Latest news with #AlaskaHouse
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Local officials warn of possible lawsuit in wake of Alaska governor's education funding veto
Then-Rep. Grier Hopkins, D-Fairbanks, speaks on the floor of the Alaska House, Wednesday, May 18, 2022. Hopkins is now the mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon) One day after Gov. Mike Dunleavy made a precedent-setting veto by cutting funding for the state's public school education formula, a group of city and borough leaders denounced the decision during a joint news conference, with some saying that they expect a lawsuit to challenge it. 'Everybody needs to start talking about what a lawsuit looks like,' said Rozlyn Grady-Wyche, a member of the Mountain View Community Council in Anchorage. Caroline Storm, of the Coalition for Education Equity, has been talking about a lawsuit for more than a year. On Friday, she said the coalition 'will file or be a partner in a lawsuit before next session, because it doesn't seem that between the Legislature and the governor, that they are capable of meeting their constitutional obligation to adequately fund public education.' State lawmakers this year voted for a bill that increases the base student allocation, core of the state's per-student funding formula, by $700 per student, overriding a Dunleavy veto in the process. But that formula is subject to the state's annual budget process, in separate legislation. If the formula is a bucket, the budget decides how full that bucket is. Until now, lawmakers and the governor have filled that bucket to capacity each year. This year, one of Dunleavy's vetoes took $200 per student from that bucket, cutting about $50.6 million statewide. For municipal officials, it's a significant problem because the ordinary local budget process is over, meaning that they will have to reopen their budgets and make additional cuts to public education. In some cases, those cuts will come atop school closures — including in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Kodiak and the Kenai Peninsula Borough — and other cuts that were already planned. 'It's a crisis for our state, and that's why we're all here today,' said Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Grier Hopkins during the joint news conference. On Thursday night, the Anchorage School Board voted to implement an immediate hiring freeze while it addresses the veto. The board had budgeted for a $560 BSA increase, thinking it was being cautious. Now that there's a $500 increase instead, ASD facing a $4.3 million budget gap. 'I cannot even imagine where $4.3 million is going to come from,' said Margo Bellamy, vice president of the ASD board. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche, R-Soldotna, said the veto has a 'fairly significant impact' in his borough, where voters may be asked to pick up the slack. 'This is essentially a tax shift. It's the state not meeting a constitutional expectation requirement, if you will,' he said. Penny Vadla, treasurer of the Kenai Peninsula Borough school board, said the impacts in her area will be largest in sparsely populated places. 'We're closing theaters, we're losing library aides in some places where that means that library in a small school will close down,' she said. 'The impact on larger schools is that they might become larger without the capacity to put more students in that building.' State legislators could override Dunleavy's cuts, but Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, and Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said they don't expect that lawmakers will be available until the 2026 Alaska Legislature begins in January. 'I'll certainly be getting on my phone and hitting the streets to urge our legislators here, in the borough, the Interior delegation, to override the veto,' Hopkins said. Micciche was critical of legislators' slow pace. Before becoming mayor, Micciche served as Senate president. Lawmakers, and particularly the presiding officers of the House and Senate, should have already scheduled a special session to consider a veto override, he said. 'You knew that there was going to be a second swipe by the governor,' Micciche said. If the Legislature stays on the sidelines, that would leave legal action as the only recourse for Alaskans seeking a quick reversal of the governor's action. Any legal argument is expected to revolve around the question of whether or not the governor's veto violates the Alaska Constitution's education clause. 'The Alaska Constitution clearly states that the legislators shall, by general law, establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the state, so that language creates a constitutional obligation to provide adequate and equitable public education,' said Grady-Wyche. 'If the state fails to meet this obligation by consistently underfunding schools, closing essential programs and/or making access inequitable across regions, it can be legally challenged in court,' she said. Storm, of the Coalition for Education Equity, has been watching the governor and Legislature closely for years and talking with other education groups in the meantime. The coalition is a nonprofit that has successfully sued to increase state school funding in the past. Storm said she sees a national pattern at work, with conservative and limited-government groups and officials attempting to favor charter schools over traditional public schools. 'This is a coordinated attack on public education as a whole, as part of a national trend, or as Project 2025 — one hundred percent — and parents need to really start thinking about what's going to happen when public education goes away, and what that means for their kid, because it's not going to be pretty,' she said. Storm wasn't in the news conference with municipal officials, who focused on the local consequences of funding — or not — public education. Micciche, who said he's 'not a courtroom guy,' cautioned that any lawsuit comes with risks: What happens if the plaintiffs lose? 'You can get a ruling; it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get an outcome,' he said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alaska Legislature forms conference committee for final budget negotiations
