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The Associated Press

The Associated Press

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Capital Focus

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JUNEAU -- Lawmakers cried foul and Gov. Sarah Palin promised cuts on Sunday as state lawmakers gave final approval to two capital spending plans.

Minority lawmakers in both bodies complained that the capital budget and a bond package for transportation projects unfairly favored some districts over others.

“I don’t mind being pushed away from the trough,” Sen. Gary Wilken, R-Fairbanks, said before a floor vote on the budget, “but I think you ought to be able to at least touch it.”

The $2.7 billion capital budget passed the Senate 15-5 on Sunday with all five minority members voting against it. The bond package, which includes $315 million in projects, passed the House 24-16, with two majority members and 14 minority members opposing the bill.

At a news conference after the votes, Palin criticized the overall size of the budget and promised to trim it.

“There’s definitely going to be some reductions,” she said.

The two spending bills raised concerns from some lawmakers over how the money was distributed around the state.

In the capital budget, election districts represented by the two Senate Finance Committee co-chairs got several times more money than other districts. The bond package also favored the districts of the co-chairs, Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, and Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel.

Wilken pointed to the regional breakdown in explaining his vote against the capital budget, and Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage, openly accused Stedman of stacking the bond package with money for his district.

“I don’t think that as a legislator, you should just look out for your district,” he said.

But other lawmakers defended the distribution of funds.

Rep. Kyle Johansen, R-Ketchikan, whose House district is included in Stedman’s Senate district, suggested it was OK for lawmakers to favor their districts when they got into power.

“You only get there once in a while,” he said, adding that things balanced out over time.

Rep. Ralph Samuels, R-Anchorage, said he thought the balance in the bond package was pretty fair and added that voters could always turn the package down if they thought it was unfair. The bond package will need public approval at the general election this fall.

“It will be the people of Alaska spending the money,” Samuels said.

Palin also expressed concerns about the two spending bills, but said she would let the voters decide on the bond package.

With the capital budget, she said she and her administration would scrutinize every item, including the ones she had requested, and work toward her original spending goal of about $2 billion.

Palin said lawmakers were expecting her to cut things and suggested they were even relying on her to keep the budget at a reasonable level.

“I think the sense was, ‘We’ll go ahead and put it in there because she’s going to cut anyway,’” she said.

Local lawmakers had mixed reactions to the two budget bills.

Sen. Joe Thomas, a Fairbanks Democrat and majority member, said he didn’t expect the governor to cut anything from the budget and hoped she wouldn’t.

“I hope they would look at it and educate themselves on what these projects mean,” he said.

Rep. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat in the House minority, called the budget “reckless” and said he hoped Palin would cut things.

Thomas added that he thought the Fairbanks area made out fairly well, assuming the bond package passes, while Wilken said he thought Fairbanks was treated unfairly.

Kawasaki and Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole, both voted against the transportation bond package, which includes $45 million for two Fairbanks projects.

Coghill said he was protesting using bonds for things like road maintenance rather than new construction projects that Alaskans could choose to fund or not. He said he would have liked to see a new biological sciences facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a new state crime lab in Anchorage, and other projects in a bond package instead.

Kawasaki said he was concerned that the projects in the package didn’t get much public vetting and that using bonds would add to the state’s debt load for decades.

“I don’t know if I’d say, ‘Don’t vote for this bond package,’” he said, “but I think we have to be really forward what it does.”