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Supporters of education funding crowded a legislative committee room on Feb. 5, advocating for a permanent increase in the state funding formula for public schools. Though the advocates were unified in their message to a joint meeting of House and Senate education committees, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop don’t support a permanent increase to the school funding formula. Instead, they have proposed targeted investments in certain areas, such as charter schools. Education administrators from across the state attempted...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy told reporters on Feb. 7 that he’d like to answer Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for National Guard soldiers to support a state-run effort along the Mexico border, but he’s not sure the Alaska Legislature will approve the cost. “To send the Guard down will cost us about — according to Adjutant General Saxe — about a million dollars a month for 100 folks. We’ll test the waters with the Legislature to see if they’re willing to fund that, and I wouldn’t mind helping Texas with their issue on the border,” Dunleavy said. The...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy invited Mayor Patty Gilbert to attend his State of the State speech at the Capitol on Jan. 30, introducing her during his annual address to a joint session of the Alaska Legislature. His remarks follow: "This past fall, just before Thanksgiving, tough times came to Wrangell. On the evening of Nov. 20, a massive 450-foot-wide landslide engulfed homes, blocked the road and cut off power lines. "Despite the wind, the rain, the cold and the dark, the community sprang into action....
The U.S.-Mexico border is a humanitarian disaster, with U.S. Border Patrol agents taking custody of upwards of 200,000 people a month trying to cross a line in the sand, river, desert shrubs or razor wire in search of a better life. The numbers are staggering — for the burden it imposes on U.S. border cities, on federal agents, and on the immigrants caught up in the political war of a U.S. election year. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators worked hard to find solutions to tighten the border, only to watch as presidential candidate Donald T...
Alaska’s Department of Health risks losing federal funding for its food stamp program, warned a letter from the United States Department of Agriculture on Jan. 30. It said the department is out of compliance with federal standards for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) due to what the letter described as “inefficient and ineffective administration.” The Department of Health has struggled to manage a backlog of crisis proportions that began in 2022 and has left tens of thousands of Alaskans waiting months for critical food...
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has joined 24 other Republican governors in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents to remove razor wire installed by Abbott’s administration along the U.S.-Mexico border. The statement was published hours before Dunleavy spoke to a joint meeting of the Alaska and Juneau chambers of commerce and called for more immigration to Alaska. He said the arrival of Ukrainian immigrants to Alaska has been a good thing. “I know there are some folks that belie...
The borough assembly has declared as “hazardous” and assigned a property value of zero to the two lots owned by victims of the deadly Nov. 20 landslide at 11-Mile Zimovia Highway, making the owners eligible to possibly receive state land as replacement for their unusable property. The owners or their estate could build on their new lots, hold them undeveloped or sell them and keep the proceeds, explained Hannah Uher-Koch, who runs the land grant program at the Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Mining, Land and Water. “There are no...
It seems the governor’s office must like country music. Can’t argue with that choice. The lyrics speak of American dreams and heartbreaks. What makes the songs so popular is that they tell stories, believable or not, such as the famous line: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” Sadly, that same line is essentially all the public is getting from the governor’s office to explain his decisions behind a dozen executive orders that will take effect unless rejected by the Legislature before mid-March. While some of the orders are not controver...
Unless the Legislature decides otherwise by mid-March, Gov. Mike Dunleavy will take over appointment of the entire nine-member Alaska Marine Highway Operations Board. State law reserves four of the seats for appointment by legislative leaders, but Dunleavy on the first day of the legislative session Jan. 16 introduced an executive order that changes the law so that the governor would control all of the appointments. The change will take effect 60 days after the order was issued — unless a majority of the 60 legislators vote in a joint s...
The Alaska Legislature failed on Jan. 18 to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of $87 million in one-time additional state funding for the 2024-2025 school year. The vote was 33-26 and did not fall along party or political caucus lines. Forty-five votes were needed to override. The failed override capped days of legislative maneuvering and months of unsuccessful lobbying by public-education advocates. Attention now switches to a bill that would permanently increase the state’s funding formula for public schools. Unable to agree last year on...
Alaskans trying to quit their tobacco habits made some significant progress over the past year, according to the annual report released last week by the state’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program. The program, which includes the Tobacco Quit Line, helped 1,753 Alaskans stop smoking or using smokeless tobacco or electronic cigarettes in the 12 months ending June 30, the report said. The program gave support to 21 community organizations around the state. The program also produced and distributed an anti-vaping toolkit to the state’s school d...
State lawmakers went back to work this week in Juneau, with two familiar topics likely to dominate the budget-writing work. “The real question is what are we going to do for the Permanent Fund dividend … and what are we going to do for education,” Rep. Dan Ortiz told the Wrangell borough assembly Jan. 9. “That’s what the argument is going to be about.” Ortiz, a retired schoolteacher in Ketchikan, also represents Wrangell and Metlakatla. He’s been in the state House since January 2015 and serves on the Finance Committee, which is in charge of...
The 2024 Alaska legislative session started Tuesday, Jan. 16. My main committee assignment will be to serve for the eighth year on the House Finance Committee, which is responsible for moving the operating and capital budgets to the full House for approval. The challenge we always face is allocating limited revenue to meet the nearly limitless funding requests, including the annual Permanent Fund dividend. We will begin our work this session with the spending plan submitted by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, which includes a deficit of $987 million and...
