Though it’s been almost 24 years since Lisa Murkowski left the Legislature to go to work as a U.S. senator for Alaska, she remembers well the problems and challenges that confront state lawmakers — particularly the state’s chronic fiscal woes.

If not for tall stacks of federal dollars or high oil prices, the state would be unable to provide the services its residents and businesses need.

It’s been that way for the past several decades, jumping between years of large budget deficits plugged by drawing down savings, and years when the treasury runneth over because of war or a global crisis temporarily driving up oil prices and state revenues.

Nothing really has changed all that much since Murkowski won her first election to the Legislature in 1998. For far too many House and Senate members, the state’s fiscal plan is to pray for high oil prices, pray for federal aid, and pray they never have to vote on taxes or real budget cuts.

The senator did not invoke prayer in her annual address to a joint session of the state Legislature on March 31, but she did give a short class on history and civics.

“We know what the contours of a fiscal plan need to be,” she said after the speech, in a session with reporters. “But political will to make it happen — still waiting 20 years later.”

Murkowski knows how hard it is in Alaska to gather the political will to assemble a fiscal plan — something lasting that shares the cost of balancing the budget between everyone, something lasting that does not bounce up and down like the tides.

During her years in the Legislature, she was a member of a bipartisan group of lawmakers called the Fiscal Policy Caucus. Led by House members, the group met and studied and learned and debated how best to put Alaska on stable financing footing. They met during a time when the Legislature was drawing as much as $1 billion a year out of reserves to cover the budget.

The Fiscal Policy Caucus put together a plan that included a modest income tax, which wasn’t anything new for the state. Alaska had a personal income tax from 1949 to 1979, until oil wealth started flowing and lawmakers abolished the tax in 1980. But then oil production went into decline in 1989. Every time oil prices dropped, the state suffered painful budgetary heartburn.

The Fiscal Policy Caucus knew it would take more than an antacid pill to solve the problem.

They approved the income tax and took up other measures, which the Senate rejected.

Subsequent versions of a fiscal policy group have sprung up over the years, but nothing really has changed. There has been a rush of federal money in some years, but nothing with the word “permanent” attached. Besides, federal aid always depends on the whims of the president and Congress.

“Alaska will need a legitimate fiscal plan as the federal budget inevitably tightens,” Murkowski reminded lawmakers last week.

And oil revenues are just as unstable for the state treasury. “The (oil-price) windfall will only go so far and last so long,” she told legislators, referring to prices driven up by the Iran war. “We can’t count on anyone or anything to bail us out of our fiscal woes. Only a long-term plan will truly end the cycle of a boom and bust.”

Nothing will happen this year, but maybe next year, with a new governor and some new legislators, Alaskans will summon the political will. Wouldn’t that surprise the senator.