Thank you

Hello Alaska! It’s Saturday, Jan. 13, and three days to the start of the legislative session.

In this edition: A heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s supported me in this space and, as we wait to see what exactly the session has in store for us, a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Current mood: ☺️

Programming note: This weekend, I have the great honor of leading a talkback session with the actors of the Anchorage Community Theatre’s production of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” following their show at 3 p.m. this Sunday. It’s a fun and thoughtful play based on a real-world battle between essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal that explores the tricky balance between a pretty sentence and The Facts. If you can make it out on the late notice, say hi, and if you can’t, I’d highly recommend finding time to see the production, which runs through Jan. 28. Find more and buy tickets here.

Thank you

Dear readers of The Alaska Memo,

We’re on the eve of the 2024 legislative session—another run of 90 to 120-ish days of hearings, floor sessions and palace intrigue—and I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported my work in this space. The interim this last year has brought a lot of change for me, with the official end of The Midnight Sun and my transition to a contributor with The Alaska Current. It’s been a bit of a challenge to work out how to balance everything, but I’m looking forward to the start of session and the structure that the daily agenda and familiar flow of legislation will provide.

I’m extraordinarily grateful and humbled by everyone’s patience through all of this. Thank you.

As we wait to see what exactly the session has in store for us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t published my usual end-of-year article. In addition to the usual bout of writer’s block, the exercise was, frankly, even more of a bummer than usual. While it’s been fun to poke fun at the foibles of Alaska politics, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the problems of 2023 are the problems I was writing about a decade ago. We’re still sitting on the knife’s edge of a fiscal crisis, with worsening outmigration, a continued hollowing out of state services, issues around energy and food insecurity coming to a head and adequately funding schools is still a bitter fight.

The theme of the last decade in politics has been that of a car careening toward a cliff. Everyone knows that the sensible action is to turn the wheel or pump the brakes, yet it seems that the only solution has been to build just enough of a bridge to get us through the next election.

My frustration not just as a reporter but as a resident of this state—who would very much like it to be the best state to as many people as possible—was encapsulated in the working headline of my end-of-year piece: “Problems I wish we could finally put to bed in 2024 (but know we won’t).”

(Though, now that I’m looking back at past stories—“Alaska and the terrible, horrible, mostly bad year” and “2022 wasn't as bad as expected, but then again we weren't expecting much”—maybe I didn’t need to worry so much about striking a positive note.)

To be sure, these are complicated issues with complicated, politically weighty solutions. Yet, at the heart of the inaction is a governor who has seemed far more comfortable with heavy-handed use of the veto pen—parachuting in at the last minute to undermine legislative work—than with the work to get tough legislation passed (surprising for a guy who never passed a bill as a legislator). At his budget rollout last month, Gov. Mike Dunleavy basically threw cold water on any hope of resolution to the state’s financial woes—it’s an election year, after all—and offered a new distraction with the insistence that we can simply mine, log and drill our way to prosperity.

From legislators’ perspective, why invest the time, energy and political capital into new revenue or a reworked dividend formula when the governor will veto it and turn it into a cudgel at election time?

Still, I see reason for optimism in 2024. The local elections in 2023 saw progressives win big in many races—sweeping the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and school board, for example—that showed the culture wars aren’t quite the winning strategy that conservatives claim and that voters are looking for representatives who are responsive and accountable.

In the Legislature, we can also see some meaningful shifts made possible with the success of several moderate Republicans through the state’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Freed from the partisanship of the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past, we’ve seen a slate of legislators who are interested in making progress, investing in the state, moving past the old political fights of the past and, importantly, understanding that as much as we all talk about efficiencies and doing more with less, that you can’t run a government for free.

When I think about one of the most telling quotes from this past session, I think about a budget wrap-up by Fairbanks Republican Rep. Will Stapp, where he explained the sky-high vacancy rate for a parole officer position.

“The real reason that position is so vacant is we effectively don’t pay enough,” he said. “In my opinion, it just shows sometimes when you ask someone to do a really hard job, you have to ensure you pay them adequately.”

For a committee that once entertained whether inflation was real, the bar is low—but at least someone gets that magical thinking doesn’t balance the budget.

Whether that kind of thinking catches on or is snuffed out this year has yet to be seen, but you can be sure that I’ll be there covering it with your support.

Thank you, and stay tuned.

The Alaska Memo by Matt Buxton is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.