Day 120: House leadership tries to pull the plug on school funding bill
Strange things happen ‘neath the Juneau alpenglow.
Good morning, Alaska!
In this edition: An evening meeting of the House Finance Committee got out of hand when Co-Chair Rep. DeLena Johnson attempted to cook up a turducken budget of her own by stapling on money for bussing costs to a bill dealing with internet upgrades for schools. Like so many ill-fated attempts to fry a Thanksgiving turkey, things got out of hand fast. Before long, the bill also picked up the permanent increase to the base student allocation that far-right Republicans have opposed all session. That drew a personal visit from House leadership to shut things down altogether, leaving school funding, internet upgrades and pupil transportation funding unlikely to pass this session despite there being, by all indications, broad support. Also, a from-the-archive write-up about how a misleading chart from the Dunleavy administration has warped the conversation on school funding.
Current mood: 😵💫
House leadership tries to pull the plug on school funding bill
Update: The House Finance Committee returned to business today and took up the school funding bill without attempting to undo any of the changes done the night before. Republicans opposed advancing the measure, raising concerns about the cost of the underlying internet bill, but ultimately didn't have the votes. Majority Reps. Neal Foster and Bryce Edgmon backed a Minority-led effort to get the bill out of committee. The bill’s success will rely on whether House Rules Chair Craig Johnson actually schedules the bill for a vote. The House could override Johnson but that would take a floor vote. The headline has been updated to reflect the fact the House Majority’s attempt at pulling the plug is just an attempt, so far.
Original story:
Strange things happen ‘neath the Juneau alpenglow.
With House Republicans smarting over the Senate’s end-of-session strongarm tactics, the House Finance Committee met on Monday night to cook up their own turducken bill that would pack an increase for pupil transportation costs into a Senate bill dealing with school internet upgrades. But as things tend to go when attempting to copy flashy trends around poultry preparation, things got out of hand about as quickly as so many ill-fated attempts to fry a Thanksgiving turkey.
Things got off to an unusual start when it appeared House Finance Committee Co-Chair Rep. DeLena Johnson’s amendment to add about $8 million to help school districts with transportation costs—a provision pulled from the Senate’s bill to increase school funding permanently—came as a surprise to the committee, which isn’t great when she’s part of the committee’s leadership.
The addition on its own isn’t particularly controversial, but it opened the door for further amendments to the bill with the explicit acknowledgment that the Senate’s school funding bill—that the House leadership is very much trying to avoid because of opposition from its far-right core—was fair game.
Like hot oil splashing over the sides of a turkey frier stationed far too close to the house, things didn’t take long to get out of hand.
Several legislators argued that what’s good for the goose must be good for the gander. So while they’re at it, why not add parts of the Senate bill dealing with a permanent increase to the base student allocation? Why not increase it while they’re at it?
While there’s been broad bipartisan support for a permanent increase to the base student allocation, there’s not broad support among far-right House Republicans who’ve long held an antagonistic view toward schools and have favored mercurial one-time increases that make it difficult for districts to plan from one year to the next.
Rep. Mike Cronk, a far-right Tok Republican who has previously bashed districts because he feels they’re not being straightforward about their funding (a takeaway fostered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration (more on that below)), warned that it’d kill the bill.
“With this amendment, I can pretty much guarantee that this bill will get killed,” he said. “It’s not the proper way to try to stuff $175 million into a broadband bill.”
Other members didn’t seem so sure.
Rep. Alyse Galvin, I-Anchorage, noted that the House had already voted in broad support of a funding increase of this size when it passed the budget. Sure, the funding wasn’t a permanent increase then, but she said it showed broad support for such a change.
“This is an odd way to do it, but I can tell you I will be supportive and here’s why,” she said. “We’ve already passed in our body the $174 million increase. … I think it will bring the education system some predictable funding. It’s not the $1,300 my caucus has supported, but it seems like a fair and reasonable amount.”
The amendment ultimately passed 8-3, with Rep. Galvin being joined by a mixture of minority members, majority Republicans and majority Bush Caucus members in Reps. Andy Josephson, Dan Ortiz, Sara Hannan, Bryce Edgmon, Neal Foster, Will Stapp and Frank Tomaszewski. Anchorage Republican Julie Coulombe joined Rep. Johnson and Cronk in opposing the amendment.
If those votes hold, it indicates that there are, in fact, enough votes for the House to pass a permanent increase to the base student allocation this year. And it would not, under the normal legislative process, kill the bill like Rep. Cronk had suggested.
But there’s a vast gulf between the normal legislative process and the one playing out right now.
Before things got completely out of hand—Rep. Stapp was in the middle of proposing an amendment to double the school funding increase—House Finance Committee Co-Chair Rep. Neal Foster noted that House Speaker Cathy Tilton and House Rules Committee Chair Craig Johnson had joined the meeting.
That was the signal for the House Majority members to clear out and huddle up with leadership. The members returned about 30 minutes later, and Rep. Foster announced they would set the bill aside.
“The thought was maybe coming back to it tomorrow to let cooler heads prevail and just think it through a little bit at the request of some folks,” Foster said, referencing the emergency meeting with Tilton and Johnson.
He conceded that it would likely make the passage of the bill, despite its support, unlikely before the end of the legislative session as it would need to hit the floor with the votes to advance it to a vote in a single day and get back to the Senate before the end of the legislative session at midnight Wednesday.
