A key public-sector union and some Democratic state lawmakers are calling on Gov. Mike Dunleavy to release the results of a million-dollar study on how competitive the state’s salaries are. The study was originally due last summer — and lawmakers say that delays will complicate efforts to write the state budget.

It’s no secret that the state of Alaska has struggled to recruit and retain qualified staff for state jobs. An average of 16% of state positions remain unfilled as of November, according to figures obtained by the Anchorage Daily News. That’s about twice the vacancy rate generally thought of as healthy, according to legislative budget analysts.

“The solution, it’s not rocket science,” said Heidi Drygas, the executive director of the union representing a majority of rank-and-file state of Alaska employees, the Alaska State Employees Association/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 52. “We have to pay people fairly, and we’re underpaying our state workers right now.”

Drygas says the large number of open jobs has hobbled state services. At one point, half of the state’s payroll processing jobs were unfilled, leading to late and incorrect paychecks for state employees.

“This is a problem that has been plaguing state government for years, and it is only getting worse,” she said.

Alaskans are feeling the effects, said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage.

“We’ve been unable to fill prosecutor jobs. We’ve been unable to fill snowplow operator jobs, teaching jobs, of course, on the local level, clerk jobs for the courts, which backs up our court system, and so on and so forth,” Wielechowski said.

So, in 2023, the Legislature put $1 million in the state budget to fund a study looking to determine whether the state’s salaries were adequate. The results were supposed to come in last June.

Wielechowski said he’s been hearing from constituents looking for the study’s findings. He’s asked the Department of Administration to release the study. And so far, he said, he still hasn’t seen it.

“This has just dragged on, and on, and on, and now we’re seven months later, and we still have nothing,” he said. “They’re refusing to release any documents at all, and that’s very troubling, because this is a critical topic that we need before we go ahead and go into session.”

Dunleavy’s deputy chief of staff emailed the heads of state agencies in early December with an update: The study wasn’t done yet. The governor’s office had reviewed drafts of the study and found them lacking.

They sent the contractor back to the drawing board to incorporate more data: salaries from “additional peer/comparable jurisdictions”, plus recent collective bargaining agreements and a bill that raised some state salaries that passed last spring.

“Potential changes to the State’s classification and pay plans informed by the final study report could substantially impact the State’s budget, and additional due diligence is necessary, especially as we look at the State’s revenue projections,” Deputy Chief of Staff Rachel Bylsma wrote to Dunleavy’s Cabinet on Dec. 6.

Though the final study has not been completed, blogger Dermot Cole filed a public records request for any drafts of the study received to date. But state officials have thus far declined to release them, saying they’re exempt from disclosure requirements under Alaska law.

“The most recent salary study draft records the state received have been withheld under the Alaska Public Records Act based on executive and deliberative process privileges,” Guy Bell, a special project assistant in the governor’s office who deals with records requests, said in an email to Alaska Public Media. “Any prior drafts that may have been provided are superseded by the most recent drafts, so they no longer meet the definition of a public record.”

To Wielechowski, that’s absurd.

“It’s laughable. It’s wild,” he said. “That’s not how the process works.”

The deliberative process privilege under state law protects some, but not all, documents related to internal decision-making in the executive branch, according to a 1992 opinion from the state attorney general’s office. It’s intended to allow advisors to offer their candid recommendations, according to the opinion.

“The deliberative process privilege extends to communications made in the process of policy-making,” and courts have applied the privilege to “predecisional” and “deliberative” documents, Assistant Attorneys General Jim Cantor and Nancy Meade wrote. However, “courts have held that factual observations and final expressions of policy are not privileged,” they continued.

Lawmakers are about to get to work on the state budget, and Wielechowski said it’s hard to do that without a sense of how, if at all, state salaries should be adjusted.

“Nobody knows how it’s going to turn out,” he said. “Maybe salaries are high. But it will certainly give us an indication of whether or not this is something we should be looking at as a Legislature.”

Wielechowski sent a letter to the agency handling the study in December asking for any of the drafts that the contractor has handed in so far. He said he’s concerned that the Dunleavy administration may be trying to manipulate the study’s conclusions.

