“Frankly, we have a bit of sticker shock from that,” Stedman said in Juneau March 11. “This is $350 million more than last year’s capital budget. We may wind up spending this much in the end, but we have to make sure it is justified.”

The Senate Finance Committee is now working through the 520 separate requests made by the administration in the capital budget, Stedman said.

“We’ve taken the budget back to a zero-based budgeting approach where we start with only what we are required to fund through the state match to federal programs. We’re having the agencies come in one by one and justify their requests,” Stedman said.

This is a different approach than taken last year, where the Legislature more or less took all of the administration’s capital budget requests as a given.

The Senate Finance Committee will work with the administration’s requests before considering other requests, Stedman said.

“We’ll be spending the next few days working with the governor’s office and finding out what their comfort range is,” in terms of an overall spending target, he said.

Stedman said he discussed the committee’s zero-based budget approach with the governor in a March 11 meeting. “It’s a robust process. She said she thought it was a good idea,” Stedman said.

Stedman is in charge of the capital budget on the Senate Finance Committee.