State Government

After nearly 40 years in Alaska’s state Capitol, Sen. Lyman Hoffman is calling it quits.

On Wednesday, the Bethel Democrat confirmed that he will not seek reelection in 2026 and will end a political career that has left him as the longest-serving state legislator in Alaska history.

“Forty years is enough,” Hoffman said on Wednesday.

“I’m going to go back and become a civilian, and I’m going to talk with Rep. Edgmon and encourage him to file for my seat,” Hoffman said, referring to Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham.

Hoffman was elected to the state House in 1986 and to the state Senate in 1994. That year, his closest opponent was Edgmon.

“He’s from the region. He’s been in politics for over 20 years. I think we would have more continuity in having a seasoned person to represent the Senate district,” Hoffman said of Edgmon.

By text message, Edgmon said he is “taking a serious look” at running for Senate.

“Senator Hoffman’s announcement today was not unexpected; however, it still comes as a bit of a gut punch because of what he has meant not just to rural Alaska but to the state as a whole,” Edgmon said. “His departure is going to be a huge loss to the Legislature.”

Hoffman confirmed that he doesn’t intend to run for governor or any other office.

“The family life — that’s the toughest part. Leaving home, leaving family, leaving friends for three to six months out of every year, it puts a big strain,” he said. “So a lot of kudos out to my wife Lillian for putting up with me to do what I love to do.”

In a 15-minute phone interview, Hoffman reflected on his career, saying that in addition to a law that requires the state to fund rural schools, his biggest achievements were those related to energy. He successfully created an endowment fund for the Power Cost Equalization program, which subsidizes rural power costs, and that endowment now is worth more than $1 billion.

Other successes also were related to energy.

“We passed legislation to set up a weatherization program, and we’ve weatherized over $600 million worth of homes,” he said.

If the trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline is built, 20% of gas-sale royalties will be reserved for rural energy development, thanks to Hoffman’s work.

“I think that overall, the work I’ve done on energy is probably the most important thing,” he said.

Asked what has changed in the Capitol during his 40 years, he said the power of rural legislators is now taken for granted. Earlier in his career, it wasn’t.

For the past 10 years, rural legislators have played a kingmaking role in the closely divided state House and Senate, frequently determining whether a Republican-led coalition or a Democratic-led coalition controls each body.

“There were times when rural Alaska wasn’t at the table, and I think that’s the biggest change,” Hoffman said.

“Even if you talk to urban legislators, I think the caliber of and the participation of rural legislators is well respected today,” he said.

When asked what advice he would give a new legislator, he said that it’s important to know that “the relationships you make directly affect your influence,” so it’s important to make friends.

“The top people that are out there — Senator (Gary) Stevens, Senator (Bert) Stedman, Senator (Donny) Olson. All of us have over 20 years of experience in the Senate, and we are good friends, and so I think it’s all about relationships and keeping your word to each other.”

During his time in office, the state’s population has grown, as has the influence of Alaska Native corporations, including Native health corporations.

“I’m chairman of the Bethel Native Corporation, and have been for around 30 years. Our wealth has multiplied by 20-fold. You know, I think that in the state … Native corporations have changed the state of Alaska for the better,” he said.

As he prepares to leave office, Hoffman said he thinks the state’s biggest unresolved issue is the affordability of living in Alaska, particularly with regard to the cost of energy.

“That’s why I spent so much time on it,” he said of energy issues.

“The unfinished business, I think the biggest one that is going to have a major impact on energy, is the gas line,” he said.

The high cost of energy in rural Alaska is also why he’s been interested in micronuclear reactors.

“Right now, people in rural Alaska are spending up to 50-60% of their disposable income on energy, and if they had that 50-60% reduced down to 10%, that would be a windfall to them, and that would change the way people look at Alaska, because it’s in many instances, it’s pretty expensive to live here because of energy,” he said.

“If we can crack the energy equation in the next two decades, I think that’s going to change the face of Alaska.”

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development has opened the public comment period for a proposed regulation change that redefines what counts as a local contribution for school districts.

The proposed change would count municipal funding for non-instructional services like transportation and school meals toward the maximum amount districts can receive from municipalities. 

Local municipalities are limited in how much can be contributed to a school district’s instructional services.

According to the Alaska Council of School Administrators, at least 18 school districts currently receive local funding for non-instructional services.

The Juneau School District is budgeted to receive more than $2 million this coming school year for non-instructional services.

The education department brought the proposed change to the state Board of Education earlier this month as an emergency regulation. That means it would have immediately gone into effect if approved.

Public backlash from school administrators, parents and city officials around the state urged the board to instead put the regulation up for a 30-day comment period.

