Alaska House sends SB 91 rollbacks to Senate as special session drags on

Update, 1:00 a.m.

The Alaska House early Tuesday passed Senate Bill 54, the rollbacks to last year's criminal justice overhaul, in a 32-8 vote.

The vote, which reverses many of the pieces of last year's overhaul, Senate Bill 91, came after lawmakers considered a final batch of two dozen amendments to enlarge SB 54.

Nearly all of those amendments failed, with one notable exception a proposal from Eagle River Republican Rep. Lora Reinbold. The amendment, to add community service requirements for people convicted of vandalism, passed 23-17.

The final vote, at 1 a.m. Tuesday, saw broad support from both the minority and majority in the House. It came after a total of about 40 amendments over three days of floor debate, as well as an array of committee hearings.

The legislation now heads back to the Senate, which passed an earlier version of SB 54 in April by a 19-1 vote.

But the House heavily amended the Senate's legislation during the current special session. And it added several new provisions during its floor debate over the past three days, without cost projections or expert testimony about the impacts of the changes.

Gov. Bill Walker, in a prepared statement issued just after the Tuesday vote, said he looks forward to seeing the Senate approving the House's version of the bill.

But SB 54's original sponsor, North Pole Republican Sen. John Coghill, said Monday he's likely to ask his colleagues to vote against the House adjustments, which could force a potentially lengthy negotiation in a joint House-Senate conference committee.

The Senate judiciary and finance committees have scheduled a joint review of the legislation Wednesday afternoon.

Yes votes: Chris Birch, R-Anchorage, Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, Harriet Drummond, D-Anchorage, Bryce Edgmon, D-Dillingham, Zach Fansler, D-Bethel, Neal Foster, D-Nome, Les Gara, D-Anchorage, Jason Grenn, I-Anchorage, Jennifer Johnston, R-Anchorage, Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, Gary Knopp, R-Kenai, Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, D-Sitka, Gabrielle LeDoux, R-Anchorage, Charisse Millett, R-Anchorage, Dan Ortiz, I-Ketchikan, Justin Parish, D-Juneau, Lance Pruitt, R-Anchorage, Lora Reinbold, R-Eagle River, Dan Saddler, R-Eagle River, Paul Seaton, R-Homer, Ivy Spohnholz, D-Anchorage, Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, Dave Talerico, R-Healy, Geran Tarr, D-Anchorage, Steve Thompson, R-Fairbanks, Chris Tuck, D-Anchorage, Dean Westlake, D-Kotzebue, Tammie Wilson, R-North Pole, Adam Wool, D-Fairbanks

No votes: David Eastman, R-Wasilla, David Guttenberg, D-Fairbanks, DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, Sam Kito III, D-Juneau, Mark Neuman, R-Big Lake, George Rauscher, R-Sutton, Colleen Sullivan-Leonard, R-Wasilla, Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla

Original story: 

JUNEAU — The Alaska Legislature's proposed rollbacks of last year's criminal justice overhaul, Senate Bill 91, appeared to teeter Monday, as a key state senator said they go too far even as several House members still pushed to make them go further.

House members spent Saturday and Sunday doing the equivalent of open-heart surgery on the rollbacks: They approved a batch of amendments to the state's criminal justice laws during floor debate without the formal cost projections and expert witnesses that come during the committee process.

It took the House two days to slog through its first 20 amendments to Senate Bill 54, the legislation to reverse pieces of SB 91. And after nine hours of delays Monday, another two dozen amendments were still in the queue — suggesting that lawmakers could be in for a long night and even another full day of work Tuesday.

[What did Senate Bill 91 do? Read our series]

The still-pending amendments were largely from House members who support tougher criminal justice policies and longer prison sentences. If approved, those amendments could provoke even stiffer opposition from North Pole Republican Sen. John Coghill, the author of the original justice overhaul.

Coghill, in an interview Monday afternoon, said that even before the House took up any more amendments, he was already likely to recommend to his Senate colleagues that they reject the House's version of the rollbacks.

That rejection would force SB 54 into a conference committee, where teams of House members and senators would try to negotiate a deal to satisfy both chambers.

Even more problematic, Coghill added, is the chance that the deeply-divided, 40-member House could fail to find the support needed to pass SB 54 at all.

"They may not even be able to get the votes to pass what they've amended. And then what?" Coghill asked. "I don't know."

Frayed nerves

Coghill, in jeans and drinking his eighth cup of coffee of the day, spoke in an afternoon interview in his Capitol office. He was running on no sleep, having arrived back in Fairbanks from a conference at 3 a.m. Monday before boarding a flight to Juneau two hours later.

His predicament, 15 days into the Legislature's special session on crime and taxes, seemed to exemplify the frayed nerves at the Capitol.

Lawmakers are facing heavy public pressure to scale back SB 91, the criminal justice overhaul.

The legislation reduced prison sentences for all but the most violent crimes and promoted the use of less-costly alternatives, like enhanced supervision for defendants out on bail and expanded parole and probation.

