The Capitol Report 4/18/17: Update on budget and key bills to watch
by Michelle Saport |
The Capitol Report - April 18, 2017
Easter Sunday marked the 90th day of the session and the statutory deadline by which the legislature is supposed to conclude its business. It's been clear for weeks that they weren't going to hit that goal, and yesterday we officially entered overtime.
The Alaska Constitution established the length of the regular session as "one hundred twenty days from the date it convenes." That clock began ticking on Jan. 17 when the legislature gaveled in. The 120th day takes us to May 17, at which point the legislature has to take formal action to extend further into a special session. Several years ago, a public initiative established a 90-day legislative limit in statute, but legislators have found it difficult to finish in that amount of time and aren't legally bound to do so given the greater constitutional limit.
So will the next 30 days be different than the first 90? Let's hope so. One big difference is that most of the major pieces of policy legislation have been passed from one body to the other, so from a procedural perspective, both are technically in a position to begin the process of negotiating on the differences in legislation. The Senate has announced that it will be shutting down all committees except for Resources and Finance in order to focus on budget and revenue bills.
Read the full report at alaska.edu/state/report.
The Capitol Report, written by Miles Baker, UA Associate Vice President for Government Relations, is designed to keep the University of Alaska community informed about the current legislative session, particularly its impact on the university budget.
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"The Capitol Report 4/18/17: Update on budget and key bills to watch" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.