JUNEAU -- A Senate committee headed by Sen. Mike Dunleavy, R-Wasilla, stripped all state funding for Alaska's public broadcasting system during a hearing late Thursday.

Gov. Bill Walker and the state House already proposed significant cuts to the broadcasting system in the early stages of this year's budget process, in which the state is trying to close a $3.5 billion deficit.

The budget passed by the House this month would slice the state's funding for public broadcasting by roughly $1 million, to a total of about $3 million. Dunleavy on Thursday submitted a proposal that contains no state general funds for public broadcasting.

"This is a stunner, to go to zero in the Senate," Jamie Waste, the executive director of Alaska Public Broadcasting Inc., said in a phone interview.

The cut isn't final. The budget proposal, which passed Dunleavy's subcommittee, goes next to the full Senate Finance Committee, then to the Senate floor. Steep public broadcasting cuts that were proposed by a similar subcommittee in the House earlier in the budget process were also reduced.

In a brief interview after the hearing, Dunleavy said his proposed cuts are "not about whether a program is a good program or not."

"This is about reducing the budget," he said. "Can we afford to pay for public broadcasting and everything we want to pay for? We can't."

Dunleavy said he wasn't sure whether the cuts would affect the distribution of emergency messages, or whether it would force stations to close. But he said he has relatives in villages who have other sources of news.

Waste said the proposed cuts would have an "immediate, significant impact" on Alaska's public broadcasting system starting July 1, the beginning of the state's fiscal year.

Stations are in urban areas like Anchorage and Juneau and rural villages like Galena, Dillingham, St. Paul and Fort Yukon. Twenty of them receive 20 to 40 percent of their operating budgets from the state, and the proposed cuts could also put some of them at risk of losing federal grants, Waste said.

"You're not going to have a station that gets shut off on July 1," Waste said. "But I believe on July 1, the domino effect starts."

Dunleavy's proposal would also shut down a state-funded satellite television broadcasting system called the Alaska Rural Communications Service, said Sheldon Fischer, the commissioner of the state's Department of Administration.

The system, which costs about $1 million annually, distributes emergency alert messages in addition to programming. If it's shut down, those messages would only be available through public broadcasting, according to administration department officials.

At Thursday's hearing, Sen. Dennis Egan, D-Juneau, tried to amend Dunleavy's proposal to put funding for public broadcasting and ARCS back into the budget. Without the funding, there would be "no statewide news, no Alaska weather, nothing."

"Parents who depend on PBS children's programming will left in the dark," he said. "No more Big Bird."

His proposal was defeated by Dunleavy and the committee's two other members, Sen. Bill Stoltze, R-Chugiak, and Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Eagle River.

Dunleavy said he thought the proposed cut to public broadcasting would survive the rest of the budget process, saying he was optimistic that the Senate "grasps the magnitude" of the state's fiscal problems.

But Egan said in an interview that he expects his colleagues to start hearing loud objections, which he predicted would "hit the fan" next week during public budget testimony.