Freshmen lawmakers reflect on their first session in the Alaska State Legislature

Eleven newly elected legislators joined the 60 members of the Alaska State Legislature this year in Juneau: 10 of 40 in the House and one of 20 in the Senate. New members came from across the state, from the Arctic to Southeast Alaska, and a variety of backgrounds and experiences in education, business, journalism, engineering, nonprofit leadership and local public office. 

Both the House and Senate had majority caucuses held by multipartisan coalitions of Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents in the House. Education funding took top priority, with the Legislature passing a historic override of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s second veto to raise per-student school aid. The Alaska Permanent Fund dividend was set at an inflation-adjusted historic low, at $1,000 per eligible Alaskan, amid declining state revenues. And the Legislature negotiated to produce a balanced, yet pared-down budget with modest if any increases in public services,  in 120 days.  

Six of the 11 members took time, some as they were packing up their offices in the Capitol in late May, to sit down for interviews to reflect on the session. 

Rep. Robyn Niayuq Burke, Utqiagvik Democrat, House District 40

Robyn Niayuq Burke represents communities across the North Slope and Northwest Arctic regions. “It went pretty well,” she said of her first session. “This job is very relational. And a person might vote a certain way, but I really appreciate all of the friendships and relationships that I’ve been able to make while being here.”

Burke said she was inspired to run for the House after watching last year’s Legislature fail to override the governor’s veto of an education funding increase. 

“That was my call to action,” she said, citing her experience as a former school board president. “I went down very much looking forward to being a part of a bipartisan coalition, working across lines.” 

She said she was glad to be part of the veto override this year. 

“Seven hundred dollars was a compromise,” she said of the per-student education funding increase. “I know that’s not enough for many districts who are facing challenges: I know that. There’s an over $10 million deficit in the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, and throughout rural Alaska there’s a challenge with schools closing.”

Even before Dunleavy reduced the school funding by $50.6 million through a separate, line-item budget veto, Burke said education will be an ongoing issue for the Legislature. “I think we have more catching up to do. So I would like to see further increases, but I know that we’ve got some challenging years ahead of us,” she said. 

Representing Alaska’s northernmost district, and the furthest from Juneau, sometimes making the multiflight journey in one weekend, was not without its challenges for Burke, as a mother of two. “It was difficult personally, like personally uprooting my life, being down there for five months was difficult for me and my family,” she said. “But doing the work, getting into it … it was really great. I really enjoy the work.”

Burke co-chaired the House Resources Committee. She was also a member of four other committees, including tribal affairs and labor and commerce, and said her focus was also on elections and public safety issues. She sponsored a bill that passed to expand funding for Mt. Edgecumbe High School, the state-run boarding school: “On the very last day, I had a bill pass the House and the Senate, and so I feel really grateful for that,” she said. The bill is awaiting transmittal to the governor, for him to decide whether to sign or veto it, or let it become law without his signature.

 Policy: B                                Politics: B                                 Personal Grade: A- 

“For policy, we teed up a lot of the things that are really important to us, and I know that we will get straight to work on them, to get them across the finish line in, starting in January,” Burke said. “There also might be this perception that just because two legislators might fall on different sides of the aisle politically, then they can’t get along, but I get along with, I would say, almost all of my colleagues on the floor, and I’m really grateful for that.”

Rep. Ted Eischeid, Anchorage Democrat, House District 22

Ted Eischeid represents North Anchorage, including North Muldoon. “I was a teacher for 25 years, and the thing that surprised me was that every week was like the first week of school. It didn’t slow down,” he said. “One of the takeaways I have is how hard the work is. You know, I don’t think I realized how hard it was. It’s grinding and it’s hard being down here away from your family … It was hard work; it was good work. And I’m really happy I was here, for my district.” 

Eischeid served on nine House committees, including education, transportation, judiciary, several subcommittees and as chair of the military and veterans affairs committee.

“I was one of the key races that flipped,” he said, referring to his election helping to secure the multipartisan majority in the House. “And I think we showed up for Alaskans in a big way, especially for things like education, which was my district’s No. 1 priority, from all my door knocks.”

