The Alaska legislature will convene tomorrow for a special session. Gov. Mike Dunleavey called the session last month to address two things– Alaska’s education system and the creation of a Department of Agriculture. The education agenda presented by Dunleavy includes several items that target education reform policies. Dunleavy issued an executive order for the Department of Agriculture last session, but the legislator vetoed it.
On Monday, the House and Senate majorities presented their own agenda. Bristol Bay’s representative and Alaska Speaker of the House, Bryce Edgmon, joined KDLG and told us they plan to go immediately into a joint session and make two override votes, one to reinstate $200 to the Base Student Allocation that the governor vetoed from the budget, and another for a bill related to auditing oil tax settlements.
Edgmon: Yeah, so the whole session, right from the start, in my view, and a lot of other legislators, was ill-advised for a whole host of reasons. The governor called the session sort of unexpectedly. I don’t know that he talked to too many people in the legislature. He certainly didn’t talk with the legislative leaders in the House and the Senate for the content of his special session.
And as a veteran legislator, somebody who's been through a lot of special sessions, some of them work, most of them don't. Because there's not enough planning beforehand, and there's not enough sort of setting the groundwork for bringing legislators back, you know, from the summer activities to their regular lives, down to Juneau to tackle, in this instance, some pretty complicated issues in terms of education policy that really didn't get a lot of traction in the legislature this past session. Or the legislature basically said, governor, we think these are longer-term in nature. We need time to go through the committee process, to have full stakeholder engagement, and to really hear the ideas out to the fullest extent.
And the call as well, put back the formation of a Department of Agriculture, which the legislature rejected in a joint session this past year for a number of reasons, one being the actual cost of creating another department at a time when there's a Division of Agriculture that exists in Alaska.
So, you know, we're going to convene down to Juneau, and I expect the session to be fairly short.
There will be an override vote in terms of the base student allocation, an amount that the governor vetoed back in June. And to rewind just a little bit more back to May, when the legislature presented its annual budget to the governor, we presented him a $700 increase in the base student allocation, which is a component of the funding formula that K through 12 schools rely on every year. And the governor vetoed $200 off that $700 so he let $500 go into law.
And the legislature, not at its own sort of beckoning, I can assure you, but because we're called in in August, we have five days, according to the Constitution, to override the governor's budget at the time that the legislature next convenes. So here we are in August, in a special session, we have a short window of time to attempt an override vote. And of course, the schools badly need that extra $200 in the base student allocation. It's over $50 million spread across the school districts in Alaska. So that's I think will be the first order of business, and it's very likely that we go in, we establish a quorum, we read the proclamation across, put it into the record, and then we go into a joint session. We hold a couple of votes, maybe more. We'll see what time affords us, and then we're going to sign a die.
Sutherland: So by the end of Saturday, the special session could be done with?
Edgmon: Yes, yes, the legislature has the ability, certainly has to, you know, honor the call when the governor issues a proclamation for a special session, but the legislature has authority to sign a die and call an end to the session.
Sutherland: So these two things that the governor brought up to reintroduce to the legislature for this session, being the Department of Agriculture and education initiatives, which are pretty extensive, his list of what he wanted to address in this session– tribally compacting schools, expanding the corporate tax credit program authorized the Department of Education as a charter school authorizer and more were not were voted down by the legislature in this past session, or not addressed in some of the cases with the education. Is there a reason why the Legislator, why this timing? Why would the Legislator have changed their minds in a couple of months?
Sutherland: The legislature took up the Department of Agriculture last session and voted that down. Is there a reason that the legislature would have changed their position on these, or that Dunlevy would be bringing these back to the legislature to address now?
Edgmon: Yeah, I think that that's an excellent question, Margaret, because it's summertime, of course, the legislature has been out of session for, you know, two months, plus we're off doing other things. We're right in the midst of what we call our interim session. You know, it's, it's the political equations, and some of these issues haven't changed at all, just being a couple of months out of session.
