State legislators, governor prepare for session’s start this week

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – While dozens of bills were shared with the public last week as part of the Alaska State Legislature’s prefiled bills releases, lawmakers are gearing up for a session that will see a range of topics considered by the House and Senate, as Gov. Mike Dunleavy does the same.

“I look forward to the next 121 days of working with lawmakers on what matters most to Alaskans,” Dunleavy said in a prepared statement from his office. “While we may have different opinions on policy issues, we are all striving to reach the same goal of making Alaska a better place to live and raise a family.”

Dunleavy’s office wrote that improving public safety and public education outcomes, making sure people know Alaska is “open for business,” and honing in on energy opportunities across the state are also among his priorities.

At the same time, a couple of the lawmakers who chose to file legislation ahead of the start of the session also spoke Monday about their decisions to introduce bills early, as well as some of the other priorities they see going into this session.

One of them is Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, who introduced a bill that would require that school districts assign certain highly-trained individuals to carry a concealed firearm on school grounds.

“We’re being very thoughtful about that,” she said, “because we want parents and community members and leaders to feel comfortable with this, that this role is being assigned to someone, not on a willy-nilly basis, but under a very careful process.”

Hughes said a retired teacher who lives in Palmer – a constituent, who was a teacher at the time of a shooting at Bethel Regional High School in 1997 and is left of center, according to Hughes – came to her with the idea for the bill.

“I believe this, also, is bipartisan,” Hughes said, adding that response times in certain schools could be much longer than in others, even when simply based on access to communities. “Our students should not go to school with any fear like this. They should know that they can relax, and be there to do what they’re supposed to do: learn, and be prepared and equipped to be productive citizens.”

The state senator is also leading the charge when it comes to multiple other prefiled bills, such as SB 172, which would extend senior benefits while lengthening the time before the Legislature must review that program, pushing that to 2034.

Another bill she sponsored, SB 177, targets artificial intelligence, deepfakes, cybersecurity and data transfers. If passed, it would demand that election campaigns using any sort of deepfakes disclose that use and bars the transfer of data between state agencies, unless the individual whose data is being shared consents first.

“It took a little longer than usual for the drafting of this bill, because it’s so brand new,” Hughes said. “I believe it’s the very first bill on AI in our state. So when it came back, there wasn’t really time to go back and forth, back and forth, tweaking every word and getting everything exactly right.

“So I expect there to be changes, and I want there to be improvements,” she said, adding that this bill – like others of hers – is about protecting Alaskans. “Once the bill is filed, it goes into the hands of committees, where those improvements are going to be made. So I don’t want anybody to think that right now, this bill is in perfect condition.”

Hughes said she also expects to spend a great deal of time on agricultural industry policies, plans to help push through trafficking laws, and hopes to see increased educational funding attached to improving academic performances in areas across the state.

Among other pieces of legislation, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, filed HB 261, which would, in part, establish a vehicular homicide offense in state statute.

“Forty-seven of 50 states do have a separate vehicular homicide statute,” he explained. “The benefit is that it’s more intuitive, I think, for a jury to understand how the offense happened, the nature of the offense, why it is a crime — because under current law, we use homicide and assault statutes to proscribe or to criminalize what is really vehicular homicide.”

Like Hughes, Josephson has multiple prefiled bills he submitted. His HB 239 would add post-traumatic stress disorder as an allowable claim for workers’ compensation under certain circumstances and for specific groups, such as fire fighters, police, emergency dispatchers, emergency medical technicians and others.

“The idea of affording fire and police the opportunity to have some period under workers’ comp benefits while they are dealing with post-traumatic stress is something, again, that other states have,” he explained. “We know that police and fire in Alaska have sought this sort of reform for a long time. No doubt, municipalities will be concerned about the cost to workers’ comp premiums and what that kind of impact that would have on their treasuries, but that’s a reform that our first responders have wanted.”

Several of his other bills are healthcare-related, to include HB 248, which would require separate consent for any sort of pelvic examination, whether by a full health care provider or students receiving instruction or individuals participating in clinical training.

Josephson also explained part of his thinking in filing a large number of bills ahead of the session, noting that prefiling is a privilege afforded to legislators, and that, come February of the second session of each legislature, personal legislation can no longer be filed.

“You don’t know what’s going to catch on,” he said. “The advantage of a prefile bill is that you’re utilizing the entire 121 days, theoretically. But the other advantage is, it sort of lights a fire under the legislative office to get the work done so that you’re not busy in February writing bills.”

The lawmaker out of Alaska’s largest city said he expects contention over a number of bills, to include a bill that focuses on the sharing of information regarding reproductive health of female patients across state lines.

“We’re concerned that this is pretextual, that this is merely a means of punishing someone,” Josephson said. “There shouldn’t be a sort of fishing expedition that goes on because she chose to do that.”

While many bills this session are modeled off legislation from other states, it will be up to the Legislature as a whole to decide what moves through each body and gets to the governor for consideration.

As for Dunleavy, he expanded on some of his priorities on Monday as well, saying in the prepared release from his office that a “major” focus of his for this session is affordability.

“Alaska can be an expensive place to live,” he said, “but we can also do something about it. Food and energy security, childcare, access to land, and healthcare are the key areas we need to work on to make Alaska an even better place to live.

“But as we work to solve these issues,” he continued, “we must ensure that we are not focused only on the short term, but that our work sets up Alaska to be prosperous over the next 50 years.”

The second session of the 33rd Legislature begins on Jan. 16, 2024.

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