May 14—The Alaska House and Senate have appointed six members to a conference committee that will work on final negotiations over the state budget ahead of the end of the legislative session next week. The committee is charged with working out differences between the House and Senate versions of the budget. Members of the committee include Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel; Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka; Sen. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage; Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage; Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage; and Rep. DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer. Josephson was named chair of the conference committee during its first meeting Tuesday afternoon, which lasted only a few minutes. Hoffman was named vice chair. The committee is expected to meet regularly until a final budget draft is completed. "We have a little less than 400 differences to work out," Stedman said. "So we're going to work those out, and the prediction is we will have balanced budget on adjournment night." Among the differences is the size of the Permanent Fund dividend. The House last month adopted a plan that includes a $1,400 payment to every eligible Alaskan and a $450 million deficit over two fiscal years. The Senate, in an effort to avoid the massive deficit, then reduced the dividend size to $1,000 and made significant cuts to agency spending. Stedman said the concerns to be addressed by the conference committee include an effort to ensure that the budget includes funds for fire risk mitigation. "We'd like to have funds available for the emergencies that come up," said Stedman. Many of the differences between the House and Senate budget meetings are "small," Stedman said, after lawmakers pared down the budget in the face of limited revenue, leaving little room for projects and additions outside status-quo agency operations.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alaska House passes public pension bill, sending it to Senate
May 13—The Alaska House on Monday narrowly adopted a new pension plan for state employees, sending the bill to the Senate for consideration. The bill passed in a 21-19 vote, dividing the chamber along caucus lines. However, the Senate unlikely to vote on its passage before the end of the regular session next week, Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel said on Tuesday. "It looks like it will be a next-year bill," said Giessel, an Anchorage Republican who sponsored the legislation in the Senate. If it becomes law, the measure would offer guaranteed retirement income to public-sector workers in Alaska for the first time since 2006, when lawmakers eliminated the state's defined benefit system in the face of a massive unfunded liability. Lawmakers in 2006 instead adopted a defined contribution system that allows public-sector workers to contribute to individual investment accounts but does not guarantee any specific income in retirement. Several recent analyses have shown that the new plan leaves most public sector workers without enough funds to retire securely. The plan has been particularly harmful for teachers, who do not contribute to Social Security and do not have access to a Social Security alternative offered by the state to other public sector workers. Since 2006, unions have warned with increasing urgency that the lack of a defined benefit option has made it difficult to recruit and retain workers in Alaska. Unions and lawmakers in the majority say the elimination of state pensions has led to dire teacher shortages that have forced some districts to hire staff from other countries on temporary visas, and state troopers and corrections officers are relying on overtime shifts rather than filling all posts. The debate in the House over the new pension plan boiled down to a single question: What would it cost? Proponents of the bill said it would ultimately save the state money by removing the need to pay tens of millions of dollars annually for recruiting and training new workers in a variety of sectors. Opponents said the pension system would shackle the state to payments it cannot afford, even as it is still paying off the unfunded liability it accrued for the pension system it closed in 2006. The bill is expected to cost around $600 million in the coming 14 years, or roughly $40 million per year, according to House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp, an Anchorage Republican who is sponsoring the legislation. However, Kopp said the state is currently spending far more than that on recruitment and retention bonuses, overtime pay and the cost of regularly training new workers to make up for high turnover. "We are burning bonfires of money," Kopp said. "What we're doing now is staggeringly expensive." Kopp and other proponents of the bill said the measure — which would allow current state employees in the defined contribution system to opt in to the new pension system — would save the state money by improving worker retention in the long haul. Minority members said that despite the fact that the plan was designed to ensure that employees would increase their contribution rate if the pension plan became underfunded, it was impossible to ensure that the plan remained solvent in perpetuity due to a variety of factors, including the fast-ballooning cost of health care premiums in Alaska. "We cannot predict the future," said Rep. Justin Ruffridge, a Soldotna Republican. "I want to support this bill. I really, actually do. I think that there are a lot of options in here that are good for people, but until we can have a hard conversation about the costs of this bill and really take a hard look at the levers that are in this bill, and until we can use some fiscal constraint around the cost over time, it's really hard to support this at this time." The bipartisan majority in the Senate adopted similar legislation in 2023 but has yet to take a final vote a pension plan this year. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has not taken a position on the legislation. The regular legislative session must end by May 21, giving lawmakers limited time to consider the bill or amend it this year. "We simply don't have time the rest of this year," said Giessel.
