Opinion: Stop self-sabotaging Alaska’s opportunity of a lifetime

In the halls of the Alaska State Legislature, a recent resolution has sparked debate — not for its substance, but for its intent.

Seemingly a gesture of goodwill toward Canada, it’s actually a deliberate jab at President Donald Trump. This is no grand geopolitical strategy; it’s simply a poke in the eye.

Most legislators have little background or global experience to wade into strategic battles beyond our state’s borders. As someone who has served all over the world in the military and as an airline pilot, including alongside our Canadian comrades in arms, I can say with certainty: Alaskans and Canadians don’t need a resolution to affirm their mutual respect for each other. The only message this resolution sends is one of political shade. It’s a game the Alaska Senate should refuse to play.

This distraction comes at a pivotal moment. President Trump, from day one, has signaled a commitment to unleashing Alaska’s vast energy and resource potential — a stark contrast to the Biden Administration, which issued 70 executive orders stifling our state’s development. Where the Biden Administration treated Alaska like a colonial outpost, Trump sees our oil, gas, timber, minerals and other rich resources as national assets. His reversal of policies that smothered Alaska offers a lifeline to a state looking to stand on its own.

Our private sector is weak. We’ve relied on oil and gas, an industry which helped build Alaska and kept us afloat. However, it is always volatile.

Most of the money for the budget we spend every year comes from the federal government. It’s not free money because most of us pay income taxes.

Alaska gets a lot more money from the federal government than we put into it because we’re so small. We have a small population by size compared to our landmass, which is more than twice the size of the next largest state. We have a lot of far-flung infrastructure to maintain. With so few people, there is no realistic way for us to pay for this without help if we continue to support every corner of Alaska.

When most of our budget flows from Washington, D.C., this binds us to federal whims.

Can we wean ourselves off this dependency? Our population cannot shoulder the costs alone, and the state’s spending often defies fiscal sense.

Here’s an example: Alaska has a population of 740,133 people and includes 54 school districts. Our largest school district has shrinking enrollment, new buildings, while continuously threatening to cut programs and asking for significant increases in funding. The Legislature sets the purse strings, but local districts decide how to spend the money. As a result, we are stuck in a cycle of “just add money” without requiring improved accountability and better performance.

If a school district or borough struggles with funding priorities, that’s on those entities — not the Legislature. In fact, the state has spent so much in recent years that we are hundreds of millions of dollars behind being able to pay the state’s bills this year, and next year is worse. Many of the problems we are facing aren’t from a lack of spending money, even money we don’t have.

An unfortunate “scare” tactic school districts and other government agencies use is a phenomenon called the Washington Monument Syndrome. It’s a form of political extortion whereby an organization faced with budget reductions threatens to cut the most visible or appreciated service in order to spark public outcry. We, the Legislature, have little control over what those districts do beyond providing funding.

The real hope for Alaska lies in reclaiming our land and resources in order to maximize their potential for all — including the public and private sector. With Trump’s backing, we could manage more of our own territory — timber, fish, minerals and energy that’s the envy of most of the world — freeing us from federal dependency.

We all want to protect our pristine lands for future generations, but we also must have sustainable development to fund that future. Projects like these take years, and with oil prices shaky, the next few years may be bumpy. But 6 to 10 years from now, as pipelines, mines, energy projects and more come online, Alaska can boom. Our potential is vast, but it demands leaders who see beyond political stunts to a self-reliant future.

Sen. Mike Shower is a member of the Alaska Senate. He lives in Wasilla.

• • •

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.