Is the legislature willing to consider these issues back during a regular session when we normally would take them up, I would say yes, and we would look forward to working with the governor, if the governor was to come forward to leadership in the legislature and, you know, initiate talks and kind of, you know, move through the process like it ordinarily should happen.
But yeah, to call us back in on August 2, a few days henceforth here and expect a change. I don't think that's going to happen, and I think he knows it, and his whole purpose of calling us back in is basically to gamble that we're not going to get enough votes to override him on the BSA increase and also on a very sort of controversial bill that would require the state auditor actually require the governor's department of revenue to give the state auditor more information in terms of being able to audit oil tax settlements. And we're concerned about this issue, because if the audits aren't taking place, it's plausible, perhaps even more likely than not, that the state is foregoing maybe millions of dollars from revenues from oil tax settlements that aren't done properly.
Sutherland: So that bill would ensure that the oil taxes are being collected properly from companies?
Edgmon: Well, again, another sort of unfortunate circumstance, because the state auditor generally has had a good working relationship with prior administrations, prior Department of Revenue commissioners and so forth, and has been able to get pertinent information to do what's called a performance audit or review of these oil tax settlement audits, to make sure they're being done properly, make sure everything is accountable as required under law.
And Senate Bill 183 that we may or may not end up overriding, ultimately, here in a couple of days, is a bill that puts into law these sort of best practices that have been occurring over time. And we think it just codifies, really, what you know, we shouldn't have had to put into law, but because the Dunleavy administration is holding back, what we think is, you know, the detailed information that our tax or state auditor needs, we're compelled, of course, put a bill forward, which we did.
The governor vetoed it. Sent sort of a, you know, a real, you know, a letter that was, you know, to the legislative leadership, basically calling us, you know, our judgment into question. And it's, it's a letter that, in my view, he shouldn't have said, sent on a topic that's very important. And if, in fact, the Department of Revenue is doing everything lawfully, and there's nothing to be concerned about, well then commissioner of revenue, certainly the governor, come forward, talk with us, tell us, you know, assure us that that's the case. But that hasn't happened. So again, here we are on August 2, along with education items that the BSA that we'll be attempting to override, we're finding ourselves having to override a bill that, again, we think is really important public policy.
Sutherland: So the legislature is, in essence, using this session that was called as an opportunity to override things that wouldn't have existed or previously been able to be addressed before the next session come January.
Edgmon: Yes, you could say that if the governor hadn't called a special session, we most likely would have waited until the start of the 2026, session in January to hold an override session, and again, going back to the constitutional requirement that the legislature has five days once it convenes, whether in a special session or regular session, to do this overriding of the governor's vetoes, and just so the governor has his agenda. The Alaska majority.
Sutherland: Is there anything else that people in Bristol Bay should know about this session or should have on their radar?
Edgmon: Well, the future of our schools are extremely important, and the governor keeps touting educational reforms. It's not that we in the legislature disagree with that, but we also know that we have to adequately fund our schools. Right? We can make policy reforms till you know, till the stroke of midnight, if you will. But if the schools don't have the resources it takes to adequately do their business, it's literally all going to be for not so we think it's important to go in to override, attempt override those two, the $200 of BSA that's in question, but not to lose sight of the any policy sort of items out there that we need to talk about, many structural reforms and what have you. And then to set our sights on next year, when we can get the education committees in the House and the Senate, certainly our finance committees as well. To take a much closer look at all this in a fiscal environment that may have changed from where we are now in late July to January, 2026 because the price of oil right now globally looks pretty shaky, and so it could be a lot lower at the start of the 2026 session than it is now here in August.
Sutherland: What would it take to pass these override votes?
Edgmon: It's a super majority in both accounts, but in terms of the base student allocation, that's what's called an appropriations bill. It's a 45 vote threshold of the entire 60 membership. So it's three quarters the Senate Bill, 183 the tax audit bill, because that's a policy bill, the threshold is a little bit lower. It's not 45 but it's 40 votes, 40 votes out of the 60, you know the makeup of both the House and the Senate, the entire legislature,
Sutherland: Great. Thank you so much.
Edgmon: Yes, yes.