Eischeid grew emotional reflecting on the session, and especially the testimony from school groups on the need for education funding. 

“It’s hard for a lot of educators, for a lot of districts, for students,” he said. “So that’s the part that you know, if I had less empathy, it might be easier for me. So we can just leave it at that.”

He said he supported the greater funding increase for schools in House Bill 69, of a $1,000 per student increase to the funding formula, that Dunleavy vetoed. “It was right on the money. It would make up for inflationary increases,” since the last major increase, he said. 

However, he was satisfied with the lower funding amount that did pass: “Politics is the art of the possible, you know, so I’m happy with education. It’s incremental, though, and that work is not done.”

“Unfortunately, education has been politicized,” he added. “But if you strip away the politics of it, our schools are important, our kids are important, and there’s a path forward. But it takes people setting politics aside. We need good schools, and we need to fund good schools.” 

He said he’s looking forward to continuing work on education and transportation issues, a state retirement benefit system, and a long-term sustainable fiscal plan, including a stable Permanent Fund dividend. “When you cut the PFD, it affects the poorest Alaskans the most. It’s not fair.” he said. 

Policy: A/B                  Politics: B/C                               Personal Grade: Incomplete

“​​One of the really important things I’m happy about is we didn’t fight culture wars,” Eischeid said, and that after door knocking during his campaign, his constituents made it clear that was not a priority. “Democracy is a messy business. It’s slow, it’s iterative, it’s not perfect. But, you know, we ask these 60 individuals, 40 in the House, 20 in the Senate, to give up a part of their life to serve their districts down here. And there’s some neat things that happen.”

Asked to grade his experience in the session, “For myself, I’d say incomplete,” he said. “Let people judge in two years.”

Rep. Carolyn Hall, Anchorage Democrat, House District 16

Carolyn Hall represents West Anchorage, including the Turnagain, Spenard and portions of the Sand Lake neighborhoods. “It’s been a fantastic experience. I feel really good about public service and serving Alaskans and serving my district,” she said. Looking ahead, she said she would, “hopefully, just be as constructive as possible and productive as possible. Yeah, I’m not like a flame thrower, I’m not an ideologue.”

She said education funding was the top priority of her office and her constituents, as the Anchorage School District faces a major budget shortfall and cuts. 

“They want their kids’ schools to be funded. They want them to be adequately funded. They want their kids to have a solid, strong quality education, with small class sizes and extracurriculars and just overall, just having a healthy education,” she said. “And what my constituents tell me is that they’re willing to sacrifice their dividends in order to have funding available in order to achieve that kind of education system.”

In May, the school district just voted to close Lake Hood Elementary School in Hall’s district. She said her constituents would support new state revenues and restructuring of the Permanent Fund dividend formula to provide more funding to schools. 

“So they tell me that they want taxes, if that’s what it means. They tell me that they want either a really small dividend or to get rid of the dividend if it means that their kids are going to have the education that they want them to have, and if they’re going to be able to get their roads plowed or to have, you know, just adequately funded public services,” Hall said.

Hall served on nine committees, including public safety and resources, and co-chaired the labor and commerce committee. She said in the interim between sessions, she’s particularly interested in continuing work on the state retirement system, updating the unemployment insurance program, and expanding paid parental leave. 

She said during the legislative session, she was a “team player” as part of the majority caucus and voted with the group’s priorities. “I grew up playing sports. I played Division II softball in college — like, I understand how teams are supposed to function, and we performed, I think, very well, very, very well as a team, when it came to our 21-person majority coalition.”

Policy: A/B                      Politics: A/B                      Personal Grade: Declined to say

“This isn’t politics. This is public service,” she said. “That sounds probably naive of me to say, but I believe it. Politics will always make its way into the conversation, of course, but that’s not where I’m coming from. I’m coming from a lens of service.”

Hall declined to give herself a grade for the session. “I am my own worst critic, so I don’t know that I want to give myself a grade,” she said. “All I’ll say is that I consider myself to be a lifelong learner. I love learning, and I plan on spending a lot of time in the interim just working on improving myself and improving my knowledge base so that I can come back here and do a better job.”

