Ketchikan Rep. Jeremy Bynum talks education funding and Alaska’s finances

Governor Mike Dunleavy vetoed House Bill 69, an education bill that would’ve boosted per-student funding for Alaska schools by $1,000, on Thursday. In a news conference, he cited a rapid decline in the state’s revenue in recent months and the lack of policy changes included in the final bill as the reasons for his veto.

The governor then proposed an alternative bill that would cut the per-student funding boost and focus more funding on homeschool and literacy initiatives and away from general funds for school districts. State lawmakers are convening on Tuesday to vote on confirming or overriding the Governor’s veto. A veto override would require two-thirds of the Legislature to vote against the governor.

Ketchikan Republican Rep. Jeremy Bynum sits on the House Finance Committee. He was one of three minority-caucus Republicans who voted in favor of the education bill. Bynum sat down with KRBD’s Jack Darrell to talk about what happened with the education funding bill, as well as the Alaska Marine Highway System, and takeaways from his first session in the Alaska Legislature.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jack Darrell: This is your first session in the legislature. You were at a candidate forum here at KRBD prior to the elections, and you talked about how a couple of your priorities were the Alaska Marine Highway System and education. I want to hear how you’ve been advocating for those things this session.

Jeremy Bynum: From the marine highway perspective, when we were going through subcommittee, they came and talked with us. We tried to put pressure on figuring out what it is that we’re actually doing – how do we get our services back where they need to be? So, talking with the department, they’re putting together their long-range plan and their vessel building plan. They’re really making an attempt to figure out what our path forward is going to be. There’s a lot of uncertainty on some elements of the things that are really important to us here in Ketchikan. We want our southern connection back. We have the Bellingham run, but the closest southern connection would be [Prince Rupert, British Columbia].

There’s been discussions of Hyder – trying to get the department to give us a feasibility study of both of those and how we can get them back up and running.

So, still working on it. We just finished up the operating budget. One of the things I pushed pretty hard for was to make sure that we had federal backstop money in place for the ferry system. Right now, there’s $5 million in the budget for the federal backstop. I was trying to get that pushed up to $10 million.

That is just basically a maintenance item, though. We don’t have those big, substantial, revolutionary changes that we need to have. We’re still working on that.

JB: The other thing that we talked about is education. Watching this whole process from being on the [Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly] for four years, you see how we have this dependency on the state to make sure they’re giving us foundational dollars early on or assurances of what those were going to be.

We all want to see additional dollars being put into education here in District 1. That’s not just Ketchikan. District 1 as a whole – Wrangell, Metlakatla, our schools over on Prince of Wales Island. We know we need additional resources here.

House Bill 69 was the vehicle that the majority decided to use. The original version of that bill – although very well-intentioned – was never, never going to be a reality. It was just unaffordable. It’s nothing that we could even consider to fund, at least under current fiscal condition.

So, a lot of people talk about, ‘Well, let’s bring in additional or new revenues.’

Well, those are a lot of conversations, but one thing that isn’t happening is that those additional revenues aren’t in front of us right now. So, to consider them as possible isn’t really reality when I have to do a budget right now.

So, we ultimately ended up with the bill that came to the floor. And, from my perspective, there was policy that was added into that bill that a lot of people were asking for, but policies I wanted weren’t in that bill. I wanted policies that would really try to protect Career Technical Education (CTE), and make sure that when we put money into the schools, that they’re going to these really important programs we talk about – sports programs in the schools, music, CTE, all these things that keep kids engaged in school. That ultimately didn’t happen.

There were policy things in there that some people were able to get on with, and so myself and two other minority members supported the education bill leaving the House to go to the Senate. Even Governor Dunleavy at that time had put out a tweet or a post on X that said that he felt that the bill was going in the right direction. So it felt pretty good to know that. I felt like we might have some possibility that we could actually get a piece of legislation that would be passed and not vetoed.

There was still a lot of concerns about the cost of the $1,000 BSA. From my perspective, ultimately, that funding is necessary in the long-term. And I figured we could figure out a way to put our heads together and make sure that we were going to make that a priority and fund it. For me, it’s not about whether we’re cutting the budget – cut, cut, cut. It’s about how we’re prioritizing where we put our money. So, it left the House looking like it was on a good trajectory.

Then, it got over to the Senate Education Committee. They made some substantial changes. They made a couple good changes, and they made some changes which I thought were not good, because I thought it hurt the bill’s opportunity to actually make it through the process.

JD: What were those changes?

