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Coastal zone renewal bill dies in House Supporters can’t garner 21 votes needed to concur with conference committee changes to Senate version of bill; program dies June 30 Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Alaska House, which in mid-April passed 40-0 a bill to extend and revise the Alaska Coastal Management Program, on May 14 couldn’t find 21 votes needed to concur with the Senate’s version of the bill after it went to conference committee.
After a 20-15 vote the House took a long at ease while supporters tried to drum up that one additional vote.
Apparently they thought they had it, and another vote was taken, but with the same 20-15 result; the House adjourned until January shortly thereafter, leaving ACMP to die on June 30.
The Senate easily assembled the 11 votes required in that body to approve the conference committee version, voting 14-4 in favor.
Unease While House members felt comfortable with the original bill after weeks of discussions in House Resources and House Finance, comments on the floor May 14 indicated that not all members were confident they understood the implications of the Senate bill.
The House had rejected the Senate version of House Bill 106 and a conference committee was appointed.
The Senate had made a number of changes in the House bill (see story in May 15 issue,) but the conference committee made just one change, reinserting most of the definitions of local knowledge and scientific evidence the Senate stripped out of the House version. The conference committee did not add back in House language which said scientific knowledge would trump traditional knowledge, but did add under the duties of the Department of Natural Resources that DNR would “address conflicts between local knowledge and scientific evidence by determining the relative strengths of the scientific knowledge and the evidence supporting the local knowledge, and render a written decision.”
Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, the House Rules chairman, chaired the conference committee.
He said when the conference committee report was discussed in the House that while the definitions were added back to the Senate version, there were some other things he would have liked to have seen changed and said he would be voting against the bill.
Rep. Eric Feige, R-Chickaloon, co-chair of House Resources, where the first version of a compromise was forged earlier in the session, said he would be voting against the bill because the balance in the House bill — between coastal districts, the state and industry — had been lost in the Senate version.
House version offered Gov. Sean Parnell said in a May 12 letter to Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, co-chair of Senate Finance and a strong proponent of revising ACMP, that a path forward on ACMP would be the House bill. He told Hoffman that when the administration went into negotiations over ACMP in the House it was “with the understanding that, if a compromise bill could be reached, it would be endorsed by the Senate.”
Parnell said the administration “was surprised to learn that Senate Finance wanted to open up a new round of negotiations on many issues. Our negotiating team met with you and your staff and tried to reach an understanding on those issues.”
The governor said he made it clear that a compromise reached the first week in May was as far as the administration was willing to go.
Apparently that didn’t hold, as Parnell said in his letter that Senate Finance “is trying to move the goal post again.”
Disagreement on what happened
Sen. Donny Olson, D-Golovin, the Senate chair of the conference committee, said after the House gaveled out that there were no objections to the conference committee version when it passed out of the committee, “and unfortunately it took a turn for the negative” on the House floor.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, a member of the conference committee, said he was shocked by the House vote.
“We had unanimous support in the conference committee; nobody objected. … In fact, we were told that … they expected that the bill would pass in the House.”
House Speaker Mike Chenault, R-Kenai, said at a post-adjournment press availability that after the first failed vote on the conference committee report, the House sent the Senate a message suggesting a way forward was to accept the House bill, and also to accept the language change agreed to by the conference committee.
They chose not to accept that, Chenault said.
He said he later went down to speak to the Senate president, to make sure the Senate knew what the House was doing. He said he talked to their caucus and explained to them the offer on the table — and that staying in session for two or three days waiting to see if someone would change their vote was not an option.
The Senate caucus chose not to accept the House offer, Chenault said.
ACMP sunsets June 30 if not extended.
Asked if the governor planned to call a special session on ACMP, Sharon Leighow, the governor’s spokeswoman, told Petroleum News in a May 16 e-mail: “There are no plans to call a special session.”
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