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others echoed that sentiment. \u201cWe need an income tax,\u201d said a woman wearing a long-sleeved blue blouse. \u201cThere are thousands of people who work in this state and live somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n
She described meeting Alaska workers living in Maui and Washington state. On her last trip from Juneau to Seattle, she sat next to a man going home. \u201cHe said, \u2018Well, hardly anybody in our company lives in Alaska,\u2019\u201d she told the crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m willing to pay income tax,\u201d added one man wearing a NASCAR baseball cap, \u201cbut people who don\u2019t live here, I want them to pay more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary Graham, wearing a Green Bay Packers jacket, said she worked for 18 years in the Permanent Fund Dividend division office and she knows all about the nonresident worker issue. \u201cI too believe that the income tax is the way to go,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Support for an income tax was widespread but not universal. Two members of the audience, Heather Bennett and Don Brand, said they support sales taxes and consumption taxes as alternatives to an income tax.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are other options for taxing,\u201d Bennett explained, saying that consumption taxes are \u201ca little bit of a moral way to do it. \u2026 They can choose not to buy something that has a higher tax.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another topic of discussion was the idea of a school tax, a flat fee levied by the state to benefit education. From 1949 to 1980, the state collected $10 from every Alaskan\u2019s first paycheck of the year under the tax.<\/p>\n
Amy Jo Meiners, wearing a flowered kuspuk, said she remembers her parents talking about the school tax. Will it come back?<\/p>\n
Not likely, said Sen. Click Bishop, R-Fairbanks. He proposed a school tax bill last year, but on Monday said, \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019ll get much of a hearing this session with all of the menus of revenue the governor has put forth.\u201d<\/p>\n
One member of Sunday\u2019s audience asked if the Legislature is willing to consider cutting education and social services spending. \u201cWhy are they hands-off?\u201d she asked from the front row. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones that consume by far the most. \u2026 It shouldn\u2019t be hands off everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kito responded that he views education as \u201cour mortgage.\u201d Spending on kids today ensures a workforce capable of paying the state\u2019s bills in the future. <\/p>\n
Egan said he doesn\u2019t support the governor\u2019s budget, because it includes cuts to preschool funding.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1oz was more equivocal, saying both that \u201cit\u2019s very difficult to cut education\u201d and \u201cthis is going to be a very difficult year, though.\u201d<\/p>\n
Regardless of what choices the Legislature makes, some in the audience said they fear it will be too little, too late. The state may already be bound for an economic recession or depression, they believe. <\/p>\n
Graham is among those. \u201cUnfortunately, I\u2019m taking my retirement money to Oregon at the end of this year,\u201d she said. \u201cI was a stalwart, but I\u2019m worried about the economy tanking, and I\u2019m bailing before it tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the main meeting room of the Mendenhall Valley Public Library, the ideas being shared sounded like a page from an Alaska history book: school taxes, income taxes, the birth of the Permanent Fund, the founding of the Alaska Marine Highway. On Sunday, about 80 Juneau residents gathered to hear from the borough\u2019s delegation to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":2765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}