Gov. Bill Walker said he won’t call lawmakers back to Juneau to work on a plan to balance future state budgets, unless he knows they’re making progress.
“It won’t be just, I’m going to put more time on the clock and hope something happens,” Walker said Monday at a press availability in the Atwood Building in Anchorage. “I think that’s really disingenuous and unfair to the legislators, unfair to Alaskans. We’ve gone through half a million dollars in per diem. We need to be careful about that.”
Walker said he’s optimistic that Saturday’s agreement on oil and gas taxes means lawmakers can reach agreement on other issues.
“It may not be as open and out there as it has been in the past, but I think it’s been effective,” Walker said. “And I guess that’s really the key. You find out what works and you stay on that system.”
The governor said the recent slide in the state’s credit rating from the best in the country to being better than only New Jersey and Illinois is a reason for lawmakers to reach a compromise on a plan.
Walker expects the capital budget to be the subject of a third special session later this month. He expects the Legislature to finish work on the state’s capital budget by July 31. He said it will make a difference to getting projects built on time.
“It becomes more significant if we’re talking about September, October,” that lawmakers act, Walker said. “Then we really have a major impact.”
Department of Transportation and Public Facilities spokeswoman Shannon McCarthy said the state could receive delays in federal funding if the capital budget isn’t completed by Sept. 30. It could also lose federal money in the future. And McCarthy said some projects could be affected even sooner, since the state’s federal authorization to spend on new projects ended on June 30.
Andrew Kitchenman is the state government and politics reporter for Alaska Public Media and KTOO in Juneau. Reach him at akitchenman@alaskapublic.org.
