The latest version of the plan to restructure the Permanent Fund appeared at 3 p.m. Monday, reached the Senate floor by the dinner hour, and won approval only after the House signed off on a scaled-back oil and gas tax credit bill.
If you want to build confidence among Alaskans to support the biggest change in the history of the Permanent Fund, you don't do it by introducing a revised version and passing it the same day.
But politics is about what's possible, not about perfection. The 14 senators who voted for Senate Bill 128 took a necessary step toward economic stability for Alaska.
Most of what the bill contains has not changed from the previous version, which received many hours of review and lots of public comment.
The House Finance Committee has scheduled another hearing Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. in Juneau. The committee should take public testimony, allowing Alaskans a chance to fine-tune a real response to the most important issue facing the state.
At this point there are not enough yes votes in the House to pass the bill, as a sense of urgency is lacking.
Maybe the no votes will find urgency in the latest declaration from a Standard & Poor's analyst Thursday: "We may lower Alaska's credit rating if state policymakers defer adopting fiscal reforms to correct the state's structural deficit."
Democrats are mad that the Legislature caved in on oil tax credits and refused to deal with an income tax, while conservative Republicans want lower state spending, at least in theory.
The Republicans say unidentified hundreds of millions can be cut from spending, while Democrats say hundreds of millions can be raised with taxes. There are dividend demagogues on both sides and some are guessing that oil prices will shoot back up to save us all from ruin.
I have written several times this year that the state needs a balanced solution. This is not a balanced solution, but it's better than no solution and it's not the final word.
There will be room to argue spending and taxes next year, only the state will be in a much tighter bind if no action is taken this year to extend the life of the Constitutional Budget Reserve.
What might get lost in the crossfire is the math, which belongs to neither party.
The state financial problem is larger than the combined total of any of the alleged spending/taxing solutions.
The numbers show that the earnings of the Permanent Fund have to be the major element in any plan to put Alaska finances on a more stable foundation.
The wait-another-year coalition consists largely of people who are so focused on the coming election that they don't see the danger of the coming years.
This financial challenge is measured not in hundreds of millions but in thousands of millions.
The most worrisome thing about the waiting coalition is that no one — Republican or Democrat — has offered anything but vague talk about how to fund the budget next year or the year after that, when billions more will have evaporated.
Under any scenario, money will come from Permanent Fund earnings, but how much, and how much would be left for dividends?
The advantage of acting now is that guidelines to govern withdrawals, while they can always be changed by a future Legislature, are preferable to no guidelines.
Those who see all of this in terms of the dividend need to consider that there could be no dividend in a few years. In addition, the programs most vulnerable to the biggest future cuts are those that lower-income Alaskans rely upon the most.
"We are living on borrowed time," Bethel Sen. Lyman Hoffman said Monday. "Even though we have great savings, the savings are only available to us for only two more years and we are going to be broke. We will not be able to pay our bills."
Anchorage Sen. Lesil McGuire said it was probably the most important bill that anyone in the Senate would deal with.
The bill approved by the Senate will move Alaska part of the way toward a sustainable budget. It's not perfect but it's possible to get it approved.
In the years ahead, the fight for balance will continue. There will be hundreds of millions to argue about for all those who want to cut spending and oil tax credits, increase taxes, pay for schools and bring back the capital budget.
Dermot Cole is a Fairbanks columnist. The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com.