The public comment period will run until 5 p.m. on July 23. Comments can be physically mailed or emailed to the state board.

There will also be a comment period at the next board meeting scheduled this October where members of the public can testify by phone or Zoom.

The field of candidates for Alaska governor grew to four last week after Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Edna DeVries filed a letter of intent saying she’s considering a run for governor.

The letter allows her to start raising money for her campaign. DeVries, a Republican, said in an interview on Thursday she’s “90 to 95% sure” she’ll file to actually run.

DeVries turns 84 next month and has a long history in the state. She moved to Palmer in 1969. In the years since, DeVries said she’s spent more than 30 years working in real estate and has also worked in postsecondary education and job training programs.

She was a state senator in the mid-1980s and more recently served as the mayor of Palmer. She’s been mayor of the Mat-Su Borough since 2021.

DeVries said she believes in limited government and is a supporter of large Permanent Fund dividends in line with a decades-old formula.

“The state has to live within its means, and I know that’s going to be shrinking, probably, the size of government that we have in the state of Alaska,” she said.

Paying a full statutory dividend would require drastic cuts to state services or raising vast amounts of new revenue. Lawmakers haven’t approved a formula dividend since oil prices crashed in the mid-2010s and the state started relying on the Permanent Fund to pay for state services.

DeVries said she’d like to examine reports by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s first budget chief, Donna Arduin, for ideas on how to cut back state spending.

DeVries also echoes some of Dunleavy’s priorities when it comes to education. She says she’s proud of the work her borough has done expanding charter schools in the Mat-Su. And she says she wants to see schools held accountable for poor performance.

“The biggest decision right there is, how do we continue to fund (education), but also get the accountability and the results that we want?” she said.

DeVries said she’s been a “Trumper” since President Donald Trump‘s 2016 campaign. Like the president, she says she’d like to expand resource development in the state.

“I appreciate him loving Alaska and speaking out on behalf of Alaska, in comparison to what challenges we’ve had in the last four years regarding developing our resources,” she said.

DeVries also lists “election integrity” as a top priority, saying she’s proud that her borough has moved to hand-count ballots in local elections.

DeVries joins an all-Republican field for the 2026 governor’s race. Candidates include Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, former Sen. Click Bishop and businesswoman Bernadette Wilson. Gov. Mike Dunleavy is in the second-to-last year of his second term and cannot run for another.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy told legislative leaders Monday that he had vetoed a bipartisan bill that the heads of the state House and Senate say was necessary to address what they described as a “persistent pattern of obstruction within the senior ranks of Alaska’s Department of Revenue.”

Backers of the bill say it’s an effort to get to the bottom of why certain types of oil tax revenue have fallen precipitously in recent years by clarifying the authority of the Legislature’s auditor.

Bill sponsor Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said Monday that the veto was “shocking.” The administration’s failure to turn over usable information means lawmakers can’t effectively perform oversight, he said.

“This is information that has been provided to the auditor ever since the auditor has been able to recollect. This information has never not been provided to the state,” he said. “The question the Legislature should be asking right now, and the people of Alaska should be asking is, what is the governor hiding?”

Dunleavy and Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum declined interview requests.

The amount of money deposited in the state’s main rainy-day fund from so-called tax and royalty settlements dropped from $281 million in 2020 to just $3.1 million in 2024, according to documents from the Department of Revenue.

Meanwhile, the Dunleavy administration has cut back on the information it provides to auditors seeking to examine tax payments by oil and gas companies, Legislative Auditor Kris Curtis told lawmakers earlier this year.

Instead of summary tables provided by past administrations as recently as 2018, Curtis said, the Department of Revenue last year sent her office what she described as a “data dump” — an unintelligible collection of raw data that her office could not assess. She said the department refused to turn over the data in a usable format.

“The most recent reason that they provided was that they were not required to do so by law,” she said at an April hearing. “This interpretation overturns longstanding precedent, and it opens the door for all state agencies to refuse to provide or compile information in the format requested, therefore preventing legislative oversight.”

The bill was the subject of a letter from Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, and House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, who urged the governor not to veto it.

“Without timely access to complete and usable information,particularly as it pertains to oil and gas production taxes, oversight is impaired, public trust is undermined, and the integrity of our state’s governance is imperiled,” they wrote.

In his veto message, Dunleavy said the bill was an unconstitutional delegation of the Legislature’s authority. The state Constitution gives the state auditor the authority to look over the state’s books, but Dunleavy said the Constitution doesn’t allow the auditor to specify the format for data it requests.

