Gov. Mike Dunleavy urged legislative action to guarantee the future of the Permanent Fund Dividend, Permanent Fund, and Power Cost Equalization Endowment Fund as the legislature convenes for the third special session of the year.
Dunleavy said:
“If you remember back in the spring, we divided the special session out. We announced the special session months ago so that we could deal, first in the late spring with the permanency of the permanent fund with the ERA going to the constitution and the POMV. The legislature, at that point, was unable to come up with a solution. So now we had to roll that part of the sustainable fiscal plan into this part, which was really supposed to be about the legislature’s discussions on any potential revenues that they want to look at and things like the constitutional spending limit that we want to make sure is in place to protect the people of Alaska. So, we know what we have to do, the question is, is there going to be the political will and the question is, is there going to be enough people to come around or coalesce around a solution?”
The legislature narrowly passed the FY22 budget at the end of June and included a PFD amount of $525. To avoid the government shutdown, Dunleavy signed the budget, but vetoed the PFD appropriation. Following action on the PFD policy in this special session, the governor will issue an appropriations bill to fund this year’s PFD as well as the Constitutional Budget Reserve reverse sweep funding.
If the legislature adopts the 50/50 plan by statute only, but rejects a constitutional amendment, would Gov. Dunleavy accept it or veto it?
“that’s an interesting question. Again, what happens is we then have a statutory change without the protection of the constitution. Without those constitutional protections, it’s really, still filled with some uncertainty going forward. The idea, again, of a constitutional amendment is to give it permanency so that we don’t have to revisit this. So, my preference would be a constitutional amendment. Again, I don’t want to get ahead of myself but I’ve been pretty consistent on that in order to make sure that we don’t have to revisit this again.”
Even though Gov. Dunleavy anticipates the issues to be solved within the next 30 days, there is the possibility of a fourth special session:
“If we don’t call them back in, then how does this get solved? I would hope that they could call themselves back in. I would have hoped that this would have been solved months, if not, years ago. But if we don’t do that, then we don’t have a Permanent Fund Dividend, we don’t have solutions to the fiscal issue going forward. So what we end up doing is continuing to have uncertainty and, to some extent, chaos.”
