A filibuster and a blizzard of amendments start to weigh down Alaska Legislature’s budget work

JUNEAU — The Alaska House's budget process Tuesday threatened to dissolve into delay and dysfunction rivaling that of U.S. Congress, complete with its own filibuster from a frustrated fiscal hawk, North Pole Republican Rep. Tammie Wilson.

Wilson started Tuesday's House Finance Committee meeting with a massive number of amendments — 243 — to the $5 billion unrestricted general fund spending plan from the chamber's largely Democratic majority coalition.

By lunch, one of the committee's co-chairs, Homer Republican Rep. Paul Seaton, had found a way to dispense with half of Wilson's amendments, lumping similar proposals into two separate packages — allowing the committee to vote them down en masse. But that still left a huge backlog, which, at its current pace, could take the committee all week and delay a conversation about proposals to take a bigger bite from the state's $3 billion deficit.

Before majority members rejected it, Wilson insisted on reading one full batch of 90 amendments to align agencies' proposed spending in the next budget year with the amount they actually spent in the last one — a move that prompted both Republicans and Democrats to leave the room.

The debate appears likely to extend into next week, as any amendments defeated in committee can be revived for a final debate on the House floor.

"It's painful," said Fairbanks Republican Rep. Steve Thompson, who went for a walk during part of Wilson's speech. "But it's part of the process."

The finance committee's painstaking pace raised questions about the efficiency of the House's budget process, which has extended into the second half of the 90-day session. A majority amendment Tuesday reversed one of the two substantial cuts that the coalition proposed in the budget — some $50 million in state aid payments for municipal school construction.

Heading into Tuesday's meeting, even after detailed subcommittee reviews of each executive branch agency's spending, the House's proposed unrestricted general fund budget for those agencies was essentially unchanged from the original plan submitted by Gov. Bill Walker. It's now $3.76 billion — up $3.8 million, or one-tenth of 1 percent, from Walker's plan. (Those figures don't include spending on debt service, Permanent Fund dividends and other items.)

Most of Tuesday's committee proceedings were spent debating Republican proposals that were ultimately rejected: The lone minority amendment to pass asked the Division of Motor Vehicles to outsource administration and licensing, a measure with no immediate financial impact.

But committee members on both sides remained undeterred. One was even enthusiastic.

"I literally can't think of a better place to be. No regrets," said Anchorage Independent Rep. Jason Grenn, a freshman who caucuses with the majority. "It is a heck of a way to learn about the state and the crisis we're going through."

Nonetheless, the blizzard of amendments has temporarily shifted the House's focus away from controversial tax and Permanent Fund revenue-generating proposals expected to fill much of the state's deficit.

The coalition has proposed to restructure the $57 billion Alaska Permanent Fund and levy an income tax, which together would generate more than $2 billion. But the legislation, House Bill 115, hasn't been heard in nearly two weeks.

At a news conference Tuesday, House leaders expressed their dismay at the Republican amendment onslaught, which even longtime Juneau lawmakers and aides said was unprecedented. The previous House Democratic minority offered dozens of budget amendments, not hundreds.

"I'm not going to say that the Republican minority wants to disrupt the process," said Fairbanks Democratic Rep. Scott Kawasaki. But the roughly 190 proposals that couldn't be addressed in batches "will cause us problems," he added.

Most of the amendments emanated from the fourth-floor Capitol office of Wilson, whose home town of North Pole, near Fairbanks, supplies the state Legislature with two of its most conservative members — she and John Coghill, the Republican senator.

Wilson was in the majority for the past two years on the finance committee, where she threatened steep cuts to the state university system and questioned the legitimacy of the economic principal of inflation.

Her GOP colleagues picked her for the finance committee again this year, and she said in an interview that she started work on her amendments Dec. 15 — the day Walker released his initial budget proposal. She hired a new aide to help: Remond Henderson, an accountant who previously worked as a top official in the state's corrections department.

"I literally went line by line by line throughout the entire budget," Wilson said in an interview in her office, where she's affixed a "243" poster on her door surrounded by balloons.

Wilson's proposals — more than three for each of the 77 pages in Walker's initial budget — made up more than half of the 330 amendments that were submitted to the finance committee. Another big batch came from Rep. Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla.

In addition to her amendments to align next year's agency spending with last year's, Wilson also had proposals to slice spending on "premium pay," which includes money for overtime and nonstandard shifts.

She said her proposed cuts amounted to more than $235 million, adding that she "absolutely" planned to argue on behalf of all her amendments.

"I believe in each and every one of them," she said.

But after Seaton, one of the co-chairs, proposed to handle Wilson's amendments in batches, committee members heard from David Teal, the Legislature's budget analyst. He told them that if Wilson's premium pay amendments were approved, the state would likely have to budget for them anyway, taking the money from other areas because the compensation is required by labor contracts or federal wage law.

By the end of the day, the finance committee had acted on about 160 amendments — 130 in the two batches from Tilton and Wilson, plus another 30 debated one by one. Teal's back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the committee would need another 20 hours of meetings to deal with the remaining amendments.

Democrats in the House coalition pointed out that the Republican minority members are now proposing to cut budget items that they approved in each of the past two years, when the chamber was under GOP control. Among them: lawmakers' daily expense payments of more than $200, plus subsidies for the legislative cafeteria.

"It seems like theater," Anchorage Democratic Rep. Les Gara said in a text message.

Wilson was unapologetic, saying she was "inundated" with legislative work before being relegated to the minority, in which she no longer chairs a committee or subcommittee.

"It's given me much more time," she said.