“The Alaska Constitution does not grant to the Auditor or to (the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee) discretion to command the activities of the executive branch by ordering state agency employees to produce work product at their whim and under threat of criminal sanction, nor may the Legislature delegate such an expansive and unchecked authority,” he wrote.

Wielechowski said legislative attorneys had written the bill and had not flagged any constitutional issues.

The bill passed the Senate unanimously and by a 30-10 vote in the House.

Rep. Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, who voted against the bill, said the problem was overblown. He said he saw the bill as a “politically motivated” attack on Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum, a possible candidate for the 2026 governor’s race.

“I think that the governor has issues now and again, and I have issues now and again, but I know Mike Dunleavy to be a pretty honest guy,” he said. “I don’t think he is intentionally telling the Department of Revenue (or) Adam Crum to hide anything, or to tell any of his departments to hide anything.”

McCabe said he agreed with lawmakers’ desire for transparency on tax issues, but said the bill was the wrong way to accomplish the goal.

Lawmakers could override the veto with a two-thirds vote when they return in January.

Alaska’s public schools likely won’t get all the money lawmakers approved in a bipartisan vote last month after Gov. Mike Dunleavy unilaterally reduced education funding with a line-item veto.

Dunleavy cut $50.6 million from formula funding for public schools, equivalent to $200 in basic per-student funding, known as the base student allocation, trimming back a $700 increase lawmakers approved last month.

Dunleavy also made other significant cuts to education spending approved by the Legislature: $5.7 million for early intervention and infant learning programs, $490,000 for teacher recruitment and $554,000 in incentives for teachers who receive a national certification.

Dunleavy also vetoed $25.1 million set aside for school maintenance and repairs, despite a KYUK, NPR and ProPublica investigation this year that found many rural schools in disrepair.

“The oil situation has deteriorated. The price of oil has gone down, therefore our revenue is going down, and, basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations,” Dunleavy said in a video posted to social media.

The veto is essentially a funding cut for districts, since it’s a significant reduction from the $680 one-time base student allocation equivalent approved last year. School leaders across the state immediately condemned the veto.

“It is unprecedented. It is going to cause chaos in districts around the state,” said Kelly Lessens, the head of the Anchorage School Board’s Finance Committee. “It is going to require local school boards and superintendents to make some very hard decisions, really a few weeks from the start of the new fiscal year.”

The Anchorage School Board, anticipating the vetoes, scheduled a special meeting for 6:30 p.m. Thursday. Lessens estimated the board would have to find more than $4 million in cuts.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District will face even deeper cuts, Superintendent Clayton Holland said, since it budgeted for funding equivalent to what it received last year.

“We’ve already been, over the years, cutting and cutting away…It’s across the board. And so we are having impacts that really are devastating to our communities,” he said.“I just worry what that’s going to do to everyone — what that does for our students, what that does for the future of Alaska as people look to choose to have options elsewhere.”

Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said it was unlikely lawmakers would seek to quickly reconvene to attempt to override Dunleavy’s line-item veto, saying that it would be difficult to gather enough lawmakers in a special session to muster the three-quarters vote necessary to override a budget veto.

Stevens said he was disappointed by the cut, saying the budget lawmakers approved in May anticipated declines in revenue from oil and the federal government.

“It’s not as if we don’t have the money. We planned for it. We have the funds,” he said. “We came up with a good budget that could afford to … increase $700, and I’m sorry the governor has vetoed it down.”

Leaders of the Republican minorities in the state House and Senate did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson said Dunleavy had gone home to his family and was not available for an interview.

The veto of education funding is one of more than $128 million in general-purpose state spending reductions Dunleavy made using his line-item veto power, which allows him to reduce spending approved by the Legislature when signing the state budget into law.

But the school funding veto in particular is a blow to lawmakers’ top priority from this past legislative session. School districts across the state have pleaded with lawmakers and the governor to increase formula funding, saying they’ve been forced to slash their offerings for Alaska’s students.

Lawmakers increased the so-called base student allocation by $700, adding roughly $185 million to annual state education spending, by overriding Gov. Dunleavy’s veto of a bill that paired a funding increase with some policy reforms. The override vote was bipartisan, garnering support from 46 of the 60 members of the Alaska House and Senate.

It was the first substantial increase to the funding formula since 2017. Though lawmakers added nearly as much in one-time funding for education last year, school leaders continued to push lawmakers to boost the base student allocation, the amount in state law that directs how much districts receive on an ongoing basis, to eliminate uncertainty.

“When the veto override happened with the $700 going through, I think that was our burst of optimism,” said Holland, the Kenai superintendent. “Even though we knew that the governor would be looking to line-item veto, we thought … he’d reconsider and uphold what’s in law right now.”

