The latest effort in lawmakers’ long-running push to restore a pension retirement for public sector workers in Alaska came to an end on Tuesday as lawmakers failed to override Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of the bill.
The 33-27 vote fell short of the 40 votes needed to enact House Bill 78, which would have given public-sector employees the option to opt into what backers conceded was a bare-bones pension system. Still, it’s the farthest the measure has advanced since lawmakers rolled back the pension system in 2006, teeing up the issue for 2027, when Alaska will have a new, potentially worker-friendly governor.
The veto of the legislation was long expected, given Dunleavy’s animosity against organized labor — the Alaska Supreme Court once found he had acted with “abundant evidence of anti-union animus” — but he seemingly tried to make a deal with lawmakers, offering to let it become law if they passed a massive subsidy for his natural gas pipeline megaproject.
Lawmakers tried and failed to make that happen on Monday, when House Majority Leader Rep. Chuck Kopp, a moderate Anchorage Republican who ran on restoring a pension, spearheaded an effort to ram the bill through as an amendment to a bill nearing the finish line.
Ultimately, that effort was hampered by insurmountable technical issues and failed to advance, and Dunleavy issued his veto of the pension bill just before midnight.
Lawmakers met in a joint session Tuesday afternoon, as required by the Alaska Constitution, to hear one last round of passionate arguments for the pension.
“House Bill 78 is not a retirement bill. It is a workforce bill, and it’s a resource development bill,” Kopp said. “We cannot build a gas line through this state unless we can retain our engineers. We cannot permit a mine when the permitting office turns over every 18 months. We can’t drill on the North Slope when the haul road isn’t being maintained. … Every business in Alaska depends on a functioning public sector underneath it.”
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, referenced a 2009 Scranton Times-Tribune article where Dunleavy talked about how great Alaska’s pension system was to him when he started working, where he said “I could retire with an income that many people would envy as a working income.” Wielechowski said if it was good enough for the governor, it should be good enough for younger Alaskans.
“Michael Dunleavy, when he said that, was absolutely right,” Wielechowski said. “He came, and he stayed for the pension, and it was very good to him. We should not be pulling up the ladder. He shouldn’t be pulling up the ladder, because it was good for him, and it was good for a lot of people in this room. We shouldn’t be pulling up the ladder.”
But pull up the ladder they did.
Sitka Sen. Bert Stedman, another longtime Alaska worker who has a state pension, insisted that young people don’t want to pursue a lifelong career anymore, and that chronic employee turnover is a product of people wanting to switch jobs rather than of jobs not being attractive. Then he joked that the most helpful thing he could do for the system is croak.
“I’m not wishing anybody to expire early, maybe a couple of my representatives would wish one guy would expire and help with the pension a little bit,” he said. “Have a heart attack and get it over with, but I’m part of the problem. I’m going to hang around for a while, and hopefully a long time.”
Other lawmakers have been similarly dismissive of younger Alaskans attempts to share in the same systems that benefited them. Tok Republican Sen. Mike Cronk said earlier this year that young people don’t want pensions, even though he admitted that he worked precisely 25 years as a teacher in order to get medical benefits from the state. Glenallen Republican Rep. Rebecca Schwanke said that her family cost the state $30,000 in medical costs last year, and that they couldn’t afford to bring anyone else on.
Stedman pointed out that his retirement benefits are protected under the Alaska Constitution, telling anyone who might be getting ideas about his benefits to think again.
“We can’t do that, and I’m not advocating that we change our constitution and strip retirement, guaranteed retirement benefits away,” he said. “I think that’d be one of the worst things we can do. So, I don’t want anybody to misinterpret what I’m saying.”
What’s next
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s push for the AKLNG project continued today with his call to hold a special session on the bill starting on Thursday, the day after the regular session is set to end.
He did not place the pension bill on the calendar.
That means that the pension, like so many other worker-friendly reforms, will have to wait for another governor.
The vote
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.
