Seeing this city with the sun out and a cool breeze in the air is like seeing the inside of a nightclub when the lights are on – it’s jarring, like you’ve stepped into a whole different dimension. You come in January, having never spent time in Juneau – when the slush lies thick on the streets and a cold sleety wind blows – stalking around the streets in a raincoat doing the Watchmen Rorschach monologue to yourself, adding to the ambiance.

Now it’s positively touristy. Businesses are playing Wilco, Modern Lovers, and the Strokes with their doors propped open. In the wake of (I’m told) an uproarious folk festival volcanically lengthened by a Kamchatkan explosion, you can practically hear the bluegrass music still echoing through the air. The first cruise ship of the season has pulled into harbor. To paraphrase Joe McGinniss in his book “Going to Extremes,” If you come here for a week in July, you’d do anything to stay – but come for a weekend in January? You’d do anything to leave.

I’ve missed a series of shake-ups in the State House, including Representative David Eastman’s (R – Wasilla) moment of notoriety on the national stage, and the abscondment of the House minority while the House majority decided to tie education funding to the Constitutional Budget Reserve. But the session, despite an often-ignored 90-day limit, is far from over. There is still work to be done.

The Senate Finance Committee met on Wednesday, discussing the state’s operating budget. According to the presentation given by the Legislative Finance Division, at $73 a barrel of oil, the state runs a $1.4 billion surplus – before the PFD and any potential additional education funding. When education and dividend funding (even the 50/50 split) are factored in, the deficit jumps up to around $600 million, which begs the question that’s asked every session – how do we pay for it?

There’s an attitude, expressed by a generation of Alaskans that are old enough to remember a time before oil, that the state was financially better off before it became a petrostate, reliant on the whims of the global energy market. They don’t necessarily intend this as a condemnation of black gold itself, but rather as a wistful remembrance of a state that had to be financially lean and mean to pay for services. Rather than racking up enormous expenses when the price of oil was high, and having to cut said services when oil prices went down, pre-oil Alaska, in this worldview, had to take a longer look at things.

But in the end, that doesn’t particularly matter – the oil can’t go back in the ground. You can’t unring that bell. What you can (and are forced to) do, is reconsider priorities with regards to spending. Barring that, you can pray for a prolonged war in Ukraine and perpetual ill fortune on the House of Saud, so that oil prices will let you rack up a truly astronomical tab. It’s the American way.

On the House floor, punctuated by several 20-minute “at ease” periods, eleven different amendments to House Bill 104 were debated, rescinded, and (with the exception of one) not adopted. HB 104, a bill intended to streamline and expedite the sale of timber, sparked debate between members of the House. Some representatives wanted to edit the language to allow for more advertisement, for fear of ushering in sole-source contracts for timber salvage, while others wanted to expedite the process, given the shorter usable life of harvestable salvage timber.

Meanwhile, House Joint Resolution 11 was moved out of the Senate Resources Committee. HJR 11 is a joint resolution to address air pollution in Fairbanks, that simultaneously decries the EPA for setting unattainable emissions and energy standards. In the text of the resolution itself, the EPA’s reliance on electric heat pumps, low sulfur diesel, and seemingly out-of-touch emissions standards are called out as unrealistic, especially for winters in the interior, when wood-burning stoves are often the only cost-effective and readily available sources of heat.

David Pruhs, the mayor of Fairbanks, spoke in favor of the resolution, claiming the EPA was taking measures against the borough’s transportation and heating industries, without any solid evidence that those industries were negatively affecting air quality. Whether or not the resolution passes the Senate (I personally assume it will) and whether or not the resolution, once passed, has any meaningful effect on the interface between federal and state air quality is now no longer in the committee’s hands.

Finally, one of Anchorage’s more sordid crimes from 2022 may end up having some kind of positive effect for victims statewide, as Senator Matt Claman’s (D – Anchorage) bill, Senate Bill 53, was heard by the Senate Finance Committee. Angela Harris’s stabbing inside the Loussac Library in February of last year made headlines, not least because the perpetrator had a history of violence against women, but had been let go due to his incompetence to stand trial. Now Harris, testifying in support of Claman’s 5-year involuntary commitment bill, is helping make the case for victims of crimes like her own, in which the perpetrator could have been committed even though he was technically incompetent to stand trial.

Essentially (and there are technicalities to the bill that go beyond the scope of this column) SB 53 attempts to make it easier for offenders with a history of violence to be involuntarily committed, for a period of up to five years. In doing so, the intent is to keep violent people off the streets and out of the community, without incarcerating them. Funding, of course, will be needed, and precautions will have to be taken to ensure offenders maintain their civil liberties, but it’s supposed to be a step forward. Harris argued, during her invited testimony, that jail may not be the right place for these kinds of offenders, but the community certainly isn’t either.

Everywhere you go in the Capitol, the budget is on everyone’s mind. And for good reason – with this session’s vocal focus on increasing education funding, Governor Mike Dunleavy’s (R – Alaska) insistence on a higher dividend, and no agreement on how to cover the deficit – the priorities of legislators have to be weaned down to the bare minimum if the state is to maintain any modicum of fiscal responsibility.

Oh, and the intern is back!