JB: The one thing that they added in there that – it was a political thing that was added that made me think that people just were not going to support the bill – they added into the bill a requirement that if you were doing the public homeschool program – this is part of our public school system – that there was a mandatory requirement that your kid would have to go through the testing process, and if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t get your funding for the homeschool program. So it was basically saying, ‘You do this testing or you will not be allowed to basically get any funding for your allotment.’

Again, that wasn’t something that I think has a big, big impact in District 1, because we don’t have a lot of students in that correspondence program. The same thing is true for other school districts within District 1. Up north, though, its a big deal. And people said they absolutely would never vote for the bill with that in there. So it was kind of like – for the lack of a better word – a “poison pill” for the bill. We knew the governor would also not support that at all. So it was like, ‘Why did you do that if we’re trying to actually get a bill done?’

“Well, things changed pretty rapidly over the last month…”

– Rep. Jeremy Bynum

Then, we’ve had some things transpire through that process, and one of the big things that’s transpired is the economic condition of the state. We had a spring forecast that said that we were going to get about $68 a barrel on oil this forecast. So, when we go to establish the budget, they do a forecast and a revenue forecast based on that, and that’s the amount of money that we have to work with when we go to craft this budget.

Well, things changed pretty rapidly over the last month, and oil wasn’t $68. It’s dropped down in the $63 range. It even dipped below that. So, there’s some uncertainty with long term forecast. We’ve seen some instability in the markets, and a big portion of what we get for funding our government isn’t just what the oil does and oil production, but also the earnings from the Permanent Fund. So, when we see a big loss of revenue or value is from the fund, that has a financial impact on the state as well. So there’s a lot of concern right now in the building about how much funding we’re actually gonna have available to us to fund the operating budget and the capital budget, and the mental health budget. All of those financial pressures really caused a lot of concern on the Senate side when the education bill was coming out of the Education Committee and going to the Finance Committee in the Senate.

Ultimately, the Senate just basically said, ‘We don’t think that there’s the current willpower to try to reduce that $1,000 down to make it more affordable,’ but we also understand that they didn’t think that we could afford it. They came right out and said it. So they stripped all the policy out of the bill, and they basically said, ‘We’ll put it to the floor for a vote, see if we get concurrence, and send it to the governor.’ And I think everybody already knew what the outcome was going to be, because the governor said, I’m going to veto this bill.

JD: And then he did. After vetoing it, he presented his alternative education bill. What do you think about that? Would Governor Dunleavy’s education bill be good for District 1?

JB: It wouldn’t hurt. There’s some of the policy stuff in there that I like. My hope is that it would be good in the sense that we would have a permanent increase. Right now, that bill has a $560 permanent increase. Along with some other funding mechanisms, it has about an equivalent of a $700 [increase to the Base Student Allocation].

But ultimately, the governor said that if we pass that bill, he’d sign it tomorrow. So, I’m like, ‘Let’s pass that bill tomorrow and let him sign the thing into law.’ I mean, we can always continue to work on other policies. We can always continue to work on additional funding. We can even have conversations about putting some additional one-time funding in, given a lot of the uncertainty within the school districts and their funding needs, but I think it’d be step in the right direction.

JD: So, if things came to a veto override vote, how would you go on that?

JB: If I’m being practical about it, when I’m looking at where the votes are, there’s not enough votes to override. So, that puts me in a position of asking, ‘Am I making a political vote?’ Do I say, ‘Yes, I want to override because I believe that this was the right bill?’ We’re not going to win that battle. So do I put all my effort into saying, ‘Let’s get something we can get across the finish line and move on.’ I want to see a solution. I don’t want to just see political statements being made. I kind of feel like House Bill 69 has been a political process and not a real serious process to solve the problem.

JD: What are your hopes and dreams for the rest of this session?

JB: We’ve been working on another piece of legislation, House Bill 75, and I’m calling it the PFD Eligibility Bill for the Merchant Marine Academy. So, this is to help protect our kids going off to the Merchant Marine Academy so they would still maintain their eligibility for the Permanent Fund Dividend, just like all the other kids going off to college get. It also helps predict our college kids to give some allowable absences for their spring break and winter break. There’s some corrective language in there to help people to have medical emergencies when they go to leave to maintain their eligibility.

It’s a good bill, and we just passed that out of the House, and so we put a lot of work into that. I’m pretty proud of the fact that we were able to work across across the aisle and also bicameral with the Senate. Some folks had some issues with but that’s okay. It’s a pretty strong showing for a freshman bill to get through the process.