Alaska
Alaska House debates amendments to education bill in marathon session
JUNEAU — The Alaska House is poised to take a final vote on a school funding bill later this week, after a marathon debate Monday on dozens of amendments to the proposal.
House Bill 69 would increase the state’s annual $1.2 billion education budget by more than $250 million per year. The measure is intended to compensate for almost a decade of virtually flat funding for Alaska’s public schools.
Members of the Democrat-dominated majority said HB 69 is intended as a compromise with Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who demanded that any education funding increase be paired with policy proposals meant to improve Alaska students’ math and reading scores, which are among the lowest in the nation. Last year, Dunleavy vetoed a sweeping education measure that did not contain his policy priorities.
Educators have long contended that Alaska schools are in crisis and that more funding would allow for reduced class sizes and improved teacher retention. But Republican lawmakers, including Dunleavy and House minority members, argue that funding alone will not improve students’ outcomes.
To improve outcomes — and appease Dunleavy — House majority members agreed to pair the funding increase with several new policy provisions, including financial incentives for reading improvement; a provision to make it easier for students to attend the public school of their choice, regardless of where they live; and a mechanism for charter schools to maintain their charter if they face being terminated by local school boards that oversee them — among other changes.
The House majority also agreed to reduce the planned funding increase for schools, as the state faces a tight fiscal outlook. Originally, Sitka independent Rep. Rebecca Himschoot had proposed increasing the $5,960 Base Student Allocation by $1,808, spread over three years. The bill also would have pegged the BSA to inflation, promising further increases if the cost of living goes up.
House majority members last week voted to amend the bill in committee to increase the BSA by $1,000, with no inflation-proofing provision. The bill also orders the creation of a task force to “analyze the state of public education funding.”
The original education bill was expected to cost well over $500 million per year. The amended measure was anticipated to cost roughly $275 million annually.
House Republicans prepared dozens of amendments for Monday’s floor session, but not all were introduced. Most amendments narrowly failed along caucus lines.
Anchorage GOP Rep. Mia Costello, the House minority leader, said after the floor session ended that there had been “vigorous debate,” and that hopefully more minority amendments would be approved.
“However, there still is concern over the size of the BSA and the affordability of it, and so I think that’s going to be the major sticking point,” she said about the bill in general.
The minority sought a $75 million funding boost for homeschooled students; proposals to expand or support charter schools; and additional reporting requirements for school district spending — among other proposals.
Wasilla Republican Rep. Cathy Tilton said school choice must be supported, “So that all students in Alaska have the education that they deserve.”
In response, Juneau Democrat Rep. Andi Story said that “when we raise the Base Student Allocation, the intent is we raise it for all of the kids.”
House majority members said the Republican charter school proposals prioritized those students over those in neighborhood schools, and that the added reporting requirements were redundant.
The Legislature is facing a $536 million deficit over two fiscal years based on legislators approving the same $175 million school funding boost as last year. Lawmakers have broadly questioned the affordability of HB 69.
Leading members of the bipartisan Senate majority have favored a smaller school funding increase — closer to the $680 BSA boost approved by lawmakers last year on a one-time basis.
Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andy Josephson on Monday said that the $1,000 BSA boost was the maximum amount the Legislature could afford this year to keep schools “afloat.”
House Republicans have asked how the education measure would be funded with diminishing oil revenue. In the Senate, majority members have proposed measures that would boost oil revenue. However, the closely divided House has not taken up revenue discussions this year.
Big Lake Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe on Monday said the majority’s original $1,808 BSA boost could see Permanent Fund dividends disappear. He suggested school administrators need to cut spending.
“Unacceptable. Our school districts need to do better,” he said.
Shortly after the House majority added the new policy provisions to the bill last week, Dunleavy signaled his support. In a social media post, Dunleavy said Friday that “there has been positive movement” on the education funding bill.
“Policies such as the literacy initiatives have been added, as well as positive movement on open enrollment. When the bill goes to the Senate, there is an opportunity to continue making improvements, both in cost and policy,” Dunleavy wrote.
“To me, it signifies that the negotiations are probably somewhere on the right track,” said Dillingham independent House Speaker Bryce Edgmon.
But the Republican House minority appeared less-than-thrilled during Monday’s floor session. Over more than seven hours of testy debate, Republicans prepared dozens of amendments — most were shot down by the bipartisan majority along caucus lines.
Dunleavy in February called for a small group of lawmakers to negotiate a consensus education agreement behind closed doors. The working group was composed of members from the House and Senate majorities and minorities.