Of course, it could still pass, but that would require the will from House leadership, and there certainly doesn’t appear to be the will.
Why it matters
This is another sign of a deep, deep schism in the House Majority. A fair number of the far-right Republicans seem to be under the impression they should get to run the show despite the fact they had to run to the Bush Caucus to cobble together a majority in the first place. As I wrote at the start of the session, a high cost comes with holding a majority, particularly a narrow majority like this.
The primarily Democratic House Coalition experienced this first-hand at the Finance Committee table, where a team of the minority Republicans and majority Republicans would frequently shoot down progressive spending priorities. It turns out the legislators who make the majority are the ones who will most likely get their way.
What’s particularly interesting now, though, is that the Republican House Majority isn’t even all that unified. So while far-right legislators like Rep. Cronk are undoubtedly loud, they don’t exactly have the votes on their side, as evidenced by him being on the wrong side of an 8-3 vote on the BSA.
Still, one of the most powerful things about being in the majority—and why the losses around the edges might be palatable—is that you still hold the gavel of critical committees, controlling the levers of how legislation flows.
So, despite there being votes for a BSA increase this year, House Rules Committee Chair Craig Johnson can refuse to schedule the bill for a floor vote. That, like most things, can be overridden in a floor vote, but that would require majority members rocking the boat when, so far, they’ve seemed keen on being team players.
In the end, Cronk may be right that adding in the BSA will kill the entire bill but it’s not for a lack of votes. Instead, it’ll be the House Leadership leaning on the levers that control the flow of legislation that will kill the bill.
Stay tuned.
From the archive: Wait, but aren’t schools swimming in money?
This section of the newsletter was published on May 9 as a premium deep dive but I feel like it provides important backstory to the BSA negotiations to keep in mind today.
While there seems to be a general agreement among most legislators that schools are in deep financial trouble with years of flat funding, soon-to-be-expiring covid-19 money and spiking inflation, not everyone is on board, far from it.
We have legislators who are just generally antagonistic toward public schools and don’t want to fund them no matter the fiscal cliff they’re facing. Still, there’s another group that seems to deny outright there’s a problem in the first place.
And the Dunleavy administration is fueling that notion with documents like the one above (link here), distributed just as the Legislature was really picking up steam on increasing education funding. Taken at face value, the sheet seems to suggest districts are flush with cash—identifying pots of covid money, budget reserves and money set aside for building and repairing schools—contradicting much of what we’ve heard from administrators and school advocates for the last several months.
It’s the sort of bait that conservative legislators already prone to distrusting the school districts eat up, as evidenced by Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk—a former teacher—declaring in a House Finance Committee hearing in late April that he can’t support putting additional money into schools until districts come clean.
“The real frustrating thing for me here is just getting an honest answer out of anything. I look at all these numbers and think, ‘How much money do they really have?’” I think that’s the struggle,” he said. “Until there’s some transparency here, this makes it very difficult for me to sit here and say, ‘I want to give you more money for your BSA.’”
The big caveat with all of that, however, is this minuscule footnote:
As of June 30, 2022. 2022!
TEN MONTHS AGO.
The covid-19 funding is a tad more recent as of December 2022 and doesn’t cover the third quarter reimbursements from school districts, meaning a fair bit of that money has already been spent, and a fair bit more will be spent before the next budget year.
Of course, like with many things in the Dunleavy administration, the document paints a limited and, frankly, wildly out-of-date picture of the state of the school budgets. That’s because, as several other members of the House Finance Committee noted, the state law only requires districts to report their budget numbers to the state at a few points throughout the year. And it only looks at the amount of covid-19 money spent quarterly, with the Anchorage School District noting that it hadn’t submitted any reimbursement requests since December and wouldn’t be submitting those requests until the end of April, and it would expect it to be in the tens of millions.
Even fellow Republican Rep. Will Stapp pointed out that he wasn’t exactly sure where all the problems were coming from because the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District was forthcoming with their numbers when he asked for them.
“I actually have fairly detailed information from my school district,” he said, noting that the Fairbanks school district only has about $4.3 million available to it when the state’s document pegged the district’s available funds at $16.1 million. “I don’t really know where the big discrepancy here is, but when I asked, I got an itemized list of where all our district’s accountability was.”
Deputy Education Commissioner Lacey Sanders essentially shrugged off the criticism, noting they were reporting the most recent information that the state collects. Everyone should have known, she said, that the sheet contained an asterisk that the data was current as of the start of the year.
“I think the only thing I will comment on is the districts have more current information. This is the information they provide the audited financial statements as of June 30,” she told Stapp. “The school districts are the ones that should be communicating to legislators and the public about what their fund balances are now.”
(Which would then raise the question of why the state’s involved at all.)
“So just for clarification,” Stapp continued, “this information is from the audited financials nearly a year ago?”
“Yes,” Sanders replied.
The committee later heard from several school districts that all essentially reported the same thing: That the document being circulated by the Dunleavy administration and used by some legislators as a reason to deny the need for a BSA increase was, in fact, wildly out of date and not at all representative of the current fiscal situation facing school districts.
Rep. Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, summed up the situation well: “I don’t think the department understands the true needs of the districts.”
With the addition of voters from the western Goldstream Valley to Cronk’s constituents, I wonder if the loud, proud public school saboteur will be more vulnerable in his next election.