Alaska
Alaska lawmakers seek public sector pension reform over persistent opposition
Alaska House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp says that if all goes as planned, the House will vote next month on a new public pension.
A bill to reinstate a defined benefit system for Alaska’s public workers — after nearly two decades without one — “will be over in the Senate’s possession before the end of March,” Kopp said this week.
Alaska’s public employees — including teachers, peace officers, local government workers and all state workers — have been without a pension since 2006, when the state instead adopted a 401(k) style retirement plan in an effort to save money.
Unions and groups representing the state’s public employees say that the change has reduced Alaska’s retention of experienced workers.
“There is one constant theme, and that is high turnover, high vacancies, loss of institutional knowledge, loss of training dollars, and an inability to effectively deliver services because they’re constantly in a training mode,” Kopp, a South Anchorage Republican, told the House Finance Committee this month.
Kopp is working to advance legislation that was first passed by the Senate bipartisan majority more than a year ago. Last year’s Republican-led House majority refused to consider the bill, blocking its progress. But the change in House leadership this year has renewed hope that the measure could pass — despite persistent resistance from some Republican lawmakers.
Ketchikan Republican Rep. Jeremy Bynum, who previously managed the Ketchikan public utilities and served on the Ketchikan Borough Assembly, said that in his experience, retirement isn’t the driving factor in public-sector workers’ decisions to leave the state.
“There’s no doubt that retirement was part of the conversation about why somebody maybe took employment, why they might be leaving employment, but it wasn’t the primary factor. The biggest issues that drove employees where I was at away, was the cost of living in the community,” said Bynum. “It was the remoteness of being in Alaska.”
Opponents of the bill also cite its potential cost as a deterrent. They refer to the unfunded liability the state accrued before 2006, when bad actuarial information left the state with an underfunded retirement plan. The state is still paying off the liability. Though numerous measures were implemented to avoid similar situations moving forward, including requirements for additional actuarial analyses, the risk of future unfunded liabilities looms.
The exact price of the new proposed plan isn’t known — a full actuarial analysis is underway — but Kopp said he expects the annual cost to be less than what the state currently spends on recruitment and retention efforts to fill critical vacancies, which amounts to tens of millions of dollars per year.
The state has kept critical positions filled, including corrections officers and troopers, in large part by approving annual retention bonuses on top of employees’ regular pay. Still, turnover has led to increased costs for training and filling positions.
“The lost training dollars to the state eclipse the cost of what we are going to be proposing here,” Kopp told lawmakers in a House hearing.
Opposition to defined benefits proposals in Alaska has been shaped in large part by the advocacy of Americans for Prosperity — a national conservative group funded by the billionaire Koch family — which has for years recommended shrinking or eliminating public spending on pension plans across the country.
Americans for Prosperity-Alaska has launched an ad campaign claiming that the cost of the plan could force the state to implement a broad income or sales tax. Lawmakers have said no such taxes are under consideration this year.
Bethany Marcum, director of AFP-Alaska, previously worked for Gov. Mike Dunleavy when he was a state legislator. She said that “the expectation of savings to recruitment and retention is being greatly overestimated” and pointed to a recent analysis from the Reason Foundation that argued Alaska is “doing a better job at retaining public workers than most states.”
The Reason Foundation, which produces policy papers on retirement systems in various states, serves as AFP-Alaska’s “pension partner,” Marcum said — providing analysis to back the advocacy group’s campaigns.
Data recently compiled by the Reason Foundation showed that Alaska’s state employee turnover rate was lower than the national public sector average, but according to figures — provided to the writers by the Dunleavy administration — Alaska’s turnover rate rose rapidly between 2012 and 2022 — from 11.5% to 17.5%.
Ryan Frost, a researcher with the Reason Foundation, said it was possible that the sharp increase in Alaska’s turnover rate was due to the elimination of Alaska’s pre-2006 pension plan.
“That makes sense to me,” said Frost, who lives in Washington state. “I haven’t looked underneath the hood to see what the (defined benefit) turnover has looked like in Alaska.”
In 2012, 36% of Alaska’s state workers were not eligible for a pension. By 2022, that figure had gone up to 73%. Recent data from the state shows that only 37% of employees who are ineligible for a pension remain employed by the state more than six years.
Kopp called AFP-Alaska’s messaging “propaganda.”
“They have a right to argue for their interest, but they are very focused on supporting the present annuity financial services industry,” said Kopp.
Marcum said AFP-Alaska’s opposition to the defined benefit plan is driven “purely from a principled policy perspective.”
Fairbanks Republican Rep. Frank Tomaszewski proposed this year alternate retirement legislation modeled after 2023 recommendations from the Reason Foundation.
Tomaszewski’s bill would make the existing defined contribution plan more generous exclusively for public safety workers, who tend to have shorter careers. It would also expand access to the state’s Supplemental Benefit System, which is meant to replace Social Security income, and is not currently open to Alaska educators.