Soldotna Republican Rep. Justin Ruffridge, a member of the education working group, said minority members met with the governor’s staff for a few days. But House Republicans had been shut out of negotiations since then, he said.
House Republicans on Monday unsuccessfully tried to strip out the policy provisions added by the majority — while trying to add their own.
Edgmon said last week that it was “categorically untrue” that the minority’s priorities were not reflected in the amended education bill.
Three minority amendments were adopted by the House. One would allow charter schools to appeal terminations by school boards; another would measure student performance over time, instead of with a single test; and a third stripped out non-binding language that emphasized the Alaska Constitution’s prohibition on creating a “voucher system” for education.
Amendment debates concluded shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Monday. More amendments are set to be heard Tuesday before the House is expected to hold a final vote on the education measure itself.
If approved by the House, HB 69 would then advance to the Senate for its consideration.
Sean Maguire reported from Juneau and Iris Samuels from Anchorage.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The National Science Foundation has selected the University of Alaska Fairbanks to be the site of a new critical minerals research program, making it one of 12 new technology innovation centers across the nation that received federal funding, according to Yereth Rosen with the Alaska Beacon.
The new Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine in Alaska will receive $15 million in funding for two years and up to $160 million over 10 years, the university said on Tuesday.
The organization will be located at and led by UAF’s Geophysical Institute and will work with more than 40 partners, said Steve Masterman, the university faculty member who helped lead the application for the award. Partners include private companies, Native corporations, nonprofits, other universities and other entities, said Masterman, who formerly served as Alaska’s state geologist.
UAF already conducts scientific research into minerals considered critical to the nation’s economy through its Critical Minerals Collaborative. That program is more scientific and academic-focused, said Masterman, who is its deputy director.
In contrast, the Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine will be focused on putting research to use, determining ways to commercialize resources, addressing supply needs, workforce development and other issues important to the critical minerals industry.
Though the scientific research already conducted at UAF will be helpful, the accelerator idea is industry-focused, Masterman said.
“This is quite different because it’s an economic development project,” he said.
Alaska is rich in resources considered critical minerals. The state has 56 of the 60 minerals classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as critical to the nation’s economy, UAF said in its statement.
In addition to the Alaska award, the NSF on Tuesday announced its awards for other innovation engines in different parts of the nation. The sites have different primary purposes, such as disaster prevention and mitigation, robotics development and development of advanced information technologies.
The Alaska innovation engine will be led by Lee Ann Munk, a faculty member at the Geophysical Institute and a geosciences professor at UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics. Munk is currently director of the Critical Minerals Collaborative at UAF.
“Our NSF Engine is built on the simple but ambitious idea that Alaska can lead the nation not only with the abundance of its critical mineral resources, but also in how we innovate, develop and deploy the technologies needed to produce them responsibly,” Munk said in a statement released by the university.
“By bringing together researchers, Alaska Native organizations, industry, workforce partners, state and federal agencies, national laboratories and communities, we are creating an engine that accelerates discovery into action,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story was republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.
See a spelling or grammar error? Report it to web@ktuu.com
Copyright 2026 KTUU. All rights reserved.
Yukon king salmon on their Canadian spawning grounds more than 1,400 miles from the Bering Sea/Pacific Salmon Foundation photo
Yukon king salmon rebound beginning?
After a couple of years with cooler waters in the Bering Sea, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a Yukon River return of Chinook salmon that has, as of the start of the month, “passed the historical third quarter point and exceeded preseason projections.”
The report comes at a time when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have linked the extremely weak returns of the past several years to the start of “an acute marine heatwave period in the Bering Sea” that began late in 2016 and extended into 2020.
Yukon Chinook, the oversized salmon that most Alaskans simply call kings, were the big losers in this warming event while Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were the big winners. This is what happens when environmental conditions change, though you might not know it if all you read is highly subjective, mainstream media reporting on “global warming.”
The planet’s warming climate is an environmental disruptor that can cause all kinds of problems for plants and animals, and even humans, but it is a two-edged sword because that is the way environmental shifts work. There are losers, but there are also winners.
And there is no doubt the planet is warming. The big debate is about how much the future increase and how fast it comes. Scientists this year ruled out the sky-is-falling warning of a temperature increase of more than six to almost 10 degrees by 2021.
But as the Climate Directorate for the European Commission notes, the latest, ” most optimistic path – the new ‘best case scenario’ – would still lead to global warming of 1.7° C, (3.06° F) temporarily exceeding the 1.5° C (2.7° F) target in the Paris Agreement” on climate change.