House Bill 57, the bill that increased the funding formula, also made a number of education policy changes — from restricting student cellphone use to easing charter school approval — most of which are unaffected by Dunleavy’s veto of education funding.

Dunleavy has vetoed education funding before — he cut a one-time funding increase approved by the Legislature in 2023 in half — but Thursday’s veto was the first time in recent memory, and perhaps longer, that the governor had reduced long-term funding specified by state law.

It’s the first time a governor has reduced the amount of funding schools receive since the state started using the current version of its funding formula in 1999.

Gov. Bill Walker, Dunleavy’s predecessor, twice vetoed basic education funding approved by the Legislature in the face of revenue shortfalls. But in both cases, the veto had no practical effect on the amount of money schools received from the state.

In 2015, when Walker issued wide-ranging line-item vetoes after the failure of a supermajority vote necessary to spend from savings, the Legislature, at Walker’s request, reconvened and restored education funding before the cuts took effect. A second veto in 2016 simply changed the source of funding, not the amount.

Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, suggested the veto could run afoul of the Alaska Constitution’s mandate that the state establish and maintain a public school system.

“There, I think, is a legitimate question about whether or not we are getting into that area where we are not following the constitutional and (state) Supreme Court mandate to adequately fund education. I think that’s an open question at this point,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lawsuit.”

Correction: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year the photo was taken. It was captured Jan. 28, 2025.

A group of state lawmakers is set to meet this summer and fall to study and discuss ways to improve Alaska’s public schools.

Lawmakers passed a bill last month boosting the base of the state’s school funding formula by $700 after overriding Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto. The bill also made a variety of education policy changes aimed at boosting student performance. Alaska’s schools have consistently lagged near the bottom in national rankings, and school leaders have advocated for larger funding increases, saying the public school system is in crisis.

Debates over school funding have dominated the past two legislative sessions, each culminating in vetoes by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who told lawmakers he wasn’t convinced a funding boost would improve student performance.

Some lawmakers in the largely Democratic bipartisan coalitions called for a significantly higher funding boost — a more than $1,800-per-student increase in base funding, with future increases tied to inflation — but scaled back their efforts in the face of the state’s funding crunch, vowing additional funding increases in the future.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau and one of the six lawmakers appointed to the task force, said the Legislature’s work isn’t done.

“This is one of the biggest expenses that state government has in Alaska,” he said. “It’s really important to do the best we possibly can for our kids, and also, always, to do the best we can with the public dollar.”

The Task Force on Education Funding created by House Bill 57 includes three Democrats, one independent and two Republicans, all of whom voted to override Dunleavy’s veto.

It comes with a sprawling mandate. The law tasks the group with analyzing state education funding, health insurance, student absences, school maintenance and ways to hold schools accountable for poor performance, among other things.

Lawmakers included the task force in the bill in an effort to win bipartisan support from lawmakers and — unsuccessfully — from Dunleavy.

Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, who will co-chair the task force alongside Sen. Loki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said the monthly meetings will give lawmakers a chance to look at some ideas, like Dunleavy’s proposal for inter-district open enrollment, without the pressure of a fast-approaching deadline and the many demands of the legislative session.

“We needed to bring folks along who had ideas that are definitely worthy of a look but were too big to take on in the legislative session,” Himschoot said. “Rather than say no to something that could be a good idea, a task force is an opportunity to study that idea with experts over time and give it a more thorough vetting.”

One of the two minority Republicans on the task force, Soldotna Rep. Justin Ruffridge, said he’s hoping to hear a wide variety of perspectives during the task force’s two years of meetings. He said he’d like to hear from University of Alaska economists, federal Education Department officials and teachers to examine the reasons Alaska’s public school system languishes near the bottom in national rankings.

“I think some of that is due to, you know, reduced funding over the course of the last decade or so. But at the same time, it can’t just be, you know, a money-only solution,” Ruffridge said. “I think you have to start looking at some of the reasons why Alaska is struggling to keep up with other states.”

Ruffridge said he hoped the task force would research and suggest changes to elements of the public school funding formula, including funding for correspondence homeschool and factors that compensate smaller schools and those in high-cost areas.

The task force also includes Rep. Andi Story, D-Juneau, and Sen. Mike Cronk, R-Tok.

The Legislature’s task force announcement comes as Dunleavy weighs whether to reduce education formula funding in the state budget. He said at a Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce luncheon Tuesday that he’s planning to release his line-item vetoes this week, public radio station KUAC reported.

The task force is scheduled to convene in August and meet once a month during the legislative offseason. It’s required to produce a report with its recommendations by early 2027.