:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/adn/FBBK46WUSBBMLOIJJ5QYAHCOKM.JPG?ssl=1 "OPINION: The simple answer to Alaska’s outmigration problem")
Sometimes, the best explanations are the simplest. Especially when it comes to economics.
The numbers way to describe the consequences of Alaska’s population problem, particularly its shortage of working-age residents, is to explain that more people have left the state than new residents have moved in for each of the past 11 years. That net outmigration is making it hard for employers to fill jobs, which means reduced hours of operation, longer waits for services and less money in the economy.
The decline in working-age residents — ages 18 to 64 — is especially noticeable in vacant public service jobs. Whether it’s school buses or municipal buses lacking enough drivers, or state ferries lacking enough crew to operate a full schedule, or essential government services delayed for lack of staff to handle the work, such as the monthslong delays in processing food stamp applications, the employee shortage affects most everyone.
Statewide, Alaska lost 30,000 working-age residents between 2013 and 2022, according to the Alaska Department of Labor. It’s a three-factor problem: more residents retiring out of the workforce; too many people leaving Alaska; and fewer people moving north.
It means more non-residents are working in Alaska than in nearly 25 years, taking home their paychecks.
All that adds up and makes sense, but maybe it’s too many numbers and too many pieces to make clear the problem.
Dan Robinson, the Department of Labor’s chief of analysis and research, explained it best in a presentation at the Resource Development Council annual conference in Anchorage last month. “Imagine yourself a store or a restaurant,” Robinson said. Your business needs to constantly attract new customers to replace the ones who stop coming. Failing to replace those lost customers is bad for business.
Alaska is failing to attract new customers to replace those it is losing.
No business can thrive with a shrinking customer base. And neither can the state.
“Something has changed about Alaska’s relative attractiveness,” Robinson said. “It’s likely complicated,” with no one answer as to why more people leave than move north.
What isn’t complicated is that elected officials and community leaders — starting with the governor and legislators — need to deal with the math. This isn’t about who can be the most pro-oil, pro-development, pro-business politician. None of that matters without workers to fill the jobs.
Alaskans need to look at why younger people are not moving to the state as much as they did in years past and address those needs, which include good schools, housing, child care, a strong university system, community services and the parks and recreation activities that younger families seek.
It means a retirement system for public employees who often are paid less than their private-sector counterparts.
Make the state more attractive and they will come. And they will fill the jobs and start businesses.
We need to make Alaska a place where more people will want to invest their lives, just as businesses invest money. There is nothing more pro-development than that.
Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.
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