Alaska lawmakers on Tuesday failed to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a bill that would have provided a $1,000 boost to basic per-student funding for public schools.
The combined House and Senate vote was 33-27, well short of the 40 votes needed to override Dunleavy’s veto. All but two members of the House and Senate’s Democrat-heavy bipartisan majority caucuses voted for the bill; all 25 members of the all-Republican minorities voted to sustain the veto.
Dunleavy vetoed the bill on Thursday, saying it didn’t include his preferred policy changes and that the bill’s $250 million price tag was too steep.
On that second point, chief Senate budgeter Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, said he reluctantly agreed, voting against an override. Hoffman acknowledged the need to boost funding for the state’s schools. Superintendents, parents, principals and business leaders have said for years that inadequate state funding has forced them to increase class sizes, slash beloved programs like sports and electives, and lay off staff.
But Hoffman said the state can’t afford a $1,000 increase right now given the worsening fiscal picture, driven in part by low oil prices.
“We need to take our heads out of the sand, look at the fiscal realities that we live in today and do what the people have sent us down here to do, to balance this budget,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman repeated a call for lawmakers to pass a series of revenue measures that he said would allow the state to fund schools appropriately. The largely Democratic Senate majority has backed three bills that would roll back oil and gas tax credits and expand corporate income taxes.
The head budgeter in the House, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, took issue with Hoffman’s view.
“I can't go to my constituents and say this is just unaffordable, because it's not. It's just a question of will, that’s all,” he said.
Josephson said the $1,000 boost would cost just $77 million more than the state approved for public schools last year on a one-time basis. That’s a small fraction of the nearly $3 billion that the state has in savings.
Status quo spending would leave the state hundreds of millions of dollars in deficit, and it’s unclear how lawmakers will resolve the shortfall. The state Constitution requires lawmakers to pass a balanced budget every year.
Senate Finance Committee co-chair Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, said before voting against the override that drawing from the state’s primary rainy-day fund, the Constitutional Budget Reserve, was not prudent with oil prices and financial markets in turmoil.
Stedman said he didn’t want to risk being forced to reduce school funding next year.
“The headwinds coming at the state over the next year or so look significant, more significant than they have ever looked in my 20 years here,” he said. “We are very concerned over the next year that we may have demands on our treasury that we have not foreseen.”
The top three sources of state revenue are investment earnings, oil taxes and the federal government, all of which are under pressure.
Stedman said lawmakers should focus on passing a minimum $680 boost in long-term funding, matching the one-time funding schools got last year. He said lawmakers should consider an additional “incremental” boost next year.
Minority Republicans were largely silent on the floor but echoed Stedman’s budget concerns in a news conference after the vote.
The veto — and the failed override — were expected. The Senate Finance Committee stripped out policy measures aimed at finding common ground with Dunleavy and avoiding a repeat of last year's veto. The governor took to social media to call the new funding-only bill a “joke” and pledged to veto it. It passed with a one-vote majority in each chamber, and Dunleavy made good on his veto threat days later.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said Tuesday that senators thought at the time that the bill had a realistic chance of passing despite a veto from the governor.
“Before Gov. Dunleavy came out and called it a joke, we thought there were 40 votes there,” Wielechowski said, though it’s not clear where those votes would have come from.
Dunleavy applauded the failed override on social media Tuesday.
Lawmakers say they'll keep trying
Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed a $560 boost to basic education funding, the base student allocation, in a bill he announced alongside his veto. The bill also includes additional funding aimed at boosting correspondence homeschool and an incentive program that would reward school districts with large numbers of young students who read at grade level or demonstrate improvement.
Dunleavy’s bill also includes provisions that would change the appeal process for charter schools terminated by a local school board and an open enrollment policy that would allow parents to enroll their students in brick-and-mortar schools outside their home district.
Those provisions are already causing some heartburn from Senate leadership. Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said he worried they would take power from locally elected school boards.
“There are some things that we're very concerned about,” he said, adding that he hoped to continue discussions aimed at finding common ground. He said he had not yet discussed Dunleavy’s new bill with the governor.
Lawmakers on all sides said they hoped to come to a compromise in the month left in the legislative session.
“It does feel like the wind has come out of the sails a little bit after this, after this override session, but we've still got time,” Wielechowski said. “Our schools are counting on us.”
Rep. Mia Costello, R-Anchorage and the House minority leader, said she looked forward to digging into the governor's proposal to find a way forward.
"We just have to work through the process and I think work together in the last weeks of session in order to get the governor's bill across the finish line," she said.
Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, the primary sponsor of the bill Dunleavy vetoed, said she thought the veto and failed override were “somewhat predictable, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing.”
“I know that right now in every school district, personnel are being laid off, programs are being cut, families are asking themselves, ‘Is this what I signed up for when I decided I was going to raise my kids here in this state?’” she said. “So we have some work to do.”
