Critics take aim at predator control
January 31, 2008
Critics take aim at predator control
Hearings on Gov. Sarah Palin’s proposal to streamline the state’s predator control laws opened Wednesday with a barrage of opposition.The bill had its first hearing in the House Resources Committee.
Officials with the state Department of Fish and Game called the bill a housekeeping measure that would mesh and simplify two confusing, often conflicting, laws aimed at boosting moose and caribou populations.
Kevin Saxby, an assistant attorney general working with the Alaska Board of Game, said the bill would allow the board to respond quickly to declines in prey populations while continuing to base its decisions on the department’s research and advice.
“The procedure is subject to almost constant challenge because it is such a complex law that there is a great deal of confusion with the public and special interest groups over what the Legislature intended. So we are proposing to reduce it to its bare essentials,” Saxby said.
Defenders of Wildlife, which is suing the state over its aerial wolf shooting program, said the bill would strip the program of scientific standards and limit public participation, leaving predator control decisions in the hands of an ideologically driven game board.
“This legislation positions the Board of Game to accelerate a program for political reasons but without attention to whether such a program is fiscally prudent or biologically sound,” said Tom Banks, the group’s Alaska representative.
Some hunting groups also had reservations over the bill.
Mark Richards, co-chairman of the Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, said his group supports the administration’s attempts to make predator management decisions legally defensible. But he said the changes would have the opposite effect by giving the Board of Game sole authority on future predator management decisions.
“We need to stop frivolous lawsuits that cost the state so much time and money, but this bill introduces too many potential downsides with its solution,” Richards said in written testimony.
Still others said the Legislature should wait until voters can weigh in this fall on a ballot initiative that would limit the state’s aerial wolf kill program to hunts done by state biologists in emergency situations.
The state currently allows private pilots to do the hunting if they are part of a state-sponsored program.
Alaskans have twice passed similar initiatives in recent years, which were later overturned by the Legislature.
The state’s program, which has been the target of lawsuits since it began in 2003, is intended to boost moose and caribou numbers where residents have complained that predators are killing too many, leaving them too few to hunt for food.
Banks said rural subsistence-dependent people are often portrayed as the chief beneficiaries of the predator control programs. However, statistics show two-thirds to three-quarters of moose and caribou hunted in Alaska are harvested by urban and out-of-state hunters, he said.
Under the program, now in its fifth year, 700 wolves have been killed. The goal is to reduce wolf populations in each of the specified areas by as much as 80 percent annually.
The committee will continue to take public testimony on the governor’s bill at its meeting next Monday.
The measure is House Bill 256.
Alaska fights to keep wolf program
January 30, 2008
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is supporting state legislation to end lawsuits by groups opposed to the shooting wolves from planes.Supporters said the bill would simplify the language in Alaska’s predator control laws, aimed at boosting moose and caribou populations for hunters. Critics such as the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife said the legislation would allow predator-control expansion across the state, the Anchorage Daily News said Wednesday.
“It gives carte blanche for the Board of Game to move ahead based on a hunch,” Tom Banks of Defenders of Wildlife told the newspaper. “Based on a belief, really, that killing wolves in a particular area would be helpful.”
The aerial predator control program has resulted in the death of more than 700 wolves in the program’s five years. While it is mostly aimed at wolves, it has also included bears, the newspaper said.
Source: United Press International
Lawmaker warns against altering education funding
January 30, 2008
The head of a legislative task force charged with fixing the state’s school funding warned lawmakers Tuesday that tinkering with any proposed changes could cause a “long-fought, well-discussed compromise” to collapse.Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, told the House Finance Committee that it was premature to consider the $200 increase proposed by Gov. Sarah Palin to the base student allowance, or BSA. That allowance is the starting amount in a formula the state uses to determine how much a school district receives from the state per student.
Read the full story at Juneau Empire
Budget dispute is about terminology
January 26, 2008
Alaska may be awash in cash thanks to high oil prices and a boost in oil taxes, but it hasn’t made building a state budget any easier or less sly than it was in the lean years.
Only two weeks into this year’s session, lawmakers already are engaged in a dispute with the administration over Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim to be reining in state spending.
Palin touted a modest 4 percent growth in state spending last December when she unveiled her $8.3 billion operating and capital budgets, made up from various funding sources, including $4.4 billion from the state’s treasury.
Lawmakers say it’s actually a much larger increase — as much as 15 percent — under their method of accounting.
And in this election year, they are worried they will be cast as the big spenders by the time the dust settles over next year’s budget plan.
“What does it say? Does it say that the governor was wrong in her budget approach? Not necessarily. Does it say, well, the Legislature is at it again: just spending away. That’s the concern,” said Rep. Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski.