Rep. Ky Holland, Anchorage independent, House District 9 

Ky Holland represents South Anchorage, from the Hillside neighborhood southeast to Girdwood and Whittier. “As a first-term legislator, my focus was on trying to learn how the processes worked and how the job of a representative, you know, could contribute to the purpose of the Legislature,” he said. 

He said his focus was school funding, developing the state’s defined benefit retirement system, and “a reasonable budget that we could afford.” He said the bipartisan majority caucus has made progress on many of those issues. “I think we’ve worked together pretty well. And obviously there’s still some loose ends with many of those things … but I think we made a lot of progress.”

On education funding, Holland described it as a “compromise” and criticized the state for not increasing funding to schools at the rate of inflation like some other departments. “Increases in the Department of Corrections or Administration, or any other departments that got regular increases without anyone being concerned, that was just expected,” he said. “But education somehow was supposed to be able to continue on a starvation diet?”

Holland said he supports new state revenue measures, and expanding the state budget and possibilities for investment. 

“It simply puts us into a situation where it’s just a game of winners and losers, because we’re playing a zero-sum game, and if one pot (of funding) gets a little bit more money, then it has to be taken out of another place. And, you know, looking at childhood education and early childhood support, versus the school system, versus corrections, we were just in a terrible position. And of course, that also led to a trade-off of not having any significant money for capital projects,” he said, like energy projects and transportation improvements.

Holland said Dunleavy’s focus on education policy changes over funding was “simply a way to dodge dealing with the money issue,” and felt unnecessary. 

“To think that somehow we’re magically going to come up with the Herculean effort that it takes to create a strong, viable, sustainable charter school like Aquarian or Rilkle Schule that the governor has pointed to, is a complete fantasy, and I think it was largely a distraction,” he said. “Because as long as we can go back and argue about policy, we were really slowing down the discussion about what funding we are going to put into the schools.”

Holland served on 10 committees, including state affairs and the joint armed services committee, and co-chaired the energy committee. He said he sees his role as a legislator as his full-time job for the next two years. 

Policy: B                                  Politics: B                          Personal grade: B

“We had to work with essentially no money, you know, a really constrained budget. And we came up with a balanced budget that’s got a little bit of reserve in it,” Holland said. “There were some responsible decisions to work with what we had to make it work.”

Holland said he learned a lot in his first session, and feels committed to the role. “There’s a lot of things I got done. I got nine bills introduced, and made some really good progress I’m proud of there. Got some things, though, that I didn’t get done.” 

Rep. Bill Elam, Kenai Republican, House District 8

Elam represents the north and eastern parts of the Kenai Peninsula, from Seward and parts of Soldotna to Nikiski. He was a member of the Republican-led minority caucus, and served on six committees, including resources, fisheries and education. He said that process was similar to his experience on the Kenai Borough Assembly. But negotiations across chambers and partisan lines were new. 

“So much of the work is done outside of committee, in meetings with your other legislators,” he said. “When you get to the point where you’re working with the other body or trying to get support from all of the 60 members, or at least enough of them — so that’s where it starts turning into more of a bigger spider web.”

Elam said he feels his district understands the fiscally conservative approach and the Legislature’s bare-bones budget this year. “My district really likes it when we live within our means. We have a balanced budget. If we have to do cuts, they understand,” he said. “But, it’s prioritizing those things that are that are important, right? So, if we cut to the point where we don’t have any troopers, then we’re going to have some problems. If we cut to the point where roads aren’t getting plowed, we’re going to have some problems.”

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School is facing a budget deficit, and even before the line-item veto, 116 teacher and staff positions were set to be cut. Elam pointed to declining enrollment as a continuing issue.

 “The real problem that we’re having is enrollment,” he said. “Probably we’re going to have to close some schools or consolidate some areas. So doing that in a way that is strategic. Nobody wants their school closed. I don’t want my school closed. But we also have to have a conversation of, like, if the building’s empty, does it make sense to have just a few kids in a big building?”

He voted yes on the historic May 20 vote to override Dunleavy’s veto of the funding, and said that was his toughest vote of the session. “As a Republican with a Republican governor, that was not an easy decision,” he said. “It was the right decision, because we cannot keep putting money, hundreds of millions of dollars, into areas where there’s no accountability.”