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alaska lawmakers are divided over state budget, stuck without agreement over dividend, schools
Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, speaks at a House majority news conference, April 8, 2025, in the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau. Rep. Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage; Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage; Edgmon; and Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, are seated left to right. (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon) As Alaska faces economic shocks from a tumbling stock market and an unstable oil market, leaders of the state House of Representatives are appealing to minority-caucus members and Gov. Mike Dunleavy to help balance the budget. 'Ladies and gentlemen, we're all in a pickle,' House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham said in a news conference on Tuesday. 'It's not just the House majority: It's the House minority; it's the governor; it's the Senate majority; it's the Senate minority. We all own the situation in front of us.' The House Finance Committee passed a budget on Thursday that includes $1.9 billion more in spending for the 12 months that begin in July than the state is forecast to raise. But Edgmon said that committee would continue to work on the bill to try to bring it into balance, as required by state law. Edgmon, I-Dillingham, noted that the budget faces several challenges, including oil prices dropping over the past week. And he said the 21-19 split in the House meant that any one member has a veto power to block legislation. The House majority consists of 14 Democrats, five independents and two Republicans, while the minority has 19 Republicans. 'We need to work together,' Edgmon said of the House minority, before addressing the governor's office: 'Please step up. Work with us. We'll get through this. But if you leave us to our own designs, we are going to be stuck in this morass that unfortunately will carry forward into what none of us want: And that's a special session.' Two majority finance committee members — Rep. Neal Foster, D-Nome, and Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, D-Bethel — support Permanent Fund dividends at the level set under the formula in current law, which would be around $3,800 per resident and cost $2.46 billion. That size would make a balanced budget impossible without new taxes or significant draws from savings. The value of the Alaska Permanent Fund fell by $3.2 billion, and Alaska North Slope oil fell from $76 per barrel to $65, in the days after President Donald Trump announced new tariffs. Before the majority news conference, the House minority held one of their own. Finance committee members Rep. DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, and Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, both said the draft budget must be reduced. They raised the possibility of reexamining any new programs or positions that were added in the current budget, which started last July, or were proposed in the draft budget, including a hotly debated education funding increase. 'It's hard work,' Johnson. 'It's drudgery. … It's not one of those things you approach with a lot of excitement. You have to approach that with a lot of work.' Stapp questioned the affordability of the proposed increase in the funding per student in public education. House Bill 69 includes a $1,000 per student increase in the base student allocation, the core of the state's funding formula. For the next school year, that BSA increase would equal $253 million. 'Ultimately, you're going to have to take the education funding level and say, you want to prioritize education, but you probably can't do a $1,000 BSA,' Stapp said. He said the increase should look more like the one-time boost in state funding for the current school year, which was $680 per student. In terms of the total budget, that education funding increase was $174 million, compared with the $253 million in the draft proposal. In the majority news conference, leaders of that caucus took a different view. Majority Leader Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage, said legislators shouldn't even be raising the possibility of a Permanent Fund dividend using the formula in current law. 'I ran and campaigned on a balanced budget,' Kopp said, adding that he would have joined the other caucus if it agreed to a balanced budget and what he described as 'the dividend we can afford.' Kopp also emphasized that the majority is not proposing paying for a larger dividend with legislation to increase taxes or other revenue. He rejected increasing oil taxes, saying that the industry is still rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic and he doesn't want to discourage investment in future development. Finance committee co-chair Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, said the draft budget includes some growth driven by necessity. As an example, he cited funding for child advocacy centers to interview children who have been sexually abused. And he noted that most of the increase in the budget was proposed by Dunleavy, with additions for public employee contract increases. Josephson described the education funding increase as a 'core principle.' 'We heard from scores of Anchorage citizens about the importance of that, and we have their back,' he said. 'Come hell or high water, we're going to stand for that principle.' The legislative session is scheduled to end by May 21. Special sessions have been called in 2017 and 2021 to avoid partial state government shutdowns, which would occur if there isn't a budget enacted by June 30. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alaska Legislature passes bill establishing March as Women's History Month
Mar. 28—JUNEAU — The Alaska Legislature on Friday approved a measure to establish March as Women's History Month. Senate Bill 43 states that schools, community groups, and other public and private agencies may honor "the contributions that women have made in the history of the state and the United States" with "appropriate activities." Anchorage Democratic Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson was the lead sponsor behind SB 43. The Senate unanimously passed the measure earlier in the month. The Alaska House passed the same bill on a 33-2 vote with five lawmakers absent. Republican Reps. Julie Coulombe and Mike Prax were the only no votes. Anchorage Democratic Rep. Carolyn Hall introduced the bill on the House floor. She presented a long list of women who had contributed to Alaska history — including lawmakers, community leaders, civil rights activists and dog mushers — such as Bettye Davis, DeeDee Jonrowe and Gail Phillips. "How many of us know of their accomplishments, their leadership or their fortitude?" Hall asked rhetorically. "These women are Alaska's history," Hall later said. She said that the purpose of Women's History Month "is to lift up, recognize and integrate women's experiences into our state's narrative." The Alaska House is majority women for the first time in state history. Twenty-one of the chamber's 40 members are women. Fairbanks Democratic Rep. Ashley Carrick noted that the House Tribal Affairs Committee is the first legislative committee in state history to have all women members. After the vote, Coulombe said in a brief interview that she voted against the measure because "this isn't going to help women. I want policies that actually help women." "We keep hearing that we have a majority of women in the Legislature, and I take offense that I'm a woman legislator. I'm just a legislator. I want to be treated equally," she added. U.S. Congress declared March as National Women's History Month in 1987. Since then, presidents have issued annual proclamations to honor American women. Former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola testified in "enthusiastic support" for SB 43. Peltola — the first woman to represent Alaska in the U.S. House — said Women's History Month would honor Alaska women from all walks of life. "By recognizing Women's History Month, we make it clear to women, especially young women and girls, that they should not be afraid to be the bold leaders Alaska needs to guide us into the future," she said. "We also honor the trailblazers who came before us, displayed remarkable leadership, and now serve as role models for our generation and the next." SB 43 does not create any new state holidays or new regulations. State agencies estimate no cost to establish Women's History Month in Alaska. SB 43 now advances to Gov. Mike Dunleavy's desk for his consideration.