Alaska was one of 15 states to reject federal funding that would have provided direct grocery assistance this summer to thousands of families with children in the state who are facing increased food insecurity and rising food costs. The new federal program would have meant an extra $120 per child in direct funds this summer to families who qualify for free or reduced lunches — about half of all kids in Alaska. Officials with Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration cited a major food stamps backlog at the Alaska Division of Public Assistance as the...
Almost 110,000 Alaskans applied for the fall 2024 Permanent Fund dividend in the first eight days after the application period opened on Jan. 1. Applications close in 11 weeks, on March 31. Last year’s dividend was $1,312. This year’s amount will be determined as part of annual state budget deliberations, which will begin next week when legislators reconvene in Juneau. The annual dividend is paid from the state general fund, which gets most of its money from investment earnings generated by the $78 billion Alaska Permanent Fund and from oil...
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the leader of Kake’s tribal government asked federal managers to open an emergency hunt, citing the community’s fears about having enough food. The request was approved by a federal management agency, the Federal Subsistence Board, and the 2020 harvest of moose and deer went ahead, supplying 135 households with meat. The opening of the hunt prompted a lawsuit from Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration — which is now, for a second time, appealing a defeat it suffered in federal court a...
Transgender girls in Alaska are now banned from competing on girls school sports teams. The new rule took effect in November. The board of the Alaska School Activities Association — which regulates school sports in the state — voted 5-3 in October to adopt the rule affecting transgender girls. The rule was required by the state Board of Education, which voted in August to require that the association create a sports division limited to students who are assigned female at birth. That excludes transgender girls. More than half of U.S. states hav...
It’s been eight years since the state last increased its per-student funding formula for public schools — a 0.5% nudge that year — and years of stagnant funding have caught up with districts statewide, including Wrangell. “We have to count on funding this year,” Schools Superintendent Bill Burr said. An increase in the state formula “is essential to us.” The state’s K-12 foundation funding covers almost 60% of the Wrangell district’s $5.3 million operating budget for the 2023-2024 school year, with borough funds filling about 30% and mostly fe...
Wrangell is No. 16 on the statewide priority list and unlikely to receive any school repair money this year from the state’s Major Maintenance Grant Fund. The list, prepared each year by the Alaska Department of Education after reviewing engineering and condition reports on school buildings, determines which districts receive state funding for their priority repair and rebuilding projects. The Wrangell School District had requested $6.5 million in state money that it would use with $3.5 million approved by voters in 2022 to make $10 million o...
The Alaska Division of Public Assistance processed more than 2,000 food stamp applications over eight days in mid-December as it works to clear a backlog that has kept thousands of Alaskans waiting for benefits. Earlier in December, food aid was delayed by more than a month for over 12,000 Alaskans. That number was down to about 10,000 before Christmas. Division Director Deb Etheridge said the week before Christmas that her employees are on track to clear the backlog in 90 days. Etheridge said after the Christmas holiday she will reevaluate...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed state budget for legislative consideration starting in January includes $5 million to strengthen the century-old earthen dams that contain Wrangell’s water reservoirs. The state grant would pay to “reinforce both these dams with buttresses,” likely concrete, Interim Borough Manager Mason Villarma said Dec. 15. The governor released his version of the budget on Dec. 14. Lawmakers will reconvene in Juneau on Jan. 16, with the state spending plan likely to dominate the 121-day session. Villarma and other borough...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy is starting his sixth year as the state’s top elected leader. Sadly, he’s not providing much fiscal leadership, other than beating the drums for his perpetual political bandwagon that trumpets the Permanent Fund dividend at the front of the parade, with public schools playing second fiddle. It’s off-key and off-base. The governor unveiled his proposed state budget last week, setting out a spending plan for the fiscal year that will start July 1 and which legislators will start working through when they reconvene in Junea...
With a deep reduction in oil revenues expected, Alaska is on track for an almost $1 billion budget hole in the coming year that will have to be filled with money from savings, according to a spending plan presented Dec. 14 by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The governor described his budget for the year beginning next July 1 as “status quo” in most categories. “There’s no cuts in this budget,” he said during a news conference in Juneau. There are a few targeted areas with increases, however, including more staff to help process a backlog of food stamp ben...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy said education is among his top priorities in the coming fiscal year but did not include an increase to the state’s per-student funding formula, known as the base student allocation, in his proposed budget. The budget includes about $1.11 billion to fund the formula that distributes money to school districts statewide, down almost 3% from this year due to declining enrollment. Dunleavy has proposed spending almost twice as much on next year’s Permanent Fund dividend. Lawmakers this past spring approved a one-time appropriatio...
In the coming days, weeks and months, the borough and state will continue the multi-agency effort to repair Zimovia Highway, gather data about landslide risks and connect eligible community members with financial assistance. Highway repairs are underway, though the remainder of the project could last an additional three weeks. On Saturday, local and state Department of Transportation crews completed installation of a 36-inch-diameter culvert under the road, allowing water and debris from the...