By Bill Walker and Randy Hoffbeck

Admiral William McRaven once wrote, “A crisis is not like red wine. It seldom gets better with time.” Alaska’s fiscal crisis proves the point.

For more than a decade, Alaska has been paying today’s bills with yesterday’s savings. That’s not a fiscal plan. It’s simply putting off difficult decisions while communities like Homer live with the consequences.

People in Homer understand planning for the future. Whether you fish, own a small business, work in tourism, teach school or are raising a family here, you know you can’t keep spending your savings and expect everything to work out. At some point, you have to deal with the problem.

That’s where Alaska has been since 2013.

Within a year of our taking office, oil prices collapsed to $26 a barrel. At the same time, the full impact of Senate Bill 21 hit. Production tax revenue fell from more than $6 billion in 2012 to about $600 million just six years later. Together, those two events wiped out roughly $5 billion a year that had been paying for schools, public safety, transportation, ferries, fish and game management and other services Alaskans depend on.

A fiscal crisis doesn’t begin when the savings run out. It begins the day you start spending your savings to pay recurring bills.

When that happened, we believed Alaska had a choice. We could hope things would get better on their own, or we could deal with the problem while we still had options.

We chose to deal with it.

We brought hundreds of Alaskans together at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to help build a long-term fiscal plan. Then we took that plan across Alaska, holding more than 500 public meetings because we believed the solution belonged to the people, not just to politicians in Juneau.

None of those decisions were easy.

We reduced the state budget by nearly $1 billion before reducing the Permanent Fund Dividend. Reducing the dividend was the hardest decision I made as governor, not because of the politics, but because I knew it would affect you. It was never intended to stand alone. It was one part of a larger plan to stop the financial bleeding. Unfortunately, while pieces of that plan moved forward, including the Permanent Fund Protection Act and today’s Percent of Market Value draw, the broader fiscal reforms never happened.

Instead, we continued spending our savings.

Today, nearly $16 billion in available reserves has been used to cover deficits, and the underlying problem still hasn’t been solved.

Communities like Homer feel that uncertainty every year. School districts struggle to plan beyond the next budget cycle. Deferred maintenance keeps growing. The ferry system remains uncertain. The Department of Fish and Game too often lacks the resources to collect the science fishermen and managers need to make good decisions. Instead of talking about where Alaska is going, we’re still arguing over how to get through another year.

We think it’s time to finish the job.

That starts with modernizing Alaska’s resource tax system. We are proposing replacing the complicated production tax created under Senate Bill 21 with a straightforward 13% gross production tax. It is simpler, easier to administer, and more predictable for both the state and industry. Most major resource producing states use gross taxes for exactly those reasons.

We are also proposing a True Resource Dividend. It would be based on the value of the resources we produce, not on politics. It would guarantee a minimum dividend of $1,000 each year, with the opportunity to grow as Alaska responsibly develops more of its oil, gas, mining and other resources.

Most importantly, we need to stop governing from one fiscal crisis to the next.

With a stable fiscal plan, Alaska can once again forward fund education, fully fund Fish and Game so management decisions are based on science instead of politics, begin catching up on years of deferred maintenance, and give communities like Homer the certainty they need to plan and invest in their future.

Fiscal stability isn’t the finish line. It’s the foundation. Without it, every year becomes another debate over what we have to cut. With it, we can start talking again about what we want Alaska to become.

After 13 years of living off our savings, it’s time to solve the problem instead of managing it.

Bill Walker is a candidate for governor and previously served as Alaska’s 11th governor.

Randy Hoffbeck is a candidate for lieutenant governor and served as commissioner of revenue during the Walker administration.