AKLEG Day 65: 'Significant consequences'
As “adults play their political games” in Juneau, districts face tremendous, community-dividing uncertainty as they turn to cuts.
Good morning, Alaska. It’s the 65th day of the legislative session.
In this edition: A day after the Alaska Legislature came up with a vote short of overriding the governor’s veto of the broadly popular education bill, legislators had very different ideas about what can and will be accomplished in the coming weeks of the legislative session. The House Republicans who killed the broadly popular Senate Bill 140 are trying to save face with claims that a second, more conservative bill can somehow sail through a chamber that couldn’t even muster the 21 votes less than a month ago. Members of the bipartisan Senate Majority, who have already said the governor’s demands are a non-starter, took a “you broke it, you fix it” approach.
Current mood: 😤
‘Significant consequences’
With the smoking ruins of the bipartisan Senate Bill 140 in the rearview mirror, legislators had very different ideas about what can and will be achieved in the remaining days of the legislative session. While most House Republicans who sunk the bill tried to reassure everyone that they could craft and pass a second, more conservative education bill before the end of the legislative session, others weren’t quite so sure. Members of the bipartisan Senate Majority, who have already said the governor’s demands are a non-starter, took a “you broke it, you fix it” approach to education, clearly frustrated that they’re being asked to compromise on the compromise to the compromise.
“Majority legislators in the House were able to kill the overriding of the governor’s veto, which is only one-third of the Legislature. The onus is now on them, I believe, on the House, to send us meaningful legislation,” said Senate President Gary Stevens during the Senate Majority’s weekly news conference. “The ball is now very clearly in their court. If representatives dismiss Senate Bill 140 and all the good things that were negotiated in that bill, you really have to tell us what you want to replace it with.”
The House Majority didn’t have any meaningful details or timeline to offer during their news conference, only empty platitudes about working hard and being able to do two things—approve multimillion-dollar subsidies for resource development and salvage education funding—at the same time. They couldn’t answer when or if time-critical legislation to upgrade internet speeds in remote schools, which was the original purpose of Senate Bill 140, would make an appearance on the House floor.
All they seemed to be particularly interested in, as Anchorage Republican Rep. Tom McKay said, is crafting “a better bill that the governor would like."
And part of that is a smaller, still-undetermined amount of school funding.
Many House Republicans have cited the likelihood that the governor would line-item veto the base student allocation funding as their reason for flip-flopping on the education bill, a point that Anchorage Republican Rep. Craig Johnson reiterated on Tuesday when he told school districts that they shouldn’t be planning on getting anything meaningful.
"I found it very disingenuous for us to continue to hold out what I believe is something they will not get. I think it's time for the education community to start planning their budgets on not getting it," he said. "There will be some funding. I have no idea what it will be. ... The likelihood of a $680 BSA inside the formula is not very good."
However, omitted from that statement is the fact that overriding the governor’s line-item veto would have taken just six additional Republican votes on top of Monday’s vote. If every member at the House Majority’s news conference—Speaker Tilton and Reps. Saddler, Johnson, McKay and Rauscher—plus one voted for the override, they would have been able to provide that guarantee they claimed was impossible to offer.
Instead, districts seem to be taking Rep. Johnson’s words to heart and are pivoting away from budgets based on the $680 figure that 56 legislators had supported less than a month ago to budgets based on status quo funding.
“Building around that $680 number had to do with optimism about the possibility of a veto override, given that 38 of the 40 members of the House had voted for S.B. 140,” Kenai Peninsula School District Superintendent Clayton Holland told the Peninsula Clarion. “As far as having a budget to present to the borough that’s balanced by May 1, we have to really look at a zero increase from the state.”
Holland told the paper that as “adults play their political games” in Juneau, districts face tremendous, community-dividing uncertainty as they turn to cuts.
“It can be a painful process, and that’s what we were trying to avoid,” he said. “We were trying to avoid splitting the community with these discussions.”
In the Senate, that frustration sometimes boiled over during Tuesday’s news conference, with members calling House Republicans’ efforts to save face on education disingenuous.
Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, said there will be “significant consequences” for legislators’ failure to override the governor. Schools will be closed, programs will be axed, and many teachers will receive pink slips in the coming weeks. He noted that the likely approach of one-time funding through the budget would most likely be used for one-time expenses, such as buying technology upgrades rather than increasing teacher wages, because it’d be irresponsible to bank on that money continuing.
“That was the choice that the Legislature made yesterday,” he said. “There’s no two ways about it. People can say whatever they want to say about how they feel about education but sometimes our votes, they’re the words.”
And not to be forgotten in all this is the governor’s insistence that everyone move on from education. During his signature ranting and raving news conference last week, he said his administration was not interested in driving any education discussion and would be moving onto energy. That, Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel noted, is hard to do without the educated population that properly funded schools can provide.
“I want to point out the irony of the work the governor did to get no votes on the education funding. The governor has talked for the past two years about prioritizing families and making this a family-friendly state. Well, families are moving away," she said. "They're going to leave if their kids are not getting solid educations. … The governor has said, ‘Time to move on, time to move on and talk about energy.’ Well, we can't talk about energy if we don't have a population of Alaskans who are prepared to do the projects. It is very ironic that he wanted a no vote on a bill that did so much."
Asked about the path ahead, Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, one of the Senate’s key negotiators on the education bill, said that Senate Bill 140 was the compromise to the compromise. Now, they’re being asked to compromise once again. He said the Senate has already given up ground on things like charter schools, and he cast doubt that they’d be willing to give up even more.
“I don't know that there’s any more, quite frankly,” he said. “I don’t think there is.”
Stay tuned.