Tomaszewski said he favors a defined contribution plan because it allows beneficiaries to will their accrued retirement funds to their children. A defined benefit pension ensures that the beneficiary and their spouse continue to receive monthly retirement income for as long as they live, but once the beneficiary and their spouse die, funds cannot be transferred to their surviving descendants.
Tomaszewski said that he liked the idea of ensuring that children of public sector workers have access to an inheritance.
“That money is actually yours, in your account. You can take it with you, or you can will to your children,” he said.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, an Anchorage Republican, has already said she plans to take up the defined benefit bill once it is considered by the House.
The bipartisan majority in the Senate is expected to support the bill, but one of its members has remained opposed. Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican, instead favors expansion of the Supplemental Benefit System.
“If we want to improve the teachers’ retirement, number one is they should be in SBS,” said Stedman.
By his calculation, allowing teachers to contribute to SBS would give them hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional retirement income.
Alaska is the only state that offers teachers neither a defined benefit pension, nor access to Social Security income.
The system requires both employees and employers — meaning school districts and local governments — to contribute 6.13% of participating employees’ salaries to the system. If the proposal were adopted, the cost to local employers would be in the tens of millions.
“We would have to increase the school districts’ funding to incorporate something like this,” said Tomaszewski.
In an effort to persuade reticent Republicans, proponents of the defined benefits plans repeatedly describe its lack of generosity. Unlike the pre-2006 system, employees’ retirement contributions could be raised in response to underfunding in the plan; employees would get a Health Savings Account instead of access to state-sponsored health insurance; and there would be no cost-of-living adjustment for retirees who choose to stay in Alaska.
“This is structurally so different that it’s barely recognizable. It would be like comparing a rotten apple on an old tree to a robust pear on a living tree. They’re both fruit, but it ends there,” Kopp told the House Finance Committee in a hearing for House Bill 78.
Still, Kopp said this “fiscally conservative” bill will be an improvement on the state’s current defined contribution system, which leaves most public sector workers ill-prepared for retirement and without any incentive to remain in the state beyond the initial five-year vesting period, according to an analysis conducted last year by the state’s retirement division.
“I’m actually glad that people recognize this bill is not generous,” said Kopp. “It’s almost incredible that our current system is so bad that our employee groups across the state uniformly support this bill as being better than what we have.”
Daily News reporter Sean Maguire contributed to this report.
Facing pressure from Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy to quickly finalize a bill to support the Alaska LNG megaproject, key members of the Senate on Tuesday expressed skepticism that they’ll finish the task before the session ends later this month.
Senate President Gary Stevens told reporters that he doesn’t think the lawmakers can finalize a bill by May 20, which could open the door to an immediate special session, or whenever the governor chooses to call one.
Senators are being asked to move quickly, creating the possibility of unexpected outcomes if a bill is passed now, said Stevens, a Kodiak Republican.
“There’s a lot of work yet to do, and I think you’re seeing the concern around this table of the mistakes we could easily make,” he said during a press conference alongside other leaders of the Senate Majority.
The concerns came one day after Dunleavy urged lawmakers in both chambers to quickly pass a bill to give the LNG developer Glenfarne a substantial property tax break, so North Slope gas can be delivered to Southcentral Alaska and overseas to large Asian buyers.
The governor argued Alaska LNG will generate billions of dollars in production taxes, gas royalties and other revenues, create thousands of jobs, lower energy costs and resolve a looming shortage of locally produced gas.
Dunleavy indicated that the Senate and House resources committees burdened the bill he introduced in March with excessive costs that would block the project. Although Dunleavy floated the idea of introducing his bill early in the session, he didn’t formally introduce it until March.
Those committee substitutes would sharply increase the alternative volumetric tax the governor had proposed to tax natural gas shipments in order to bring in more state revenue. That new “alternative volumetric tax” would replace the state’s property tax for the project.
Dunleavy said he will only support a bill that allows the project to receive financing to move forward. He said he would call a special session if a bill he doesn’t think makes the project workable fails to pass the Legislature.
Members of the Senate Resources Committee said Tuesday they lack a clear picture of the important financial details they need to determine what size of tax break the project should receive, if any.
Some of the missing pieces, they say, include a recent update to the project’s $46 billion price tag, a figure that’s been around for more than a decade, and a better understanding of the estimated cost of gas to Alaska ratepayers.
Before the project can receive a tax reduction, the developer needs “to help us with this bill, giving us actual numbers so that we can credibly set a realistic AVT, alternative volumetric tax,” said Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage and chair of Senate Resources.
Adam Prestidge, with project developer Glenfarne, told Senate Resources on Tuesday morning the company can share financial details with lawmakers if the state takes a stake in the project, under confidentiality agreements or confidential executive sessions.
