EDITOR’S COLUMN: Stay classy, be heard

On Thursday at the Wasilla Legislative Information Office, the public was given an opportunity to speak to the House Finance Committee in Juneau via video teleconference.

Down in the Lower 48 this is a courtesy rarely offered. Down there, your elected officials go into session, work out a budget, pass some bills, don’t pass others, and if you don’t like what they come up with, you can vote the bums out the next chance you get. That’s about it, and there’s little John Q. Public can do while they’re in session.

Of course, these courtesies may be the least the Legislature can offer, given that the capitol is 800 miles away and farther from 90 percent of the state’s population base.

Having the capitol in Juneau is stupid; almost as stupid as the fisherman’s cap always worn on the house floor by Homer Republican and co-chair of the committee Paul Seaton, yet not nearly so stupid as his committee’s HB57, if you agree with the rationale given by the Mat-Su Borough contingent that was the first to speak from the Wasilla office.

The purpose of the public testimony was for citizens from Kodiak, Homer, Kenai and the Mat-Su to tell the legislators what services they’d like to see spared the significant cost-cutting measure. Most spoke about the importance of quality education and providing services for the neediest among us.

After patiently waiting his turn at the microphone, Borough Assembly member Dan Mayfield, from District 5, was the first to speak in Wasilla. He strongly urged the bill be rejected, saying it cuts state debt reimbursement by 41.8 percent, which would leave the Mat-Su Borough in a $9.5 million budget hole; this after the assembly dug its way out of a $5.7 million hole in 2016.

“This is the axe falling unequally on the Mat-Su Borough,” Mayfield said, adding that making up the cost would translate to a $100 debt upon each man, woman and child in the Mat-Su. “We believe this means a larger burden on us than anyone else in Alaska. This is a serious burden to our education system and our obligation to provide public services.”

Assistant Borough Manager George Hays followed, articulating many of the same fact points, insisting that a $9.5 million burden would simply be too much to handle, after already eliminating all overtime and instituting a hiring freeze in 2016.

“We were able to efficiently manage that, however, we do not have the ability to repeat it,” Hays said. “It would be — and this is not overstating it — devastating. It would mean permanent employment reductions, the loss of many borough services and it would hurt our hard-earned credit rating.”

Following Hays was Borough School District Superintendent Gene Stone, who, the night before delivered the bad news to his school board that massive cuts would be required to fulfill the district’s mandate to balance its budget, and even after that, might require a sales tax just to make ends meet.

Stone reminded the state officials that much of this quandary was due to the state reneging on promises to match half of the funds put forth to construct badly needed schools in the state’s fastest-growing area.

“There was a commitment made to be honored by existing bonds,” he said. “Pulling back on that erodes public trust and makes it difficult to pursue bonds in the future… If transportation isn’t funded, the difference comes right out of the classroom and hurts the 18,819 students in the Mat-Su Borough.”

All three delivered statesman-like, fact-based, reasonable arguments for voting no on HB57.

Then came time for the last four Wasilla office speakers, all representing the crowd that believes earnestly that the state government is wildly bloated and the halving of last year’s PFD by the governor was nothing short of criminal.

These are defensible arguments, but they had nothing whatsoever to do with the assigned topic.

Steve St. Clair, who ran for the Senate seat ultimately won by Shelley Hughes, took the most vicious trip down this rabbit hole, asking what happened to the totality of the predicted savings from closing the Palmer prison facility and from instituting the highly controversial crime bill SB91.

Things went from off-topic to off-color as St. Clair asked the legislators essentially whether they are crooked or just plain ignorant for not seeing things as clearly as he does. St. Clair insultingly asked the legislators on the video screen to nod to prove they were awake and demanded they answer his rhetorically loaded question.

Made uncomfortable by these attacks, Seaton tried to cut St. Clair off by saying his 2-minute time limit was up, which was clearly not the real concern, as many speakers before had gone over the time limit. The difference was, the previous speakers had gone over while maintaining a respectful and thoughtful tone.

The issue was the tone, and the damage inflicted by that kind of rhetoric doesn’t do a thing to prick the consciences of the ‘fat cats’ in Juneau, but it surely did plenty to make each of them forget the thoughtful and real-world impacts HB57 would have on the Mat-Su Borough.

Had it dealt with the issue at hand, this contingent should be all for the bill, which drastically cuts government spending, cutting the state budget ‘till it hurts.’

Instead, they preferred to rant wildly off-topic, which not only hurts the borough’s chance at retaining services, it hurts their own cause, which is defensible in a broad philosophical debate.

This kind of behavior gives the ‘fat cats’ easy license to simply dismiss the Mat-Su as a whole.

You could almost read their minds as the last four speakers spoke…

“Well, that’s the Valley for you.”

Yes, your state representatives work for you, and yes they may not always do what’s best for the state or strictly adhere to constitutional constraints. But speaking to them while they’re in session is a rare opportunity.

Don’t ruin it.

Stay on topic. Stay reasonable, and most of all, stay classy.