This session Alaska Legislature faced an impossible and undesired task. Craig Tuten, in an Alaska Commons blog post, summarizes their effort and conveys the recent report by the Legislative Finance Director, David Teal, who reported to the legislature yesterday. The good news is… there’s not much more to cut. Revenue enhancement discussions are what we can expect from now on.
Teal said that the Senate addressed the largest cost drivers of operations.
“Salaries were… held at the current levels in the Senate budget,” said Teal. “Medicaid took some reductions, along with everything else. Of course, you don’t need to be reminded that you also cut K-12, and how hard that is for some people to accept.”
The capital budget took a cut of about $500 million from the previous year, down to $110 million.
“It’s really difficult to cut another $500 million from a $100 million budget,” Teal dryly joked. “You are stuck, unfortunately, with operating cuts as the only way to reduce expenditures in the future.”
“The cuts you made were much deeper than anything I would have imagined you could do,” he reiterated. Agency operations spending per capita and adjusted for inflation was already nearing its lowest level in forty years, said Teal.
“For those who may be critical of whether we’re not looking at what we’re supposed to do, I would just say that we are trying to take one component at a time,” said Sen. Anna MacKinnon, co-chair of the finance committee.
As the Senate Finance meeting concluded, the budget conference committee was already delayed over two hours and looked likely to be canceled for the seventh consecutive day. A House floor session canceled an hour later, indicating a deal had not yet been reached.
“The difference between where we are in the House and the Senate is pittance… in comparison to the problem that this state is facing,” said majority member Sen. Lyman Hoffman (D-Bethel) on Tuesday.
Whereas House members may read that to mean that the education funding does not make a significant difference to the $3.9 billion deficit and should therefore be restored to school districts facing drastic impacts, Senate majority members, like MacKinnon, continue to see the cuts as a “small step in the right direction.”
See Full Story Here at Alaska Commons