The overhaul was based on research that showed longer prison terms aren't any more effective than shorter ones in stopping convicts from committing crimes once they're released, and can actually be counterproductive.

But legislative critics of SB 91 have tied it to constituents' complaints about a spike in crime, particularly in Anchorage — even though experts say that it's too early to establish that link.

The heated criticism of legislation seemed to peak over the weekend, when the House, in its debate on SB 54, voted 27-13 late Saturday against an amendment from Wasilla Republican Rep. Cathy Tilton that would have repealed nearly every aspect of SB 91.

[Critics, defenders of SB 91 square of as House begins debate on revisions]

On Sunday, House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, D-Dillingham, warned members that he'd contacted the Capitol's security chief about a social media posting "suggesting that there be retaliation against members of this body for actions that were taken on an earlier amendment."

A spokesman for Edgmon identified the posting as one on the Facebook page of Anchorage Republican Rep. Chris Birch. It came from the account of a man named Ashley Dahm, who posted a list of the House members who voted against the repeal amendment, wrongly referring to them as senators.

"I openly call for every Alaskan to steal and vandalize each one of these senators' vehicles since they refuse to repeal SB 91 and coddle the guilty," Dahm wrote.

A U.S. Army spokesman, John Pennell, said Dahm is a staff sergeant stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. The incident is under investigation by Army personnel and state troopers, Pennell added.

Asked about the post, Dahm, in a Facebook message late Sunday, insisted it wasn't a threat because "no harm is even considered or intended."

Balancing priorities

House members continued their work on SB 54 on Monday without further disruption, though a spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Public Safety confirmed that a state trooper took a morning walk-through of the Capitol after a request by the Legislature.

Monday's debate was scheduled to start at 9 a.m. But after beginning the session an hour late, Edgmon gaveled out after just a few minutes, telling a reporter that the House's majority and minority caucuses were trying to negotiate a way to speed up the process.

As speaker, Edgmon faced the delicate task of balancing the competing priorities of his own House members with those of Coghill's Republican-led Senate majority.

About half the members of the House want more aggressive rollbacks to SB 91, and even before debate resumed Monday evening, the chamber had already approved several amendments over the weekend to toughen Alaska's criminal laws.

Three of the amendments lengthened sentences for petty theft and low-level felonies. Another forces convicts to wait longer before they can be discharged from probation and a fifth lowers the standard to convict someone of riding in a stolen car.

The most strident SB 91 critics — Republican Reps. Lora Reinbold of Eagle River and David Eastman of Wasilla and Democratic Rep. Andy Josephson of Anchorage — still had more amendments chipping away at the original overhaul.

But any additional amendments to SB 54 were likely to face objections from Coghill in the Senate.

And such changes could also jeopardize the potential for the rollbacks to even pass the House, with defenders of SB 91 saying Monday that they might not be willing to support such substantial changes.

By reinstating longer sentences, SB 54 could jeopardize the savings from SB 91's shift away from prisons that were supposed to go toward rehabilitation and drug treatment, said Juneau Democratic Rep. Sam Kito III.

"If we push back too far on SB 91, then we lose that savings," Kito said.

Even before SB 54 was amended on the floor, the Alaska Department of Corrections projected that it would boost the state's prison costs by more than $3 million a year.

The legislation, Kito added, has "pulled back a lot of the things that SB 91 has done to move our justice system forward."

'Too critical'

Edgmon, in a brief interview Monday evening, said he's still confident the House will get the 21 votes needed to send SB 54 to the Senate.

"I think this bill is just too critical," Edgmon said.

But he acknowledged that it's hard to predict how far the House can go before risking that the Senate will refuse to go along.

"Somewhere in all this, there is a balance," Edgmon said. "At this point, we don't know where that balance is."

After being delayed much of the day, the House debate on amendments resumed Monday evening, with the potential to continue into Tuesday.

While the state Constitution allows the special session to run for another two weeks, lawmakers appear increasingly unlikely to go beyond the crime bill to vote on the wage tax proposed by Gov. Bill Walker as a way of reducing Alaska's massive deficit.

[New tax proposal from Gov. Walker would take 1.5 percent of wages]

The House Finance Committee canceled a Monday afternoon hearing with Angela Rodell, chief executive of the Alaska Permanent Fund — the $62 billion account that's expected to generate billions in investment revenue to complement the tax measure.

The Senate, meanwhile, hasn't held a hearing on the tax proposal, though one is scheduled for later this week. And Senate President Pete Kelly, in an opinion piece last week, blasted Walker's administration for relying on "doomsday" oil revenue forecasts to "rationalize a tax-and-spend agenda."

Walker hit back in his own opinion piece Monday, saying Kelly was making unfounded "fabrications." And Walker again pushed for his tax proposal, which would raise an estimated $300 million.

"The time to act is now," he wrote.