Is industry paying to subvert public will?

MYRL THOMPSON/Juneau Report

March 20, 2007

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the weekly Juneau Report newsletter of Capitol watchdog Myrl Thompson.

If you spend enough time in Juneau hanging around the Capitol building, you'll become numb from the endless supply of witless platitudes and flawed reasoning. With a &#8220citizen legislature,” that may just be par for the course, and that, in itself, may not be an insurmountable problem, if party politics doesn't come into play.

The problem is, some of our elected officials appear to have been bought and paid for by special interests wanting a return on their large political campaign &#8220investments.” Legislators who accept these donations will go out of their way to say that the money they receive makes no difference in how they vote on anything. But a quick check of campaign disclosure listings and voting records casts doubt on this assertion.

The recently moved &#8220ocean ranger” bill, House Bill 164, by the House Transportation Committee, is a perfect example, albeit only the latest such example of how the system works.

Last August, voters approved the cruise ship initiative, part of which instituted a requirement that marine engineers, or ocean rangers, be onboard cruise ships to monitor pollution discharges, among other things, while the ships are in Alaska waters. The program was to be paid for with a portion of the tax that the initiative instituted.

HB 164 strips this requirement from the initiative.

It is bad enough that some legislators are willing to make significant changes to a newly passed initiative of the people. But to do so while reasoning that the voters just didn't understand what they were doing adds insult to injury.

Those same legislators have no problem with the intelligence of voters when it comes to electing them to office. But somehow, initiatives are different, in their point of view.

I'll take another approach. If voters knew what I know about how these officials act and conduct business here in Juneau, few of them would ever get re-elected. Initiatives, on the other hand, are the people's response to legislators who are not being responsive to the needs or wishes of Alaskans.

Legislators recently made our constitutional right to put initiatives on the ballot even harder to accomplish. Now some legislators have the nerve to second-guess voters after we were forced to address a problem that they, themselves, refused to address.

The cruise ship industry cannot afford to buy off all Alaskans, but it looks like they may be able to procure enough legislators to get what they want, despite us.

The House Transportation Committee has the unusual distinction of being chaired by a first-term lawmaker, Rep. Kyle Johansen, a Republican from Ketchikan, despite the presence of more senior majority legislators on the committee, such as Mat-Su's own Vic Kohring and Mark Neuman.

Prior to winning election to the Legislature, Johansen was a lobbyist for the city of Ketchikan, whose economic lifeblood is the cruise industry. The city was openly opposed to the cruise ship initiative.

The ocean ranger bill passed out of Johansen's Transportation Committee bill on a party-line vote, a gift to the cruise ship industry and a direct slap in the face to voters. Only Mike Doogan of Anchorage, the only Democrat on the committee, voted to not approve the bill.

After checking cruise industry donations to the five members who did not oppose passing the bill, one thing is abundantly clear - they all received substantial cruise industry donations.

Johansen and Kohring, the two who voted in favor of passage, received the most industry donations, some from executives from as far away as Florida and California.

Reps. Craig Johnson, Anna Fairclough and Neuman all voted &#8220no recommendation” on the bill, effectively ensuring its passage. All three received healthy out-of-state industry donations, as did the state Republican Party.

Equally suspicious is that first-term lawmakers Fairclough and Johnson received donations before it was even known - at least by the public - that they were going to be on the Transportation Committee.

The bill is headed next to the House Finance Committee, whose co-chairs, Reps. Kevin Meyer, R-Anchorage, and Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, both received cruise industry donations, even though both ran unopposed.

The plot thickens.

In fairness, it may be possible that cruise industry donations had nothing to do with the bill or its easy passage. But doesn't it strain credulity just a bit to dismiss all these factors as random, interwoven coincidences?

Anyone interested in seeing the details can contact me or check out candidate disclosure records at APOC's Web site, www.state.ak.us/apoc.

Myrl Thompson is a citizen lobbyist and former independent candidate for state House in District 15. To subscribe to the full weekly Juneau Report, contact him at myrl@ak.net.