“We didn’t fund a million dollars to get some politically massaged study,” he said.
“We funded a million dollars so that we could get an objective organization (to) go ahead and look at this problem and to tell us what the numbers look like to tell us how competitive we are.”

An ally of the governor, Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasillia, said he, too, would like to see the results — but he said he sees the value in waiting to see the whole picture.

“I think that in this particular case, it is important that the administration, or even the legislature or the judicial branch, all of which commission studies, ensure that they are appropriately finished (and) vetted,” Shower said. “Sometimes you don’t get back everything you were looking for.”

Though he’s the incoming Senate minority leader, Shower emphasized that he was speaking only for himself. He said the caucus hasn’t discussed it as a group.

But majority-caucus lawmakers say they’re not interested in waiting. Incoming House State Affairs Committee chair Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks, said she plans to take a look at the issue as the session begins.

“I think that there are a lot of questions that are unanswered, and we will be spending the first week of the House State Affairs Committee, in part, addressing the lack of a response from the Department of Administration,” she said.

Drygas, the union leader, sent a letter to her membership on Wednesday asking them to sign a petition calling for the state to release the draft study. It quickly amassed more than a thousand signatures. She said the union is “eagerly awaiting the results,” which she said would provide helpful background for contract negotiations.

“Our membership is fired up,” she said. “We’re not going to just let this go.”

On any clear, dark night you can see them, gliding through the sky and reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world. Manmade satellites now orbit our planet by the thousands, and it’s hard to stargaze without seeing one.

The inky black upper atmosphere was less busy 68 years ago, when a few young scientists stepped out of a trailer near Fairbanks to look into the cold October sky. Gazing upward, they saw the moving dot that started it all, the Russian-launched Sputnik 1.

Those Alaskans, working for the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, were the first North American scientists to see the satellite, which was the size and shape of a basketball and, at 180 pounds, weighed about as much as a point guard.

The Alaska researchers studied radio astronomy at the campus in Fairbanks. They had their own tracking station in a clearing in the forest on the northern portion of university land. This station, set up to study the aurora and other features of the upper atmosphere, enabled the scientists to be ready when a reporter called the institute with news of the Russians’ secret launch of the world’s first manmade satellite.

Within a half-hour of that call, an official with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., called Geophysical Institute Deputy Director C. Gordon Little with radio frequencies that Sputnik emitted.

“The scientists at the Institute poured out of their offices like stirred-up bees,” wrote a reporter for the Farthest North Collegian, the UAF campus newspaper.

Crowded into a trailer full of equipment about a mile north of their offices, the scientists received the radio beep-beep-beep from Sputnik and were able to calculate its orbit. They figured it would be visible in the northwestern sky at about 5 a.m. the next day.

On that morning, three of them stepped outside the trailer to see what Little described as “a bright star-like object moving in a slow, graceful curve across the sky like a very slow shooting star.”

For the record, scientists may not have been the first Alaskans to see Sputnik. In a 1977 article, the founder of this column, T. Neil Davis, described how his neighbor, Dexter Stegemeyer, said he had seen a strange moving star come up out of the west as he was sitting in his outhouse. Though Stegemeyer didn’t know what he saw until he spoke with Davis, his sighting was a bit earlier than the scientists’.

The New York Times’ Oct. 7, 1957 edition included a front-page headline of “SATELLITE SEEN IN ALASKA,” and Sputnik caused a big fuss all over the country. People wondered about the implications of the Soviet object looping over America every 98 minutes. Within a year, Congress voted to create NASA.

Fears about Sputnik evaporated as three months later the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, and eventually took the lead in the race for space.

Almost 70 later, satellites are part of everyday life. The next time you see a satellite streaking through the night sky, remember the first scientist on this continent to see one was standing in Alaska. And the first non-scientist to see a satellite in North America was sitting in Alaska.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Gusty winds and heavy snow has begun to spread into Western and Southwest Alaska, with a surge of warmer air. Temperatures in Southwest Alaska is already 10 to 35 degrees warmer than yesterday morning. This warmth will spread across the rest of the state through the weekend, with some of the most pronounced warmth along the Slope. We’ll see many areas this weekend into next week remaining well-above average.