Elam said he wants to continue working on education policy to improve outcomes, as well as financial strategies for schools and their facilities, and some cost-cutting to the Department of Corrections. 

Policy: B                               Politics: B                                           Personal Grade: B

“The decorum and the people getting along was good. We had a good process and procedure,” he said. “When it comes to the policy that came out, we really didn’t do much. We did a lot of resolutions. … I bet we’re probably down in that B area, and I’m just an optimist and not wanting to give us an F.”

Elam gave his own session a “B.” “I didn’t have real high expectations of getting a ton of things accomplished. You know, you’re in the minority, first session, my job here is to really learn a lot and try to build a team. And I felt like I did a pretty good job at that. There’s always room for improvement,” he said. 

Rep. Jeremy Bynum, Ketchikan Republican, House District 1

Jeremy Bynum represents the southernmost region of Alaska across island communities from Metlakatla and Prince of Wales to Ketchikan and Wrangell. “When you’re running for the seat, you have a lot of ideas about how the policy process works, how people are working in the building, but it’s not that way. So that was a bit of a learning experience,” he said, and described jam-packed days, particularly as a new member of the powerful House Finance Committee.

“It’s very busy from day one,” he said. “I was on six subcommittees, and so that was a lot of work, to just be doing all that. And then early session, you have all the fly-ins with people coming here to advocate for different issues. And your calendar can be packed. I get up every day at about 5:30 a.m., to try to catch up on some email, trying to figure out what my day is going to look like … but then it’s off running busy all day.”

Bynum said there were many challenges working on the House’s proposed budget, and he worked to represent his district’s interests, particularly the Alaska Marine Highway System, as well as housing and fisheries issues. 

“The challenging part wasn’t for me, it wasn’t about ‘cut, cut, cut.’ It was about, let’s prioritize where we’re going to put our money. And I guess it’s kind of, maybe it’s the same thing, but my perspective is just a little different,” he said. “So you find yourself with…somebody that you aren’t politically aligned with, but you have common goals. So that was a good reward for me.”

Bynum said as a member of the Republican minority, the negotiations around education funding were tough, and balancing the needs of schools, the state’s finances and policy priorities sought by the governor. He supported an end to one-time funding and increases through the base student allocation. “This uncertainty is one of the bigger problems. The level of funding is a problem, but the uncertainty is even worse,” he said. 

He said passing House Bill 57 felt like a bipartisan effort. “I felt like it was a massive win, it was a massive win for Alaska. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, the Democrats won,’ or ‘Oh, the Republicans won.’ That was a win for everybody. And you know, I recognize it wouldn’t have happened without the Republicans supporting it, working with the majority,” he said. “It wouldn’t have happened.”

Policy: D                            Politics: B+                                       Personal Grade: B

“Some of the process of how we got through our budget process was very painful. Not the people, but just the situation. I give that a D, the defined benefits bill, I give it a D-minus. We didn’t pass a whole lot of other things,” he said, with the exception of the education funding bill.

“Some of our new freshmen legislators are fantastic, top-notch, smart people,” he added. “And some of the people that have been here for a long time are too. I mean, not taking that away from them, but that was unexpected for me, we had so many just really sharp people.”

Rep. Jubilee Underwood, R-Wasilla, House District 27, said she was not available for an interview but sent an op-ed which reflects on her first session, published in the Anchorage Daily News. She criticized in-fighting among Republicans, who had a minority caucus in the House, and called for embracing debate and differences among the conservatives. “The infighting within the conservative ranks is more than just a distraction; it’s a self-inflicted wound that cripples our ability to advance our principles,” she wrote. “While the left maintains a disciplined front, coalescing around shared goals despite internal disagreements, conservatives splinter into factions; each claiming to be the ‘true’ champion of the movement. From primary purges to social media slandering, we’ve become experts at devouring our own.”

Reps. Nellie Jimmie, D-Toksook Bay; Rebecca Schwanke, R-Glennallen; and Elexie Moore, R-Wasilla; and Sen. Rob Yundt, R-Wasilla, did not respond to several requests for interviews.  

James Brooks contributed to this article.