The Alaska Legislature gaveled on Monday, marking the start of the 34th Legislature that will serve the next two years.
As was the case with the start of most sessions, the day was focused on the formalities of swearing in legislators and selecting each chamber’s leadership, but also came with an emphatic call to increase funding for the state’s public schools.
“We’ve seen exploding classroom sizes all across the state,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, the Anchorage Democrat who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, told media at an availability on Tuesday. “We’ve seen increased teacher vacancies all across the state and we have a real crisis in education. We have not increased the base student allocation since 2017, and with inflation, with rising costs, our schools have fallen behind. We need to desperately do something for schools this year and I would expect that you’ll see that in an education funding bill.”
Funding for public schools has been a perennial problem in Alaska. Base per-student funding — known as the base student allocation, or BSA — has stayed the same since 2017, lagging far behind inflation. Pandemic-era relief money helped cover that problem for years, but that money has expired and school districts have been forced to shutter schools and ax programs.
Schools, teachers, families and many of the legislators who make up the multipartisan coalitions have long called for a permanent increase to the BSA to address the district’s financial needs and bring some much-needed stability to the districts. Gov. Mike Dunleavy and many Republicans, however, have favored one-time funding that is easier to use as leverage in the budgeting process or for forcing votes on otherwise unpopular school policies.
At Tuesday’s news conference, Wielechowski reiterated that the Senate and House would be pursuing standalone BSA bills and keep school policy changes separate.
Dunleavy has suggested he would support an increase to school funding but as part of a larger package of still-unnamed education policy changes. Last session, some of the school policies he pursued was an expansion of the public charter school program and a Don’t Say Gay-style bill that would have restricted discussions of gender and sexuality in schools.
Other notes from the day
In the Senate, the 14-member majority selected moderate Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens for another term as Senate President. In the House, the 21-member majority put Dillingham independent Rep. Bryce Edgmon back in the Speaker’s seat, which he held from 2017 through 2020.
The new session marks the first time in recent memory that bipartisan or multipartisan majorities control both chambers, and it’ll also be the first time that the House has a majority of women. Among the 21 women in the Alaska House, the three Alaska Native women — Reps. Maxine Dibert, Nellie Unangik Jimmie and Robyn Niayuq Burke — are the most in the chamber’s history.
The alignment between the two majorities is unusual in Alaska’s recent history, particularly when they’re made up of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. It’s provided a lot of optimism and hope that they can deliver on longtime priorities like education funding, worker retention, election reform and a balanced budget.
Those are all priorities the Senate Majority outlined at its opening media availability on Tuesday, indicating close alignment with the House.
Worker retention
Both majorities are keenly interested in stemming the state’s ongoing outmigration and believe worker-focused changes such as higher pay, lighter work loads and a dependable retirement plan are part of the formula. Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, has already reintroduced her pension bill from the last session, proposing a decidedly non-deluxe public employee pension system. She noted at the availability that the cost of switching to the plan is modest — about $45 million annually — in comparison to its benefits of keeping talented and knowledgeable employees from moving to other states.
“It’s dependable but not fancy,” she said, likening her plan to a Chevy when the old plans that ended decades ago were gold-plated Cadillacs.
Election reform
Also on the agenda is an election reform bill that seems to be a bit of everything for everyone. Sen. Wielechowski said it’s set to be introduced shortly and would address the state’s voter rolls (there’s been a plan floating around that would shorten the time it takes to remove someone for inactivity), hasten results and also address the state’s witness signature requirement on absentee ballots, which he said is “meaningless.” The witness signature isn’t cross-checked against anything — Wielechowski noted officials said you wouldn’t get flagged for signing Mickey Mouse — so it’s never been used to catch fraud and instead has contributed to a disproportionate number of ballots in rural Alaska being thrown out.
A balanced budget
“There is no way that we can afford that,” was the blunt assessment from Senate Finance Committee co-chair Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, of the $3.5 billion deficit contained in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget proposal.
Hoffman and his fellow co-chairs, Sens. Bert Stedman and Donny Olson, shared a similarly chilly outlook on the budget this year. Stedman oversees the capital budget and said this year’s budget won’t include much new project spending. There also seemed to be little appetite for drawing down on savings, which would not only be politically tricky but could put the state in dire straits if oil prices fall.
The big driver of that $3.5 billion deficit is the governor’s dogged insistence on including a full dividend according to the long-ignored formula.
Stedman indicated that the Senate is largely coalescing around the status quo plan of a 75-25 split of the spendable revenue from the Alaska Permanent Fund between government spending and the dividend. But he said even hitting the 25% mark this year could be difficult.
“The statutory dividend doesn’t work,” he said. “I think that the sooner we can get the discussion underway within the state on revamping that formula, the better off we will be in our process.”
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 Bluesky.
