Senate Bill 146 would amend language already used to support school maintenance in the state’s REAA’s – or Regional Education Attendance Areas – to include Mt. Edgecumbe High School. REAA’s are generally communities that are too small to have a full-blown school district. Although Mt. Edgecumbe is located in Sitka, it is owned and operated by the state Department of Education (DEED), and not a part of the Sitka School District.

SB 146 was on the morning docket of the Senate Finance Committee, which sponsored the bill. Committee co-chair, Sitka Sen. Bert Stedman, said that Mt. Edgecumbe had been unable to reliably secure maintenance funding in the past, because it’s on the same list as all the other state’s facilities.

He argued that this was an inequitable outcome for one of the state’s top schools.

“So this bill then would correct that,” said Stedman. “How Mt. Edgecumbe would rank with all the other schools – school needs – I don’t know, but I think they would be fairly treated. And I think it would be a more equitable analysis done on the maintenance. And when you look at that school, the quality of the students are some of the highest levels of all our high schools around the state. I think it’s the number-one high school, but it happened to be in my district, but if they’re not number-one, they’re certainly in the top handful. Also the construction needs for housing, for teachers, for dormitories – the girls’ and boys’ dormitories were built right before World War II and refurbished several times. Clearly, they’re 70-80 years old. And I think there’s also a need for an additional classroom. As an example, I think the last time I was in the boys dorms, they had four to five boys in each dorm room with one desk. The ladies dorm is a little bit different, but I think the State of Alaska could do better for the kids at Edgecumbe.” 

The Department of Education estimates that the bill would cost over $300,000 in the first year, to pay for two full-time employees to address standards around the construction of housing, and just under $200,000 the second year.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl of Juneau wondered if the state didn’t already have a mechanism to deal with school housing, and whether two additional employees were necessary.

“There are schools throughout rural Alaska that have attached teacher apartments, various housing units, either in the school or adjacent to the school, and we have a rural teacher housing program that I think runs through the Housing Finance Corporation,” said Kiehl. “I wonder if a sharper pencil could find a way to partner up with AHFC, or whoever looks at major maintenance on those schools now, and maybe find a way not to need two new bodies to do something we always should have been doing. And I think do now.”

Senate Finance co-chair Lyman Hoffman, of Bethel, agreed, saying that the bill would likely not require additional staffing in the Department of Education. He did not call for a vote on the bill, and instead set it aside for further work.

In the meantime, Mt. Edgecumbe High School – along with public schools across the state – remains in serious financial jeopardy, pending action from the legislature on House Bill 69, sponsored by Sitka Representative Rebecca Himschoot, which would increase per-student funding in the state by $1,000. HB 69 passed the House by a wide margin in mid-March and was referred to the Senate Finance Committee Friday morning, April 4. 

In previous reporting, Sen. Stedman told KCAW that he did not think a $1,000 increase would pass the senate. Many school districts – including Sitka’s – are hoping that a smaller increase of $680 will pass, and survive a possible veto by the governor.

Some of Alaska’s newest legislators are concerned that the deep budget cuts being pursued by the Dunleavy administration will starve the state’s economy.

They spoke during a legislative leadership forum on Thursday (9-19-19) at the annual meeting of the Southeast Conference in Sitka.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl and Rep. Sara Hannan, both Democrats who represent northern Southeast Alaska and Juneau, and Rep. Dan Ortiz, an Independent who represents Ketchikan and some Prince of Wales communities, held the stage for half an hour at the Southeast Conference.

The trio didn’t pull their punches when it came to discussing Gov. Dunleavy’s efforts to cut the state budget by over $400 million. Ortiz, a third-term independent, called out the governor’s attempt to take 50-percent of raw fish taxes — historically collected by communities to support harbors and other infrastructure — and transfer them into the state budget. He also criticized the 20-percent cut to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, which has impaired the agency’s constitutional mandate to manage the state’s fisheries. 

Ortiz suggested that the administration had overshot its goal of being efficient, and was doing harm.

“While I’m going to continue to be an advocate for efficiencies as we move forward,” Ortiz said, “we also need to make sure that in our attempt to achieve efficiencies we’re not overcutting these agencies that have a very important job that links directly into how our economy’s going to move forward in the future.”

Note: Although only in his third two-year term, Ortiz is among the more “senior” half of Alaska’s 40 House members.

Rep. Sara Hannan has been in the legislature for 9 months. She said that the administration and legislature had cut the budget beyond “what is acceptable for a healthy economy of Alaska.” That remark generated a round of applause from the Southeast Conference. So did this one, from a legislator whose district includes much of Juneau.

“We’ve got a diversified economy, but when you take 817 state jobs out of our region — jobs that had mortgages, jobs that supported families — that’s really crippling to a region,” Hannan said. “And it may not have shown up as significantly in Anchorage — and there’s that idea that if you concentrate the entire economy in one place, you have some efficiency — but for state, that’s not good. The goal of government isn’t to be efficient — we want it to be efficient — our goal of governing should be to serve the needs of our state.”

Hannan got another ovation for alluding to a person “who is no longer director of OMB,” a reference to Donna Arduin, whom Gov. Dunleavy brought in from out of state to oversee the drafting of this year’s budget. Dunleavy has since moved her into a consulting role. Sen. Jesse Kiehl — also a first-term legislator from Juneau — said this was an opportunity to push for a return to budgeting from the bottom-up.

“The governor hasn’t changed his philosophy,” said Kiehl. “We’re still going to have differences of opinion. But there was a good conversation about moving more of the work of developing the governor’s budget proposal into the departments where they do the actual work.”

The districts encompassing Juneau saw a complete turnover in their legislative delegation last fall. Another newcomer, Rep. Andi Story was scheduled to appear at the forum, but was not present. Sitka Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Sen. Bert Stedman both appeared before the conference on the previous day.