He said that publicly releasing the project’s cost estimate would put the project at a competitive disadvantage at a time when it’s negotiating agreements with contractors for work, and purchase agreements with entities that would buy and sell the gas, he said.
In such cases, he’s seen the “counterparty try to back calculate what they think the cost of the product is that we’re selling, using what they’ve seen as public information, and it creates a real challenge for being able to commercialize the product,” he said.
Giessel said confidential agreements are problem for lawmakers.
“Confidential executive sessions put us at a real disadvantage because now we have to craft a bill based on what you’ve told us privately, and yet we can’t tell the public what those numbers are,” she said. “It doesn’t work very well.”
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, and vice chair of Senate Resources, said he won’t vote on a bill that could remove potentially $1 billion in annual property tax revenue — referring to Dunleavy’s original version — without having solid numbers on the project.
“From my perspective, this bill should not go to the floor because, me personally, I don’t want to commit generations of Alaskans to billions of dollars in tax breaks without firm numbers,” he said.
Tim Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson with Glenfarne, said in a statement Tuesday that “the state, along with other potential investors, will have the information needed to make an informed investment decision.”
“The state has no financial risk in Alaska LNG and as testimony has made clear, publicly releasing sensitive cost information harms the project’s competitive position and ability to deliver reliable, low-cost energy for Alaskans,” he said.
“Alaska is rapidly running out of reliable, affordable energy, and state and local policymakers and the legislature’s own consultants have highlighted the need for tax reform for over a decade, during which no project has progressed,” he said.
Alaska will deploy 25 National Guard soldiers and airmen to Washington D.C. this month, according to a Friday update from the Alaska Department of Military and Veteran Affairs.
The deployment is part of a response to President Trump’s August declaration of a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital. In the nine months since, 2,500 troops remain, according to NBC4 Washington. Guard members have assisted with medical emergencies, arrests and beautification projects, as well as snow removal.
The division announcement said the Alaska service members will be focused on public safety: “Guard members provide support functions such as crowd management, perimeter security, and logistical and communications support.”
Alaska National Guard members will deploy for 60 days, according to the division, as part of a joint task force with the Metropolitan Police Department and federal law enforcement partners.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy approved a verbal request in November from the U.S. Secretary of the Army for Alaska to deploy 100 service members, following a national directive by the Pentagon to all 50 states to prepare National Guard service members to train for “civil disturbance operations.”
A spokesperson for Dunleavy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the smaller deployment, the purpose and timing of the mission on Monday.
Lawmakers had raised concerns about the Pentagon’s national directive for an estimated 20,000 National Guard service members to be trained and prepared to deploy in U.S. cities within 24 hours. Alaska was initially charged with preparing 350 service members as part of a “quick reaction force” by Jan. 1.
Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, co-chair of the Alaska Joint Armed Services Committee, and a veteran of the Alaska National Guard, was among those who had raised concerns.
On Monday, Gray said the smaller deployment for 60 days is less of an issue.
“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the American taxpayer to be flying service members from Alaska to D.C. to do what I don’t believe is of grave consequence,” he said.
“At the end of the day, to me, it’s sort of a nothing burger. I do think that it shows that the Dunleavy administration and General (Torrence) Saxe are in alignment with Trump. They’re showing that they support Trump’s agenda. But again, this is just not that big of a deal, in my opinion.”
WHEREAS, all Alaskans have the right to safety and justice, and the rates of missing and murdered Indigenous persons (MMIP) represent a crisis that is actively being addressed; and
WHEREAS, Alaska Native women are overrepresented in the domestic violence victim population by 250 percent, and although Alaska Natives comprise 19 percent of Alaska’s population, they represent 47 percent of the State’s reported rape victims; and
WHEREAS, the call for a greater response to the MMIP led to increased communication between tribal communities and State agencies in an effort to better understand the scope of the issue; and
WHEREAS, the State of Alaska now has four MMIP investigators, two tribal liaisons, and dedicates significant resources to address these cases and work with the family members of missing and murdered persons; and
WHEREAS, in 2024 I signed legislation that further moves Alaska’s response forward with mandatory entry of missing persons into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and requires that the State employ MMIP investigators, and requires that all current and future Alaska law enforcement officers attend cultural diversity training with an emphasis on MMIP; and
WHEREAS, the State of Alaska is committed to continuing its efforts to work with Alaska Tribes in combatting this crisis and offering support to communities and families.
NOW THEREFORE, I, Mike Dunleavy, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF ALASKA, do hereby proclaim May 5, 2026, as:
Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Awareness Day
in Alaska and encourage all Alaskans to recognize the elevated rates of missing and murdered Indigenous persons and support law enforcement, victim advocacy, and the efforts of Alaska Native Tribes to work with State, local, and other entities working together toward solutions.
Dated: May 5, 2026
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