JUNEAU -- Some Democratic lawmakers say they've lost a tool for bipartisan cooperation following a committee vote Tuesday evening to change the Alaska Legislature's procedural rules.
The Legislative Council -- a committee with members from both the Senate and the House charged with taking care of the Legislature's internal business -- voted unanimously to get rid of a rule allowing more than one legislator to have their name listed at the top of a bill, a practice known as joint prime sponsorship.
A staff member for House Speaker Rep. Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, who made the proposal, said at the 20-minute meeting that the change was designed to clear up a number of procedural problems and cut the extra staff workload stemming from the 20-year-old rule providing for joint prime sponsorship.
But Rep. Chris Tuck, D-Anchorage, said in an interview Wednesday that there was an "alternate motive" to the proposal: "It might be another excuse not to move Democrat bills."
"It is a big deal," Tuck said. "And I don't think anyone in the building knew what was going on."
Tuck said the existing sponsorship rules gave Democrats a way to get more traction for their ideas, which rarely move forward in the Republican-controlled House and Senate.
The Legislature passed just six of the 149 bills with minority members alone as prime sponsors in its last two-year term compared with four out of 17 bills with sponsors from both parties, according to an analysis provided by the state's legislative library.
But several questions surrounding the rules and procedures of joint sponsorship had not been addressed since it was first introduced in 1993, Chenault said in an interview Wednesday.
What happens, for example, when one of the joint sponsors wants to withdraw his or her bill and another doesn't? Can each sponsor draft their own estimate of the financial impact of the bill? And should jointly sponsored bills count toward each legislator's limit of 10 bills that can be filed before the beginning of the session?
Legislative staff, Chenault said, have been "kind of making it up, because the rules don't really specify."
In a memorandum submitted with Chenault's proposal, Doug Gardner, the director of the Legislature's legal services office, said the problems could be fixed with a "'clean-up' bill." Or, Gardner said, the rule allowing for joint prime sponsorship could simply be deleted, the option Chenault chose.
Wright, Chenault's chief of staff, said they opted for deletion because fixing the rules would have been a more complicated, lengthy process.
Sen. Gary Stevens, the Kodiak Republican who chairs the Legislative Council, said deletion was "cleaner," then added: "I don't think it harms anything to have it gone."
Chenault dismissed Democrats' assertions that the change was politically motivated, and he said minority members who want to collaborate with Republicans can sign on to a bill as co-sponsors -- another procedural move that allows legislators to offer a show of support for the prime sponsor of a measure.
"I don't look and see if it's a minority or minority member that's the prime or the co-prime," sponsor Chenault said. "I've got some good friends that put in bills I don't like."
Chenault pointed out that a Democratic member of the Legislative Council, Juneau Rep. Sam Kito III, voted for the change. Another Democratic legislator, Sitka Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, was in the room when the measure was being considered and didn't speak against it, Chenault said.
Kito said in an interview Wednesday that he voted for the measure after hearing from Republican leaders that the rule allowing joint sponsorship was "not needed."
"If it's not needed, then we should be seeing more minority caucus bills coming to committee and being heard on the floor," Kito said. "My goal is to hold them at their word."
Kreiss-Tomkins, in an interview, said he didn't object to the change at Tuesday's meeting because "the will of the committee was very clear."
Over the last two years, Kreiss-Tomkins worked on two of the four bills with bipartisan prime sponsors that made it through the Legislature. He called the practice "a mechanism that incentivized collaboration, cooperation and bipartisanship," and said he had explored expanding the opportunities for legislators to jointly sponsor bills.
Through Tuesday, they were only allowed to do so before the start of the annual 90-day legislative session.
"Despite the outcome, I'm optimistic that there will still be a spirit of collaboration and bipartisanship without joint prime sponsorship," Kreiss-Tomkins said.