Senate approves $30 million in new road funds for Mat-Su as Legislature enters final days

Mat-Su is doing pretty well in the state budget, at least so far.

As this is written the state Senate has passed a budget that includes funding for a needed Palmer wastewater treatment plant upgrade and an emergency responder training facility in Wasilla.

In a late addition in the Senate, $30 million was added for road improvements in the Matanuska- Susitna Borough. This must be matched 50-50 by the borough, and can be funded from municipal road bonds already passed by voters.

That totals $60 million for new road work in the region.

The Senate’s budget additions must be approved by the House. Expectations are that a House-Senate conference committee will be appointed to work out differences between the two budgets, which is a normal procedure.

The budget must be approved by the Legislature’s final adjournment May 18.

Senators also approved $5,500 in Permanent Fund Dividends, or PFDs to citizens, which is a combination of a special one-time “energy” impact payment and the regular PFD for this year.

The expectation is that the House will not agree to a dividend this high, and a lower amount will be negotiated in the conference committee for the final amount.

Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, agrees with this assessment, “I expect it to be pulled down to something different,” Shower told the Alaska Beacon, a new news service covering Alaska state government.

Senate President Peter Micciche, R-Soldotna, shared that view: “I think the probability is probably there that the House does not support that (higher) level,” he said.

The Senate budget would create a budget deficit of about $970 million instead of the $1.2 billion projected earlier. The state has sufficient savings to cover that deficit at projected oil prices, but Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, warned of catastrophic consequences if oil prices are lower than expected.

The Senate [budget’s] biggest component is $3.6 billion for the cash payments to Alaskans, through the PFDs.

In other issues, a bill on education that is a priority for Mat-Su Sen. Shelly Hughes has hit a big bump in the House. The Senate passed Senate Bill 111 with a margin of 15 to 2 on April 12, but the bill has been held in the House Education Committee since then.

On May 10 the House committee surfaced a proposed substitute version of the proposed bill that adds several new programs and a major funding increase for schools. The main purpose of SB 111 is to fund new pre-kindergarten programs in the state as well as more intensive reading instruction in grades 1-4 and special services to aid teachers and local school officials if children fall behind in reading.

Alaska is now at the bottom of the 50 states in reading scores for fourth-grade children. The reading programs, and funded, added in SB 111 are based on successes in other states with intensive reading programs for children.

The pushback in the House came from several rural legislators who felt there wasn’t enough in the Senate bill to aid Alaska Native children, many who speak English as a second language, as well as children speaking other languages.

The Senate had included language to grant school districts more authority to develop special reading assessment tools and instruction materials appropriate for other cultures and languages, and the House substitute added to this including creating a new division in the Department of Education and Early Learning to help school districts with indigenous students.

The controversial changes came, however, when the House added new sections not dealing with reading instruction, such as authorization for an overall increase in school funding through the state School Foundation Program and a change that would require the state to offer a

“Defined Benefits” pension-type retirement as an option to the current “Defined Contribution” system, a 401-K type program.

Both changes are in other bills pending in the Legislature. One other change in the House bill certain to irritate Mat-Su’s Sen. Hughes is new language changing a “Virtual Learning Consortium” to a “Virtual Learning Library,” a sharp downgrade of Hughes’ goal of the consortium as a group including teachers specializing in on-line learning as well as materials and technical assistance to school districts.

The “library,” on the other hand, is simply a repository of materials for online instruction, something the state’s education department already has, in fact.

Hughes’ proposals for the more enhanced “consortium” is aimed at extending extra help to the growing number of correspondence and home-school students. The downgrade of this reflects a bias toward traditional “brick and mortar” schools.