Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, casts one of several votes during a Senate floor session at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau on May 20, 2025. (Marc Lester / ADN)
Alaska legislators looking to override some of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes received a boost late Tuesday with news of a lawmaker’s plan to return from Europe for a special session set to begin next month.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Forrest Dunbar is deployed with the Alaska Army National Guard and was previously expected to miss the special session that Dunleavy called for August. But Dunbar said he had received permission to fly to the state to participate in the session.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate majorities have said they plan to vote on overriding Dunleavy’s veto of roughly $50 million in education funding — but to succeed, they need support from 45 out of 60 lawmakers. The presence of Dunbar, a reliable vote in favor of an override, increases the likelihood that they can meet that threshold.
Dunleavy called lawmakers into a 30-day special session to begin Aug. 2 with the stated goal of reviewing his education policy ideas and a plan for creating a new agriculture department. But majority members in the House and Senate have been skeptical of Dunleavy’s policy plans. Dunleavy has declined to provide specifics on his proposals until the beginning of the session.
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Instead, lawmakers say they expect to hold a brief special session that will focus on attempts to override Dunleavy’s vetoes of what majority members describe as high-priority items.
Under the Alaska Constitution, lawmakers have a window of five days once they convene to consider overriding any of the vetoes Dunleavy has enacted since the regular legislative session ended in mid-May.
Earlier this month, Dunleavy asked House Republican minority members not to attend the first five days of the special session, to make it more difficult for majority members to secure the votes needed to succeed in overriding him. Additionally, Dunleavy scheduled the session in summer, when many lawmakers were set to be absent.
Dunbar’s announcement that he had succeeded in getting permission from his military superiors to return to the state for the special session indicates the lengths some lawmakers are willing to go to override Dunleavy’s vetoes.
Several House minority members, including House Minority Leader Mia Costello, have said they would not heed Dunleavy’s request for them to stay away from Juneau for the first five days of the session.
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“I’m hearing from folks that they — at least my constituents — are telling me they want me to attend, because it’s my job,” said Costello, an Anchorage Republican.
But it was still not clear whether the Legislature could muster the 45 votes needed to override Dunleavy’s budget veto, Senate President Gary Stevens said Wednesday.
Costello said she hadn’t yet decided whether she would vote to override Dunleavy’s vetoes, despite voting to override Dunleavy’s veto of an education bill in May.
“I’m not sure if we have the votes, but we’re trying to figure that out right now,” said Stevens, adding that the Senate majority caucus would meet Friday to discuss its course of action.
And even if they did, Stevens said that Dunleavy was considering calling off the special session altogether, based on two phone conversations Stevens said he had with Dunleavy on Wednesday.
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“The governor always has the right to cancel a special session right up until the time we call ourselves into order,” said Stevens. “Will he do that? I don’t know.”
In response to several questions about whether Dunleavy was considering calling off the special session, his spokesperson Jeff Turner said in a email only that Dunleavy “is having discussions with the Senate president about the policies that will be taken up in the special session.”
If the governor cancels the special session, lawmakers may convene one without his support. Such a move would require support from 40 lawmakers — a threshold Stevens didn’t immediately know whether the Legislature could meet.
If the special session goes ahead as planned, Stevens said he intends to prioritize votes to override Dunleavy’s education funding veto, and to override Dunleavy’s veto of a bill that was intended to provide clarity on the state’s audits of oil and gas tax revenue. Stevens and other legislative leaders said that the Dunleavy administration has refused to provide certain information on the tax revenue to the legislative auditor, raising concerns among lawmakers that the administration is leaving millions of dollars in revenue on the table. (Dunleavy has called the bill “sweeping and likely unconstitutional.”)
Those two veto override votes could come as soon as Aug. 2, the first day of the special session. And the special session could end soon after that, Stevens said.
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“Any legislator saying, ‘I won’t be there on the first day,’ is abrogating their responsibility,” said Stevens. “It’s our duty, it’s our job to honor the call of the governor and be there on Aug. 2. And everyone needs to be there on Aug. 2. If they are not there, they are not doing their jobs.”
The bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate number 35 members combined. That means they need to draw support from 10 Republican minority members to succeed in overriding the governor on budget vetoes. Overriding policy vetoes — like that of the oil and gas tax audit bill — requires a lower threshold of 40 votes.
On paper, lawmakers have the support they need to override the governor’s veto of education funding and the oil and gas tax audit measure, known as Senate Bill 183.
The Legislature overrode Dunleavy’s veto of an education funding bill with support from 46 lawmakers in May. And Senate Bill 183 passed with support from 49 lawmakers.
But some lawmakers who supported the May veto override vote, including Costello, have indicated they have not decided yet whether to support an override of the budget veto.
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Costello said Wednesday that she was spending time meeting with constituents this week to determine whether they support overriding the governor.
