Rep. Mike Doogan in Juneau - Legislative Newsletter

There’s been a lot of talk about process in the Capitol the past two weeks. In case you’ve missed it, and you very well might have, legislators are still down in Juneau, trying to figure out if we’re going to have a budget next year. So far we’ve been at that for 12 days of special session, and we’re pretty much right where we started.

Maybe that’s because everybody is talking about process, mostly in dueling press conferences and interviews, but nobody seems to actually be applying a process.

Yesterday the House Minority Caucus held our own press conference. We talked about ... well, process, for the most part. We really just wanted to say that, though the weather has been glorious, we’re really getting tired of hanging around Juneau, accomplishing bupkis. We also explained what we see as the not-so-complicated path out of this mess.

1). The governor needs to renounce his threat to veto capital projects in retaliation for his stalled oil tax bill.

2). The Senate needs to split up the energy capital projects they linked to thwart the governor’s vetoes.

3). The House, Senate and governor need to agree about which energy projects actually should be in the budget.

It doesn’t sound all that difficult, but it does require people in power to sit down in the same room and try to do about as much listening as they do talking. There’s no point worrying about who got us into this mess. It doesn’t have to end with winners and losers, but it can end with a budget and maybe a few sheepish grins. But what do I know? Without a gavel I’m just a hostage in this fiasco. I’ll stay here and do my job as long as it takes, but I’d like to be back in the district, putting my ties and fancy socks in a drawer for a few months.

I had the chance to take a state-paid trip home this week. I didn’t. Here’s why.

Gov. Sean Parnell really wants to the legislature to pass a bill that would give his friends in the oil industry $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year for no particularly good reason. The House went along. The Senate balked. Parnell threatened to retaliate by vetoing capital budget.

And the game was on. The Senate’s response was to chain together more than $400 million in projects, most of them for energy, so that if one was vetoed, all were vetoed.

The result was a stalemate. The capital budget, 150-plus pages of spending for ideas big and small, sat in the Senate Finance Committee through the regular session and, so far anyway, through two weeks of the special session. Parnell has made some not-very-convincing claims that he didn’t really mean what he’d threatened to do. The Senate has made some counter offers. Statements have been made and press releases have been, well, released.

The House majority has sided with Parnell but to little effect. Then some rocket surgeon thought it would be peachy keen to bundle the Finance Committee off to Anchorage for a hearing on the capital budget.

Why? According to one of the committee chairmen, Bill Stoltze, the House leadership-governor side of the fight hasn’t been getting a fair shake in the press. A change in venue would mean new reporters, who in turn might make for better coverage.

(I am not making this up. His explanation is available in televised coverage of the majority press conference.)

So most of the committee packed up and went to Anchorage, where it is to hear about the problems with the Senate’s capital budget list. From most of the same people they saw earlier in the week. In Juneau.

What does this add to the efforts to get our work done here in Juneau? As I far as I can see, nothing. So I passed. I hope to attend the meeting through the magic of teleconference.

And when that meeting is over, all the members who went to Anchorage will get right on the very next airplane back to Juneau. Right?

As if life wasn’t tough enough for people trying to navigate the uncertain currents of the Alaska Legislature, they now have to deal with a very important but not-spoke-of peril: reapportionment.

That’s by the process in which the number of voters in each election district is adjusted to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” ruling.

In Alaska this time that means one less seat for southeast Alaska and one more for Mat Su, larger districts for rural Alaska and smaller, more densely populated districts for the urban areas.

If that’s all that happened, of course, reapportionment would be strictly a mathematical exercise. It’s not. In Alaska, it is also a chance for the party in power to increase its power by creating election districts more likely to choose its candidates. This time around, that means Republicans will gain and Democrats will lose.

It is hard to see what is happening in the legislature this year, and to think about what will happen next year, as unrelated to reapportionment. If I was a rural legislator – or a Democratic legislator or, heaven help me, a rural Democratic legislator -- I’d be trying to do all I could before the numbers change.

And that’s not all. If my election district changes much – and the odds are it will – I’ll lose a lot of voters who know me and gain a lot who don’t know me from Adam’s off ox. So my next election will be more expensive and more difficult. And I expect the Republicans in the reapportionment board will make it as hard and costly as they can.