SOUTHCENTRAL:

Temperatures are slowly warming across Southcentral, with many areas seeing cloud coverage increasing. While we could see some peeks of sunshine today, most locations will see mostly cloudy conditions. While we can’t rule out light flurries for inland locations, most of the precipitation today will occur near the coast. Snow looks to be the primary precipitation type, although later this evening a transition to rain or wintry mix will occur. This comes as temperatures quickly warm across Southcentral.

We’ll see highs today in the upper 20s and lower 30s for inland areas, while coastal regions warm into the 30s and 40s. The southerly flow aloft will remain with us for several days, pumping in the warmth and moisture. As a result, Kodiak could see over an inch of rain today, with gusty winds.

While most of the precipitation this weekend remains near the coast, inland areas will see the best chance for wintry mix Sunday into Monday. Little to no accumulation is expected.

The key takeaways for this weekend, is snow transitioning to rain, with some gusty winds likely for parts of Southcentral this weekend.

SOUTHEAST:

Another fairly quiet day is expected across Southeast today, outside of some light snow near Yakutat. We’ll see a mix of sun and clouds with temperatures remaining on the cooler side. Parts of the Northern Panhandle may stay in the upper 20s today. The stretch of quiet weather will stay with us through the first half of Saturday, followed by an increase in precipitation and winds. This upcoming system may bring some heavy snowfall to Southeast, so be prepared for that potential this weekend. Temperatures warm into next week, back into the upper 30s and lower 40s for many areas.

INTERIOR:

While temperatures this morning have bottomed out as low as -30 near Fort Yukon, temperatures will warm into the weekend. A wind advisory for the Alaska Range goes into effect at 9 Friday morning, where winds up to 60 mph will warm the Interior. Temperatures today for many locations will warm into the single digits, with some of the greatest warming arriving Saturday through next week. It’s likely we’ll spend most of next week with temperatures in the 20s and 30s, with the warmest locations near the Alaska Range. While we will largely stay dry, there is a chance for some light snow arriving Sunday night into Monday.

SLOPE/WESTERN ALASKA:

Temperatures will remain slightly above average for parts of the Slope today, with warming winds to build into the Slope this weekend. This comes as our area of low pressure in the Bering Sea continues to move farther north. Be prepared for gusty easterly winds along the Slope, leading to blowing snow and reduced visibility. We’ll see temperatures quickly warm well above average, with highs climbing into the 20s and 30s along the Slope into next week. While some snow is possible through the weekend, the heaviest activity will occur for the Brooks Range. We’ll see the potential for 4 to 12 inches of snowfall, with the highest amounts occurring along the southern slopes of the Brooks Range near Kobuk Valley. Winds could gusts as high as 45 mph, leading to greatly reduced visibility.

Heavy snow is impacting Western and Southwest Alaska this morning, with winds gusting up to 50 mph. Numerous winter weather alerts, as well as a coastal flood advisory is in effect. The heaviest snow will fall for the Seward Peninsula and east of Norton Sound, where up to a foot or more of snow is to be expected. The heaviest amounts will fall today, with the activity set to lighten up through Sunday. In addition to the snow, gusty winds will lead to areas of blowing snow. Visibility could be reduced down to less than half a mile at times. As southerly flow continues to pump in warmth, we’ll see a transition from snow to rain later today into Saturday for parts of Southwest Alaska.

ALEUTIANS:

Gusty winds and heavy rain will fall through the Aleutians today, where up to .75″ of rain is possible. As the area of low pressure moves north, we’ll see a new low form just south of the Eastern Aleutians. This will lead to additional rain and winds into the weekend. Winds could gusts upwards of 50 mph through the Eastern Aleutians and through the Alaska Peninsula. With ridging to our east, more rain and winds remain with us into early next week. There is the potential that the Pribilof Islands see a return to snow Sunday, as colder air moves into the Bering Sea.

OUTLOOK AHEAD:

Well above average warmth will stay with us as we close out January. While one more short-lived cold snap is possible, we may have to wait until February before we tap into warmer conditions. Temperatures through the close of January will keep average monthly temperatures 5 to 12 degrees above average for much of the state. The overall trend still favors a wetter pattern, although with warmer weather the southern parts of the state will favor more rain or a mixed bag of precipitation.

Have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend.

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