Legislators are planning to arrive soon in Juneau for the special session scheduled to kick off Saturday morning. Legislative leaders say they expect the session to move quickly, and likely not last more than a day.
Most lawmakers are now planning to show up Saturday, including some Republicans who initially said they’d skip the beginning, but they’re divided on whether it’ll be worth the money it costs to bring them to Juneau.
Precisely what this special session will cost is up in the air. A portion of the cost depends on how long legislators stick around before they adjourn.
Fifty-seven of the 60 legislators — that is, everyone who doesn’t live in Juneau — can collect per diem payments of around $300 per day to cover their daily expenses, like food and lodging. And then there’s the airfare: flying legislators from Anchorage or other communities to Juneau isn’t cheap.
Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, an independent, will be flying in from his home in Dillingham, and he said he expects the total cost of the session to run into the six figures.
“Accounting for the entire legislature, all the support staff, the gathering of, you know, all the pieces it takes to hold a session, it can be north of $100,000 a day,” Edgmon said.
The head of the nonpartisan Legislative Affairs Agency, Jessica Geary, said by email that her office won’t know the exact cost until lawmakers turn in their expenses for reimbursement. They have two months to do so.
But the agency has some data from the past. One six-day session in 2021 cost nearly $175,000, or around $30,000 a day.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy called this year’s special session and put education reform and the creation of a state agriculture department on his agenda. But Edgmon, an independent, said he’s expecting Dunleavy’s vetoes to be the overriding priority. Though the governor sets the legislative agenda for sessions he calls, he does not have the power to force lawmakers to consider legislation, and legislators are able to determine on their own when to adjourn.
The governor offered some new details on his agenda for the session on Monday. Many of his proposals are ideas that lawmakers have, over the past two years, rejected or have said need a closer look. They’re planning to convene an education task force to talk over ideas like inter-district open enrollment in late August.
Edgmon said he hoped legislators could muster the 45 votes needed to overcome Dunleavy’s veto of more than $50 million in education funding. If they do, he argues the cost of the session would be money well spent.
However, “for the other measures that the governor is contemplating, I don't see any pathways towards immediate success,” Edgmon said. “Quite frankly, the money would have been better spent doing our normal course of business and regular session.”
Lawmakers also plan to attempt to override Dunleavy’s veto of an oil tax transparency bill that passed by a wide margin. That bill would face a lower 40-vote override threshold.
Edgmon and the Senate president, Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens, said Monday they planned to adjourn immediately after the override votes. Edgmon said he has a hotel booked for “a couple of nights.” He’s bringing his chief of staff to Juneau, but nobody else, he said.
Rep. Zack Fields, an Anchorage Democrat, said he’s not planning to bring any staff to Juneau. He said he isn’t even booking a hotel room. He said the peak of summer tourism in Juneau makes it hard to find rooms that don’t cost an arm and a leg.
So, he’s planning to arrive Friday night, sleep in his office, and leave after the votes on Saturday.
“No one sees this as a kind of real month-long special session,” Fields said.
Like other members of the Democrat-heavy bipartisan majorities in the state House and Senate, Fields sees the session as an effort by Dunleavy to ensure his vetoes aren’t overridden. He said he can’t square that with the fact that Dunleavy cited the state’s low-oil-price-induced fiscal constraints when he vetoed the $50 million in education funding.
“It’s hypocritical to say the state is short of money and then call a special session that is sort of farcical in nature,” he said.
Dunleavy’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Rep. Kevin McCabe, a Big Lake Republican and an ally of the governor, said he thinks the special session would be money well spent — but only if legislative leaders take some time to actually consider Dunleavy’s proposals.
“I think this would be a good use of the state's money if we manage to fix the educational issues that are happening in the state of Alaska, the student outcomes,” McCabe said. “Nobody cares. Nobody seems to care about the students.”
But if lawmakers stick to their stated plan and solely focus on override votes, McCabe said, “it's a waste of my time. It's a waste of your time. It's a waste of everybody's time. And our kids, as usual, suffer the consequences.”
But McCabe said he will be there when lawmakers gavel in Saturday. That’s a change from a couple of weeks ago — he had planned to be in Idaho for a pro-life conference. McCabe got a call Thursday from a van driver wondering why he wasn’t at the airport in Coeur d’Alene, he said.
Dunleavy initially asked Republicans to skip the first five days of the session because, according to his spokesperson, he didn’t want legislators to override his vetoes. The Democrat-heavy majorities need minority Republicans’ help to do so.
But more recently, McCabe said Dunleavy’s office has told Republicans it would be a good idea to show up in Juneau. McCabe is hoping to stay in the Legislature’s Assembly building, which has apartments for lawmakers and staff. If there’s no room, McCabe said he’ll sleep in his office.
A handful of other conservative House members, including some like McCabe who initially said they were not planning to attend, say they’ll be there, too.
“Clearly, my constituents, they want me to be there to work,” McCabe said.
That’s in line with a poll released Thursday by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, which indicates that nearly three quarters of respondents told the group they didn’t want legislators to skip the session.
Some 59% of the more than 600 respondents said they wanted lawmakers to override the governor’s veto of education funding, according to the poll. An even larger majority, 72%, said they wanted legislators to override Dunleavy’s veto of bills boosting oil tax transparency and capping interest rates on payday loans.
