Nine members, two chambers, one mandate: work out whether the equalization formula under §12.8 needs rewriting. The Joint Committee on Fiscal Equalization has not met since the day it received the answer to the question it spent its first session deciding how to ask.
That answer, when it came, split cleanly down the middle. The Executive Monitor certified no operational failure — the mechanism does exactly what the statute tells it to do. It also published, unprompted, the numbers the statute didn't require it to publish: the median wait between a Territory filing a capacity request and that request receiving funding has gone from 2.1 years to 4.4 years since Year 10. The comparable figure for disadvantaged States has barely moved. The gap has widened in each of the last four annual certifications.
No failure, a governing document that only obligates a legislative response to failure, and a widening number that isn't one. That was the whole of it in September. It is still the whole of it now.
What the Silence Costs, Specifically
Korda Territory is one of five now past the three-year mark on a pending capacity request — a figure that was two as recently as Year 10. This paper is not aware of any request from Korda's own delegation for the committee to reconvene, and did not receive a response to one placed with the delegation's office this week.
That silence may mean nothing. It may also mean a Territory currently occupied with two statehood petitions and a Joint Monitor Council review has limited capacity left over to chase a formula committee that has given itself no deadline to act.
Nobody Has to Move
Chair Renata Kell's office did not respond to a request for comment on whether a second session is scheduled. Senator Aldous Fenn, who told this paper in September that he wanted the committee to use "finding first, response second — rather than backfilling the finding after the response is already decided," now has the finding. He did not respond to a request for comment either.
Neither silence is evidence of anything beyond itself. §12.8 ties the Legislature's obligation to a failure finding, and there isn't one. A committee with no deadline and no obligation is, procedurally, doing nothing wrong by doing nothing. The distinction between "nothing legally requires action" and "nothing is happening" is not one this paper is in a position to resolve. It is one worth naming plainly, since most coverage of this committee, including this outlet's own, stopped naming it in September.