Juneau -- Good morning. This is Speaker of the House Brian Porter. Last week the House passed a Supplemental Budget bill. This is the measure that the Legislature deals with every year, in which we pay the bills for disasters, emergencies, and other events which have occurred since the end of the previous session and which no one could have anticipated. The Supplemental did, however, occasion some controversies, and it is those controversies I would like to discuss this morning.

There has been an impression created - and in no small part by Juneau's Senator - that the Republican Majority in the House refused aid for the western Alaska fisheries disaster and that this was an urban-rural issue. Quite frankly, this is nonsense. The Governor requested $9.6 million for this purpose; the House funded $8 million. The balance of the request was for capital projects, which the Finance Committee will consider soon when preparing next year's budget. Characterizing this as a refusal to fund disaster relief is a bit disingenuous.

The other major piece of misinformation in circulation concerns Power Cost Equalization, or PCE. The House rejected adding $1.4 million to this fund. What one must realize is that the Legislature last year appropriated $17 million dollars for PCE. It was budgeted to cover the entire fiscal year. If you or I were given a flat sum of money and told it had to last until a certain date, I think we would try to even-out our expenditures across the entire period of time. For the record: state law requires this to be done. But the Division of Energy spent the entire $17 million on a spending schedule they had to know didn't match their appropriation. It may be they are the only people in Alaska who haven't figured out that there is a fiscal crisis in the state!

What concerns me most, however, is not the political conflicts surrounding individual appropriations. Rather, it is the clear pattern of public utterances we've been hearing which seem to be designed to drive wedges between rural and urban Alaskans. The true nature of this tactic is often disguised by a surface appearance of this being just another controversy between the Majority and the Minority. But it's much more than that. It is a battle over who we are and who we will be. Are we Alaskans all? Or are we individual groups sharing the same part of the earth and suspiciously eyeing each other across artificial barriers? Is Alaska to be the Great Land? Or will we become like Eastern Europe, neighbors perpetually fighting and trusting no one?

There will always be legitimate differences of opinion, but I urge all Alaskans to watch for these attempts to divide us and to reject them. We might also watch for, and reject, those who seem to be sowing these seeds of rural-urban discontent for their own purposes. Benjamin Franklin, I think, put it best: "We must all hang together," he said, "or, surely, we will all hang separately."

This House Speaker Brian Porter. Thanks for listening.