Irritated Dunleavy asks a reporter to tell him how much to increase education spending

Gov. Mike Dunleavy unveiled his proposed budget for the next fiscal year Thursday and there was no more talk of the billions that candidate Dunleavy said the state saved during 2022.

Instead, the Dunleavy budget for the fiscal year that starts next July comes with a plan to spend $2.4 billion on dividends and create a deficit to be filled by the Constitutional Budget Reserve.

Dunleavy says the deficit would be about a quarter-billion dollars, but that claim falls apart under review, given the items that have yet to be added to the budget and an oil price guess that is shaky at best.

As in years past, the December budget release is strictly a public relations exercise.

Missing from the budget are key items such as an increase in the state education formula to deal with inflation, That would add to the deficit.

Dunleavy was more than a little irritated and defensive Thursday when public radio reporter Wesley Early asked him about why he didn’t propose an increase for inflation.

Early said there are hundreds of jobs open in Anchorage, which has a $48 million deficit. School districts across the state are facing serious money problems. Fairbanks is no exception.

Dunleavy didn't like the question. And refused to answer it. He asked Early to tell him much of an increase he should have put in the budget.

“I would ask you this, ‘How much?’” Dunleavy said to Early. “Give me a number. You wanted me to put a number in this budget. How much? Don’t say you don’t know.”

Early said that five years in a row without an increase means a decrease because of the impact of inflation.

“So how much should I have put in this budget to deal with the question that you had?” Dunleavy asked Early for the third time.

Early replied, “I’m not the governor. And I’m not a school administrator.” He said that an administrator at the Anchorage School District told him that had the base student allocation risen with inflation in recent years, Anchorage schools would not have a deficit.

Dunleavy meandered for the next 90 seconds with a disjointed soliloquy about why he won’t take a leadership role on this. He claimed it wasn’t his job to put a new number in the budget because not everyone would agree with him.

“So I am the governor. And I’ve been a superintendent. And I’ve been a school board president of the second largest school district in the state of Alaska. And I’ve dealt with budgets.”

“You have to have a discussion with the Legislature and what factors they want to look at. What do they want to do with the BSA and any other discussions related to education, transportation costs, etc. For me to put a number in the budget, some will say it’s too little. Some will say it’s too much.”

“So what we’ve done is we’ve put forth a budget here on December 15th to begin that discussion. And I'd be willing to bet you a couple dollars that the number that you may be thinking in your head, and I don’t know if you are, probably won’t be the number that’s agreed upon by the Legislature. That’s part of the process.”

“So we’re gonna see testimony from educators, testimony from superintendents, teachers, you name it, that will be putting forth various figures and numbers. We understand that. But in terms of putting forth a number right now, I could tell you that people would say, you would be probably asking a similar question. ‘Why did you put that amount in there instead of this?’”

“We put forth a base student budget with no major reductions, no reductions really in education because we understand that there are inflationary pressures. We get that and we are looking forward to the discussion on how to deal with that. And so right now it’s a blank piece of paper for all of us to work on. I think there’s gonna be some good results that come out of those discussions.”

The real story here is that keeping an education increase out of the budget is one way for Dunleavy to pretend that the state can afford to spend more than $2.4 billion on the Permanent Fund Dividend next year.

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