Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy today called a special session that will start at the beginning of August, ostensibly to push for policies that legislators have already rejected, but which will have the very real effect of helping his unpopular vetoes stand.
The creation of the Department of Agriculture and “education reform” are the two items officially on the special session call, set for August 2 in Juneau. However, the Alaska Constitution also requires that any vetoes be taken up during the session, which would include the governor’s landmark veto of public school funding, a veto of an oil tax transparency bill, another one that would have increased funding for teacher housing and one that would have limited predatory payday loans.
While school funding, the teacher housing bill, and the oil tax transparency bill — which aimed to get to the bottom of the Dunleavy administration’s suspiciously secretive handling of oil taxes — passed the Legislature with veto-proof majorities, that requires everyone to be present and stick to their votes.
Both of those could be challenging.
With at least one member of the Senate Majority unavailable because he’s on a military deployment, Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski took to social media to note that the timing appears to be squarely aimed at putting an override out of reach of legislators.
“The reason he is doing this is because the Legislature is required to vote to override vetoes on education and oil and gas audit bills — which potentially are worth billions of dollars in additional oil tax revenue to Alaska — immediately when they go back into session,” he wrote. “The vote will be very close and he knows at least one member is deployed in the military overseas, making it less likely the vetoes will be overridden.”
He added that the governor also specifically vetoed money from the Legislature’s budget to cover a potential special session for this year, which will require them to retroactively approve funding for it next year.
The absent lawmaker is Anchorage Democratic Sen. Forrest Dunbar, who is currently deployed in Europe with the Alaska Army National Guard through the end of the year.
That’s why legislators have been reluctant to call a special session and, instead, have aimed to take up the vetoes when they return to session in January 2026.
And while both the tax transparency and school funding measures passed with bipartisan supermajorities, the Dunleavy administration and the Alaska Republican Party have not been shy about pressuring legislators to change their votes to uphold his vetoes. They notably did just that with his 2024 veto of an increase to the baseline public school funding when several Republicans went from supporting the bill’s passage to upholding his veto.
Especially when it comes to education funding, there’s little room for legislators to lose votes. Legislators overrode his veto of the bill increasing the education funding formula by 46 votes, just one more needed to override his subsequent veto of the actual funding for the increase. Dunleavy’s budget veto marked the first time in state history that the state would be funding schools below what is laid out in state law.
Wielechowski said it’s unfortunately just the latest in a long line of Dunleavy bending the rules to his advantage — and the advantage of oil companies on the receiving end of the sweetheart deals the administration might be hiding — at the expense of everyone else.
“Real leaders do not game the system to benefit the already privileged,” he said.
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.
