Governor Bill Walker expressed his displeasure with the State House today, which again gaveled in and recessed with little progress on the state’s operating budget.
Gov. Walker: “If you went to the grocery store and you got a basket of groceries, but you only had enough to pay for a few of the items, that’s what we have in this situation, you’d have to go back and decide between, do you put back the medication, do you put back the baby formula, what do you put back? That’s the situation that we’re in. They gave us an expenditure side, but they didn’t give us the money to carry out. So we can’t go forward with preparing for 2016. We don’t have the funds to do that.”
Speaker Chenault insisted there was little reason to have Legislators in Juneau while the budget committee continues to meet. Republicans and Democrats are still at a stalemate over how to fund the state.
Walker said the state may be forced into a shut down later this year…
Gov. Walker: “David Teal, his estimate is September 1. We don’t want to have to do through that process. When is it that we run out of funding for the Alaska Marine Highway System? For the airports? For the functions that we use. How do we cover the Division of Corrections in our prisons? We don’t want to get remotely close to that. That’s where we’ve asked in our last cabinet meeting, we said, ‘Everybody get to me their shut down strategy. What would they do?'”
Today, just six of the House’s 40 members and three of the Senate’s 20 members were in Juneau for a technical session. The Senate will reconvene Friday; the House will gavel in again on Saturday.