Some Republican lawmakers aligned with the governor have already announced they would not attend the special session. Among them is Senate Minority Leader Mike Shower, a Wasilla Republican, who said he had a prior work commitment that would keep him away from the Capitol for the first days of the special session. Some House members have said they would follow Dunleavy’s request not to attend the beginning of the session, including Rep. Sarah Vance, a Homer Republican, and Rep. Jamie Allard, an Eagle River Republican.
Stevens said that if lawmakers are successful overriding Dunleavy’s vetoes of education funding and Senate Bill 183, they may move on to some of the governor’s other vetoes.
“That would be my intention of dealing with those two things primarily,” said Stevens. “Then, as we discuss it, we’ll see if there are other overrides we want to consider.”
The potential list of override votes is long: Dunleavy vetoed dozens of line items in the state budget, and he also vetoed four other policy bills, including ones that passed with broad bipartisan support from lawmakers.
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But if the votes over education funding and oil and gas audits fail to reach their respective thresholds, “it would be pointless to go on to other overrides,” said Stevens.
Regardless of whether the special session goes as planned, education funding and oil and gas tax audits are “live matters that will be dealt with in January,” Stevens said.
Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola narrowly leads Republican Senator Dan Sullivan in Alaska’s 2026 U.S. Senate race, a potential shakeup in the fairly red state, according to a new poll.
Newsweek reached out to Peltola’s press team via email on Wednesday for comment.
Why It Matters
Democrats are facing a tough Senate map in the 2026 midterms. Even if President Donald Trump’s approval rating fuels a Democratic wave, the party still needs to win control of states that backed him by double digits in the 2024 election to win a majority.
But Peltola, the only Democrat to win statewide in recent years, may be able to make the race against Sullivan competitive. Alaska could become the state that decides control of the Senate in November.
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What To Know
Peltola represented Alaska’s at-large congressional district in the House, first winning a special election in 2022, defeating former Governor Sarah Palin to fill the late GOP Representative Don Young’s seat. She was elected to a full term later in 2022 and lost her reelection bid in 2024.
Peltola, who only recently announced her campaign for the Senate, raised $1.5 million in the first 24 hours of her bid.
An Alaska Survey Research poll conducted January 8-11, ahead of Peltola’s official announcement, showed her leading Sullivan by more than 1.5 percentage points. The poll found that 48 percent of participants back Peltola to 46.4 percent for Sullivan. About 5.6 percent of participants are undecided.
The survey of 2,132 Alaska adults, 1,988 of whom are registered to vote, also found that Peltola has a more positive rating than Sullivan, 46 percent to 39 percent. In terms of his job approval rating, 36 percent of participants approve of his work while 44.5 percent disapprove.
Nearly half of the poll’s participants, 46 percent, said they have no party affiliation, while 30 percent identify as Republican and 15.4 percent as Democrat. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
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What People Are Saying
Nate Adams, Sullivan’s campaign spokesperson, told Newsweek: “Senator Sullivan has spent years delivering real results for Alaska: historic investments in our state’s health care, major funding for our Coast Guard, helping protect those who can’t protect themselves and policies that are finally unleashing Alaska’s energy potential. Dan Sullivan delivers for Alaska, and that will be the focus of his campaign. Conversely, his opponent served a term and a half in Congress where she didn’t pass a single bill. Alaskans deserve a senator with a proven record of getting things done, and the contrast couldn’t be clearer in this race.”
Mary Peltola, in her campaign announcement: “My agenda for Alaska will always be fish, family, and freedom. But our future also depends on fixing the rigged system in DC that’s shutting down Alaska, while politicians feather their own nest. DC people will be pissed that I’m focusing on their self-dealing, and sharing what I’ve seen firsthand. They’re going to complain that I’m proposing term limits. But it’s time.”
Senator Dan Sullivan, on X on January 6: “I am so excited about 2026 and all of the opportunities ahead for our great state. The Alaska comeback is happening!”
Alaska Democratic Party Chair Eric Croft, in a statement: “Mary Peltola is our most steadfast champion and a strong voice for Alaskans in every region of our state…Mary has never been afraid to stand up to powerful special interests or her own party to put Alaskans first—and we can’t wait to elect her to represent us in the U.S. Senate this November.”
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, on Alaska Public Media: “We’ve had a pretty solid team here in the Senate for the past 12 years, so we want to figure out how we’re going to keep in the majority. And Dan delivers that.”
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What Happens Next
Candidates will spend the coming months making their case to voters, as both parties try to win control of the Senate in the midterms. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Alaska race “Leans Republican.”
Update 1/14/26, 3:43 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Sullivan’s campaign.
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City Manager for Juneau, Alaska, Katie Koester, joins FOX Weather to talk about how locals are handling the recent flood and avalanche threat and how emergency crews are prepared to handle impending situations.
HAINES, Alaska – An avalanche closed part of a highway in the borough of Haines, a small town about 90 miles north of Juneau in Alaska’s panhandle on Tuesday night — the latest debris slide in the region after days of heavy rain triggered avalanches in Juneau last week.
HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER
Barricades have been placed at Mile 10 of the Haines Highway and crews will begin to assess the damage during the daytime on Wednesday, Alaska Department of Transportation officials said.
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(Alaska Department of Transportation/Facebook / FOX Weather)
Earlier Tuesday, the department released a few photos of the highway’s condition and issued a travel advisory before the avalanche and reported that rain-on-ice conditions were making road conditions very difficult.
RECORD SNOW BURIES JUNEAU SCHOOL AND PROMPTS FIVE-DAY CLEANUP
Drivers were urged to stay off the road.
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Relentless rain from an atmospheric river has pounded the southeastern part of the state, which has begun to melt a historic amount of snow that fell across the region over the holidays, triggering days of avalanche warnings.
More than 7 feet of snow has fallen across the Alaska panhandle, with the bulk coming after Christmas Eve.
Evacuations were issued in Juneau last week after several large avalanches were reported on the Thane and Mount Juneau avalanche paths Friday.
Governor Mike Dunleavy issued a disaster declaration on Saturday for both the ongoing storms and the record-shattering snow.
Another day of heavy rain is expected, but the precipitation will finally begin to decrease later Wednesday.
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Check back for more details on this developing story.
A Mini-PASS unit and explanatory posters are displayed on Aug. 10, 2021, at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage. ANTHC distributed hundreds of the units during the COVID-19 pandemic to homes in villages that lacked piped water. (Yereth Rosen / Alaska Beacon)
A key step to preventing the spread of diseases like COVID-19 or influenza is simple: washing hands. But lack of piped water in parts of rural Alaska has made that simple practice not so easy to carry out.
Now a technological innovation has boosted rural Alaskans’ ability to do that important disease-fighting task.
The Miniature Portable Alternative Sanitation System, or Mini-PASS, a portable water station that does not require connection to any piped water system, proved effective at helping people wash their hands properly, and there are signs that its use is fending off contagious diseases among children, according to a recently published study.
The Mini-PASS is a stripped-down version of the full Portable Alternative Sanitation System that was also designed by Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and its partners.
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The full PASS units typically store 50 to 100 gallons of water, and the units include connections to septic tanks, allowing for flush toilets to take the place of “honey buckets,” the plastic-bag-lined buckets commonly used in rural Alaska areas lacking water and sewer systems. The Mini-PASS units lack those septic connections, and they typically allow for storage of 20 gallons of water. Storage tanks are placed above sinks, and used water drains into collection buckets.
The Mini-PASS units are much cheaper than full PASS systems, costing a little over $10,000 for construction and delivery, according to ANTHC. A full PASS system can cost about $50,000 per household, according to ANTHC. That sum is vastly lower than the cost of extending piped water and sanitation service, which can total $400,000 or more per household in parts of rural Alaska.
Simplicity had its virtues during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, there was urgency for distributing Mini-PASS units to several rural communities — places where people living in unpiped homes were hauling water, often in difficult circumstances, then using and reusing it in germ-spreading basins.
The consortium, with the help of partners, distributed hundreds of Mini-PASS units to rural households during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At least 350 units had been distributed as of 2021, and more have gone out since then.
“The idea was people were not going to be reusing the water, that it was free flowing, that you’d wash your hands, and then it would go into the wastewater bucket, the gray water bucket,” said Laura Eichelberger, an ANTHC research consultant and co-author of the study.
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“And because the pandemic was this urgent situation of crisis, they needed to get as many of these units in as they possibly could. And so they took the idea of the PASS and just made it as simple and cheap as possible,” she said.
The recent study used interviews to measure the effectiveness of mini-PASS. In all, there were 163 interviews from 52 households.
Water use is considered an indicator of public health, and the Mini-PASS units led to an increase in water use that expanded over time, the results found. Average water use per person increased by 0.08 gallons per month in households that used the units, meaning that after a year, water use was up by 0.96 gallons a day per person, or 3.6 liters per day, the results found.
Additionally, people with Mini-PASS units reported that children 12 and under had fewer symptoms of contagious diseases.
There was a “statistically significant decrease in the reported symptoms, respiratory in particular, for households who were actively using the Mini-PASS as their primary hand- washing method, compared to those that were still using wash basins,” said Amanda Hansen, the study’s lead author and another ANTHC health researcher.
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Prior to the distribution of Mini-PASS units, water use in unpiped villages in Alaska averaged only 5.7 liters per person per day, according to a 2021 study by researchers at Canada’s McGill University. That was well below the World Health Organization standard of 20 liters per person per day, according to that study.
Parts of rural Alaska continue to face daunting challenges in securing adequate water and sanitation services. According to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, more than 30 communities were considered “unserved” as of 2020. The category applied when less than 55% of homes are served by piped, septic and well or covered haul systems.
Still, there has been significant progress in recent years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the number of rural Alaska homes without water, sewer or both has decreased by a notable 70% over the past two decades.
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
