The 33rd Alaska Legislature saw the most progress toward returning teachers and other public sector employees to a pension system, but that effort came up short on the penultimate day of session.
In a last-ditch attempt to break through the Republican-led House’s resistance to public pensions, pro-worker senators tried on Tuesday to add public pension legislation into a bill dealing with the state’s teacher shortage. While they initially got a win, adding it to the bill on a 11-9 vote, the measure was ultimately and unceremoniously withdrawn, putting an end to this session’s effort to improve Alaska’s retirement system.
The plan was rumored heading into the final days of the session, ultimately being proposed by Anchorage Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel as a floor amendment to House Bill 230. She and other supportive legislators have argued that the current system — which offers public employees a 401k-style pension while also exempting them from Social Security — has created a revolving door of public employees. Supporters argue the current system puts too much risk on employees, pointing to recent research that shows many employees are lagging well behind what’s needed to retire.
While the effort has made significant progress this session, it still faces considerable opposition from Republicans who argue that worker-friendly retirement plans are outdated. Even though several GOP senators conceded that they have cushy pensions ahead of them, they insisted that younger Alaskans are more interested in hopping from job to job and don’t want long-term careers.
That included Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, who conceded that he has pensions from both his time in the military and his time working for FedEx but insisted that younger people aren’t interested.
“They certainly want portability,” he said. “They don’t want to be stuck in that job for 30 years. That’s not how they operate. No matter what somebody tries to tell you, that’s not what they do.”
The measure also faced lengthy pushback from Senate Finance co-chair Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, who argued that Alaska shouldn’t commit itself to paying pensions, pointing to the financial troubles created by the state’s early public pension system, of which he is a beneficiary. He argued that it was wrong to saddle future generations with the costs of pensions, a point that seems to run in conflict with his support of ballooning the senior property tax exemption, a move that would shift billions of dollars in property tax burdens onto younger Alaskans.
While the amendment passed on an 11-9 vote, because it’s a House bill, it would have required a supermajority to approve the title change for the bill. Lacking those votes, the Senate ultimately rescinded action on the amendment, and Sen. Giessel withdrew it.
“It didn’t seem that it was going to make for a productive end to the session,” she told The Alaska Beacon on Tuesday evening after the Senate gaveled out for the day. She told the outlet that the chances of the pension bill passing are “probably zero — but that doesn’t mean it’s not a critical issue, especially for our workforce.”
Why it matters
While a disappointing outcome for the public employees who’ve been asking for the pension ever since the state shifted away in the mid-2000s, the session underscores an immense amount of progress that has been made on the issue. The Senate approved the pension change as standalone legislation this year, a first. While House Republican leadership quashed the bill, socking it away in a special committee that only met once, those Republicans only hold a narrow majority. A few flipped seats would likely give the legislation a clear runway to passage.
However, given that Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy would likely veto such a measure — which would require a two-thirds majority of all legislators to override — it’ll likely take more than a few flipped seats to make it a reality.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