What exactly this means for Yukon Chinook is hard to say, given that Arctic Ocean warming of late has focused more in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Europe than in the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska. The odds, however, would seem to favor a continued bounty of Bay sockeye while Chinook to the north continue to struggle.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is this year forecasting a Bay harvest of 33.5 million sockeye from a total return of 45.3 million of the fish. This is a historically very strong run, but it pales when compared to what happened during those heat wave years when Yukon Chinook were fading.
A sockeye explosion
In 2022, the Bay witnessed an unprecedented return of 79 million sockeye, according to state data, and the harvest topped 60 million. Meanwhile, there was over-escapement in almost every river system in the region because the harvesting and processing resources in the Bay couldn’t handle a return so big.
Escapement is the number of fish getting past fishermen to make it back to their spawning grounds. It is a scientifically calculated number intended to produce the greatest return of salmon per spawner in future years.
The goal in the Bay is to put about 11.8 million salmon on the spawning grounds. The escapement in 2022 was about 7.2 million over the goal even though the harvest that year dwarfed the previous record harvest of 44.3 million set in 1995.
The 16.2 million difference between the two, record harvests was bigger than the total harvests for all but two seasons in the Bay from 1938 to 1979 when the North Pacific Ocean was filled with colder water.
A so-called “regime change” at sea in the 1980s altered marine survival and sockeye harvests in the Bay – home to the largest wild sockeye fishery in the world and one of only a handful of Alaska fisheries that can claim to catch truly ‘wild’ salmon – began to explode.
By the end of the 2021 fishing season, the five-year average harvest had reached 41.1 million sockeye; the 10-year average stood at 33.4 million; and the 20-year average stood at 29.4 million, nearly double the historic, long-term average of 16.2 million.
The good, old days for Bay fishermen have come in the here and now, despite a catastrophic drop in prices paid for Bay salmon since farmed, Atlantic salmon took over global markets at the start of the new millennium.
Alaska sockeye salmon, and especially those increasingly rare Alaska king salmon, have hung onto a niche in the premium market dominated by farmed salmon, but the bulk of the Alaska harvest is now made up of so-called ‘wild caught’ salmon that compete globally with ‘wild-caught’ Russian salmon in markets for canned and pouched salmon and smallish pink salmon filets.
The ‘wild-caught’ label is used to disguise the fact that many of these fish are products of hatchery operations in Alaska and Russia. They are as wild, or not, as cattle put out to pasture to fatten. And the same applies to some non-Bay sockeye, such as those coming from hatcheries in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Bay salmon are a different story. These are truly wild salmon, and there is no doubt that they have benefited from warming.
Not all good
The same warning, however, has proven disastrous for Yukon Chinook and the people who once depended on them for cash and food. The commercial fisheries that produced cash have been closed for years, and subsistence harvests for food have been sharply limited.
Alaska catches fell to less than 20,000 kings per year on average in this decade, and with a serious downward trend underway, the U.S. and Canada in 2024 signed an agreement to suspend “directed Chinook commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use fisheries in the mainstem Yukon River and Canadian tributaries for one full life cycle (of) seven years.”
Alaskans fishing the Yukon for chum salmon, which are comparatively far more abundant, do still harvest some kings as bycatch, but the number is small. And harvests, whether in-river or at sea, do not, according to the NOAA researchers, seem to be the key problem facing the Yukon fish.
The scientists reported finding that “elevated natural mortality in later, post-juvenile life history stages has increasingly limited population productivity and recovery potential in recent years following a protracted marine heatwave period. Collectively, our results emphasize how shifting conditions can induce, novel stage-specific survival bottlenecks in species with complex life cycles.”
Their peer-reviewed study published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, has, however, come under fire from Alaskans who don’t want to believe the data and prefer to blame the decline on the bycatch of Yukon Chinook offshore trawl fisheries targeting pollock and bottomfish.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, from Bethel near the mouth of the Yukon in rural Western Alaska, has repeatedly dissed the science. She is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and continuing to do so.
“I’ve seen the decline of our fisheries firsthand. I’ve seen our families suffer. And I’ve seen our fishermen have their livelihoods threatened. I’m running for Senate because it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the rigged system in D.C. and begin to restore abundance to Alaska,” she has said.
She contends that “the truth is that out-of-state factory trawlers and excessive bycatch are hurting Alaska. They are sweeping up more than 140 million pounds of bycatch….But instead of reining in the trawling industry, Alaska subsistence and sport fishing are hit with crushing restrictions, punishing Alaskans while protecting the corporations doing the damage.
