NOTN- Juneau residents turned out Thursday evening for a legislative town hall at the Mendenhall Valley Library with Juneau’s delegation.
State Senator Jesse Kiehl and Representatives Sara Hannan and Andi Story met with constituents to share updates from the current legislative session and hear directly from the community.
“Mostly, the reason we’ll do this is to hear your questions or hear your comments. By golly, we need to hear from you. You’re who we work for.” Said Kiehl Thursday morning.
Attendees asked about a range of issues facing Juneau and the state including disaster response, Representative Andi Story assured constituents that the legislature is speaking with Alaskaa ‘s congressional delegation to come up with long-term mitigation plan for glacier lake outburst floods.
“Everyone’s living with a lot of stress, it’s emotionally draining when its your home.” Story said, “We know August is coming around, we’re trying to repair the HESCO barriers, we are trying to do what we can.”
Most prevalent was the budget, and more specifically, the Governor’s recently proposed fiscal plan, currently making its way through the legislature.
“What we have to do is have a balanced budget.” Story said, “We don’t have to pass any policy at all, but every year we have to come together to provide a balanced budget to meet our constitutional budget requirement.”
The Governor’s sweeping fiscal plan includes Alaska’s first statewide sales tax in more than four decades. The proposal would create a year-round sales tax, 4% in the summer and 2% in the winter, running through 2034.
“It would add on top of local sales tax, and it would override any local sales tax decisions.” Kiehl said, “So Juneau voters just voted to take sales tax off of food. This will put sales tax back on all food, that’s an issue.”
If adopted the tax could potentially raise over 800 million dollars a year by the early 2030s.
The plan also includes a constitutional amendment to set a “50-50” Permanent Fund Dividend, which would amount to roughly $3200 per recipient.
“What the governor used to propose, was just take more than we can sustain out of the earnings reserve. Great, big draw.” Kiehl said, “So I applaud the Governor for saying, okay, that old idea of his doesn’t work. His proposal takes that cap, and it says we’re going to draw 5% we’re going to split it 50-50, between public services and PFDs. but you can only do that if we spend even less on services than we do now.”
Kiehl said the Governor’s proposal could underfund schools and building maintenance.
“The state’s going to crumble and fall down if we do that, the math doesn’t work.” He said,”Could we protect a dividend? Yeah, but the simple fact is,
we’re not gonna get the votes to raise taxes to increase the PFD from where it’s been. We should stabilize the PFD, but if we’re talking about adding taxes to Alaskans and Alaska businesses, we’re not going to do that to pay out a bigger check than we’ve been paying.”
Representative Hannan hinted at an opportunity for residents to publicly testify at a Senate Finance meeting next Thursday, this has yet to be confirmed on the Alaska State Legislature website.
The meeting took place in person and was live-streamed on Facebook.
