Mount Edgecumbe High School is seen on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023, in Sitka. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has canceled a bipartisan proposal that would have allowed rural school districts to maintain teacher housing with money from the state’s rural schools fund.
House Bill 174, from Rep. Robyn Niayuq Burke, D-Utqiagvik, passed the House and Senate by a combined 54-5-1 margin.
The vote count led lawmakers to raise the possibility of overriding the veto.
Burke, reached by phone on Thursday, said that when she heard about the veto, she immediately sent a text to the group chat shared by members of the House’s coalition majority.
“The response was, yes, let’s override,” she said.
It would take 40 votes from the 60 members of the combined House and Senate to override the governor’s decision on HB 174, and a vote isn’t expected until the Legislature convenes in January.
If enacted, HB 174 would allow small school districts to use the state’s Regional Educational Attendance Area fund for major maintenance at district-owned housing.
It would also allow Mount Edgecumbe High School, the state-operated boarding school in Sitka, to use the fund for major maintenance. Currently, the high school is maintained using funds from the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.
HB 174 also would remove a $70 million cap on the size of the REAA fund, allowing the Legislature to stock that account with more money.
In his veto message to the Legislature, the governor said that enacting HB 174 would diminish the equity across school districts “and commits the state to a local housing obligation, diverting already scarce dollars away from critical classroom repairs and complicating grant rankings.”
The message also said that the repeal of the cash cap on the REAA fund could allow general-purpose dollars to accumulate “without project deadlines and adding ongoing operating costs to the state.”
That latter comment is a reference to the bill’s fiscal note, which said that the state would have to hire two new employees to deal with the change and that there would be other costs associated with implementing HB 174.
Burke said the veto wasn’t a surprise and that the governor’s legislative office had tried to reach her about the bill, but that meeting didn’t take place before the legislative session ended.
Burke is a graduate of Mount Edgecumbe, as is her mother, grandmother and grandfather. Other lawmakers, including Sen. Donny Olson, D-Golovin, have tried to advance HB 174-like legislation in prior legislative sessions, without success.
In 2024, a similar bill passed the Senate but died in the House Finance Committee.
“There’s a lot of excitement about it,” Burke said.
“I’m sure they’re pretty disappointed,” she said of the bill’s advocates, “because they’ve been working on that for quite a while. I’m frustrated, disappointed, not surprised, and will look forward to overriding it.”
Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, is a longtime advocate for Mount Edgecumbe. The Beacon’s call about the veto was the first he had heard of it, “but it doesn’t surprise me,” he said.
Stedman said that while it’s possible that the Legislature could override the governor’s decision, doing so is tough, “because the governor runs blocking maneuvers — no matter who the governor is, that’s just business, right? So it’s easy for him to pick off a few votes.”
It’s also a rural issue, which adds to the difficulty of gaining support, Stedman said.
The veto is “unfortunate for Edgecumbe,” Stedman said, “but there’ll be another governor in a year and a half, and we’ll give it to the next governor.”
So far this year, Dunleavy has vetoed five policy bills in addition to his line-item budget vetoes. Since taking office in December 2018, Dunleavy has vetoed 14 policy bills, a low number by historical standards.
But since 2014, the number of bills passed by the Legislature has dwindled, legislative statistics show. As a proportion of the number of bills passed by lawmakers, Dunleavy is vetoing at an above-average rate when compared to prior governors.
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