Alaska Legislature starts 2022 session with election on lawmakers’ minds.
Members of the Alaska State Senate leave their chambers after the 2022 Alaska Legislature convenes on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2022 at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau.
“It seems to me that folks are a little more risk-averse in an election year,” said Sen. Josh Revak, R-Anchorage. But Alaska’s House and Senate are deeply divided along ideological lines, and those divides haven’t changed in the months since the Legislature met last fall for its fourth special session of 2021.
Last year, some members of the House’s Republican minority, citing dissatisfaction with the majority’s handling of the budget, withheld their support for a procedural supermajority vote that allows the budget to take effect more quickly than normally allowed by the state Constitution. Speaker of the House Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, said members of the House majority haven’t discussed the timing of the budget, and majority members of the House Finance Committee said they haven’t discussed the issue, but other members of the House majority said they are prepared to advance the idea if negotiations break down between the majority and minority.
The preliminary spending plan introduced in December by Gov. Mike Dunleavy calls for diverting much of that money into next year’s state operations budget, freeing state dollars for use in a 2022 dividend that would match the amount paid for under a new dividend formula proposed by the governor.
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