Members of both the House and Senate Finance committees have wrestled with the issue over the last two weeks in meetings with Palin’s budget director, Karen Rehfeld, and her legislative counterpart, David Teal. It’s just the start of a long budget process that is typically only resolved in the last hours of the session.
Both sides agree on the anticipated revenues and expenditures for the current year and the year that begins July 1. The disagreement boils down to a difference in where the numbers appear on the summary sheet.
It often comes down to conflicting views over use of the surplus, a $2.6 billion gift from skyrocketing oil prices and a hike in the state’s oil production tax. What Palin counts as savings, like her plan to sock away three years of education funding, lawmakers describe as deferred spending.
Palin’s budget also places programs like revenue sharing, education increases and tax credits for small producers in the capital budget instead of the operating budget, where lawmakers believe they either should be or traditionally have been placed.
As a result, Palin’s spending overview showed a mere bump of $39 million from the state treasury to pay for the cost of operating state government. In the Legislature’s accounting, using the same numbers, that bump is closer to half a billion dollars.
Rehfeld and Teal are working to reconcile the placement of numbers, though some differences still exist.
“At least we are all saying the same things. We are trying to restrain the operating budget, we want to make room to do some good things in the capital budget and we want to save surplus. So it’s just how are we going to get there,” said Rehfeld.
Palin, however, took exception this week to lawmakers’ suggestions that her budget is not open and transparent.
“It is the Legislature’s responsibility to appropriate and we anticipate changes to our (fiscal year 2009) fiscal plan; however, we fundamentally disagree that spending is higher than reported, due to some committee members’ arguments over which column the funds are in,” Palin said.
The arguments are not new. One veteran lawmaker says the budget process has always been particularly challenging in Alaska given the volatility of its main revenue source.
The state gets 85 percent of its revenue from oil production, but the state’s largest field, the North Slope, is experiencing a 6 percent decline yearly.
Sen. Gary Wilken, R-Fairbanks, a former and longtime member of the Senate Finance Committee, points out that five years ago, the budget balanced at $25 dollars a barrel. Today it balances at $61 a barrel.
Wilken said the tendency of lawmakers, from both the administration and the Legislature, to put the best light on spending with creative budgeting has complicated the budget picture over the years.
Conflicting views on how to deal with the massive surplus further confuse the matter, he said.
“Problems now are with new-found wealth. What a wonderful problem to be burdened by savings: how to classify it and how to save it. I go back to 1999, we would have died to have that problem,” said Wilken.
Palin and lawmakers agree they need to save much of this year’s surplus for the lean years ahead.
Next year’s surplus is expected to be much smaller and, with oil production in decline and oil prices uncertain, experts say the state could be back to deficit spending by 2010.
That prediction exacerbates the need for a common yardstick to measure the budget if they want to control growth in spending, lawmakers say.
“Anything that is done that doesn’t paint the true picture or has us falling off a billion-dollar cliff in four years, I stand firmly against because it is brain-damaging budgeting carried to the extreme,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Fairbanks.
Oil executives head to Alaska’s Senate
January 23, 2008
Jan. 23, 2008 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) –
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) - Fresh off having its gas pipeline proposal rejected by Gov. Sarah Palin, ConocoPhillips took its argument to the Legislature.
Company executives were scheduled to state the case for their pipeline proposal to the Senate Resources Committee late Wednesday.
Last November, the Houston-based company submitted what it called an alternative to the state’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA.
Two weeks ago, Palin said the company’s proposal gave the state no reason to deviate from AGIA.
The state wants a plan that guarantees progress toward pipeline construction and is friendly toward new exploration.
AGIA was designed to stimulate competition among oil and gas companies and independent pipeline companies.
Five applications were submitted under the state’s terms, and only the one from TransCanada Alaska Company LLC/Foothills Pipelines Ltd., was advanced to a public comment period, which ends March 6.
ConocoPhillips didn’t apply under AGIA. Even though Palin rejected it, ConocoPhillips — the state’s largest oil producer — is trying to advance its plan with lawmakers.
But ConocoPhillips also said it first wants a long-term fiscal package to cover costs such as royalties and taxes before moving forward on a multibillion dollar investment.
That option failed under the previous administration, prompting Palin to chart a different course with AGIA and the intent of tapping the North Slope’s 35 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.
State Sen. Charlie Huggins, a Wasilla Republican who heads the Senate Resources Committee, says the Legislature will listen to ConocoPhillips.
‘All options have to be on the table,’ Huggins said.
‘I characterized it as a risk worth taking,’ he said. ‘Now I question that rationale because it appears it may become too risky as there isn’t any competition.’
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