Lawmakers decry ‘bully tactics’ in budget proposal<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nIn an interview with the Empire Wednesday, House Minority Leader Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, said the statement was to show her caucus never opposed those programs but wants to take a different approach at funding them. Tilton said members of her caucus support the governor’s amendments to constitutionalize the PCE program.<\/p>\n
The proposed constitutional amendment is on the call of the next special session but many lawmakers want to first address the reverse sweep, which would fund critical programs for this year. The high vote threshold needed to reverse the sweep has traditionally been used as leverage by the party in the minority.<\/p>\n
“We just wanted to be sure that Alaskans knew it is not the programs themselves that are the reason why there was not a vote on the reverse sweep,” Tilton said. “In general, members are supportive of the programs, we just want to look at an alternate way of funding those programs.”<\/p>\n
Tilton said her caucus is diverse and didn’t have a unified opinion on how to fund the programs.<\/p>\n
Statements from the minority were met with praise by other members of the Legislature, including Stutes, who released her own statement thanking her colleagues for expressing support. Hopefully, the minority’s statement showed a willingness to “establish a special session call of our own so that the (Permanent Fund Dividend) and programs vital to our state’s economic recovery will no longer continue to hang in the balance,” Stutes said.<\/p>\n
Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, told the Empire Wednesday he hadn’t seen the minority’s comments but he hoped they meant the lawmakers were willing to take the PCE fund off the table from the year-to-year budget debates.<\/p>\n
“They need to get into are they going to support maintaining the endowment,” Stedman said in a phone interview.<\/p>\n
Stedman said he wasn’t convinced the governor’s proposal would provide enough long-term funding, and it was important that rural areas of the state not have their power costs subject to political maneuvering when much of the state has built-in power subsidies.<\/p>\n
“Railbelt legislators don’t have to work every year for the subsidized electrical rates throughout their districts,” Stedman said. “Their costs are sunk in concrete dams and natural gas credits and subsidies in Cook Inlet.”<\/p>\n
Also Tuesday, the governor’s office posted a request for bids from media companies for a $250,000 campaign to promote Dunleavy’s proposed constitutional amendments. The governor’s proposals were unfamiliar to 67% of the responding public, according to a survey cited by the administration in its request.<\/p>\n
The call to this special session has already been amended once. Lawmakers asked the governor to move the start of the session back, allowing the workgroup more time to craft recommendations. Dunleavy moved the session from Aug. 2 to Aug. 16, and added his proposed amendment to constitutional both the PFD and PCE to the call.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy spokesperson Jeff Turner told the Empire the governor is taking a phased approach to the Aug. 16, special session.<\/p>\n
“He wants a policy decision on the PFD and the permanent fund first,” Turner said in an email. “The budget issues can be addressed at the appropriate time by adding an appropriation bill to the call of the special session.”<\/p>\n
Turner said lawmakers calling themselves into session is an internal legislative matter.<\/p>\n
• Contact reporter Peter Segall at psegall@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SegallJnuEmpire.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lots of public testimony. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":73629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-73628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73628","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\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73628"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=73628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}