“Instead of holding their corporate trawler donors accountable, D.C. politicians kick the can down the road with more studies. But we don’t need more studies to tell us what’s happening in front of our eyes.”
Whatever Peltola might see in front of her eyes, the scientists say there is no evidence that it is a bycatch problem. After modeling a huge pile of historical data, they concluded that ending all bycatch would put some more Chinook in the Yukon River, but not many more.
A few hundred fish
Simulations using various sizes of salmon returns to the Yukon showed that “the greatest difference occurred in 2007, in which the median run size from the zero-bycatch simulations was 433 fish greater than that of the fitted model,” they said. “In other years, median differences in run size between the fitted model and zero-bycatch simulations ranged from 32 to 398 fish.”
Basically, the models concluded what has long been observable. Bycatch numbers go up when Chinook are abundant and go down when Chinook are scarce. The Bering Sea pollock fishery, the biggest target of the anti-trawling campaign, posted a record bycatch of 122,195 Chinook in 2007, according to the North Pacific Management Council.
That now oft-cited number was an anomaly. It reflected a year when Chinook were unusually abundant in the region. The bycatch dropped to 20,000 the next year.
For the past decade, according to NPFMC data, the average stands at just shy of 19,000 fish per year. Genetic studies have shown these fish come from rivers all over North America, but the greatest proportion comes from Western Alaska rivers.
If bycatch could be wholly eliminated, the NPFMC estimates there would be an almost 2 percent improvement in the number of Chinook returning to those streams. As for the Yukon itself, the estimated improvement is 0.63 percent.
Such a change would be undetectable. The state sonar used to count salmon at Pilot Station on the Yukon has a “confidence level” of 90 percent. What this means is that the count is an estimate that comes from within a range that could be 10 percent higher or lower than the number judged to be the total return.
The numbers make the politics of the bycatch, at least as it applies to the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, a classic red herring. There are no doubt some king salmon die when caught in trawls in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), but that fishery also happens to be the most intensely monitored fishery in the state.
The NOAA researchers noted that the trawl fleet has, since 2011, “been subject to 100 percent fishery observer coverage with full census counts of all salmon caught, and paired genetic and scale samples collected from one in 10 fish.”
Most Alaska fisheries operate without observers, and Alaska commercial salmon fishermen have opposed efforts to fit their boats with video cameras to provide remote monitoring because, according to the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, “commercial permit holders are extremely sensitive to the confidential nature of
their fishing activities. Many see this program as opening their catch data to a number of unknown entities.”
The biggest of those “entities” would be the public. The state now hides data on how much money individual commerical salmon fishermen are making by mining the ocean for a common property resource and does not require they to report bycatch – such as starry flounder in Cook Inlet – that they discard.
Meanwhile, critics of the Bering Sea fishery claim that the federal monitoring now in place isn’t perfect, which is true, and argue that the Chinook bycatch could be significantly underreported. But even if observers were underreporting the catch by 100 percent, the improvement in the Yukon return would rise by only about 1.2 percent, according to the NOAA study, leaving it still well below the ability of the state sonar to detect a change.
Not that this is likely to alter the bycatch rant.
The Covid-19 pandemic days of “listen to the scientists” are now over, and Alaska has returned ot the days of people listening to what they want to believe, and some people – Peltola among them – deeply want to believe that the Yukon River would be full of salmon if the largest of U.S. fisheries – the pollock fishery – were shut down.
That weather and climate dictate how natural systems function is a hard thing to grasp in a now very urban America, where most people are out of touch with the natural world.
Categories: News, Outdoors
-
Minneapolis, MN5 minutes agoBWCA wildfires continue to escalate, peacetime emergency extended
-
Indianapolis, IN11 minutes agoNFL Trade Rumor: Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers emerge as top landing spots for $4M Cleveland Browns’ QB
-
Pittsburg, PA17 minutes agoPostponed: Waiting on Parkway East bridge to be demolished in explosion
-
Augusta, GA23 minutes agoAugusta youth program feels state budget cut heading into new school year
-
Washington, D.C29 minutes agoNational Guard continuing DC deployment through Inauguration ’29
-
Cleveland, OH35 minutes agoCleveland Advances Housing Manufacturing Strategy with MMY US Selection and Historic Tax Credit Award for Wellman-Seaver-Morgan Building
-
Austin, TX41 minutes agoAustin Pets Alive! activates emergency response to assist shelters affected by flooding
-
Alabama47 minutes agoGovernor Ivey Taps Glenda Allred as New Tourism Director, Announces Lee Sentell’s Retirement –
