A voting error led one Alaska House of Representatives minority-caucus member on Wednesday to vote to move a public-school funding increase one step closer to passage through the Alaska House of Representatives, at a time when the House’s majority caucus has a narrow margin.
Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, joined 20 members of the House majority in voting to move House Bill 69 from the House Education Committee to the House Finance Committee. Twenty votes were needed.
If signed into law, HB 69 would permanently increase the state’s per-student public school funding formula. The finance committee is the final stop before a vote of the full House.
Prax opposes the bill and has said he wants to see broader changes to the state’s public school system, but on Wednesday, he erroneously voted to advance the measure and did not change his vote when prompted by Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham.
Prax said afterward that he didn’t realize he had voted to advance HB 69. After he realized his mistake, he made a motion to reverse the vote. That motion to rescind action failed, 19-20.
Under ordinary circumstances, Prax and the rest of the Alaska House wouldn’t have had to consider HB 69 on Wednesday.
But for more than a week, Rep. Maxine Dibert, D-Fairbanks, has been absent from the Capitol, hospitalized for what her office called a “respiratory issue.”
Dibert is a member of the House’s education committee, and without her presence, the committee hasn’t had the votes to advance HB 69.
While minority-caucus Republicans have said they didn’t have enough of a chance to weigh in on the bill in committee, majority members say they had ample chances to do so before the bill was ready to move onward.
On Feb. 10, the committee paused its regular meeting, and Chair Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka and the author of HB 69, asked if one or more committee members from the minority caucus would be willing to help move the bill onward.
“I was there, and you did say, ‘I’d like to move this bill today. Are you ready to move it?’ And the minority said no. And so you held the bill,” said Rep. Andi Story, D-Fairbanks, speaking to reporters alongside Himschoot on Wednesday.
The issue wasn’t brought up again.
“Nobody asked us again after the seriousness of her illness became apparent. We were not asked about whether we would move it out,” House Minority Leader Mia Costello, R-Anchorage, said on Wednesday.
HB 69 has been the top priority of the House’s coalition majority, and lawmakers had been set on passing it through the House by mid-March.
That timing would allow the increased K-12 funding to be incorporated into the state budget, and school districts — whose budgets are generally finalized in the spring for the coming year — would have an early indication about the Legislature’s intentions.
But Dibert’s absence made that schedule impossible. For more than a week, HB 69 has been stalled in the education committee.
To break the impasse, the majority caucus used a technique normally employed by members of the minority caucus — they called for a “discharge motion” on the House floor, effectively asking the whole House to vote on advancing the bill from one committee to the next.
There was no guarantee of success.
The Alaska House is split between a 19-member Republican minority caucus and a 21-member multipartisan majority that includes two Republicans, five independents and 14 Democrats.
With Dibert’s absence, the majority had just 20 lawmakers present, one short of what was needed to advance the bill.
Nevertheless, Edgmon said afterward, the majority felt that it needed to take a vote.
The education committee had heard more than a month of testimony, overwhelmingly in favor of the bill.
“In deference to what we’re being asked by our school districts to do, and by the majority of the state, we had to take action today,” he said.
Though the vote succeeded, it aggravated members of the minority, who spoke for more than an hour afterward on the House floor, objecting to the process and saying they felt unheard by the majority.
“I would hope that all of our members’ voices are taken seriously,” Costello said later.
Wednesday’s vote could foreshadow more to come in the closely divided House. As long as Dibert remains absent, the majority will have only 20 votes, one short of what is needed to pass legislation.
“Twenty-one is a challenging enough number, right?” Edgmon said. “Like I’ve said from Day One, and I’ll say it again: I think there’s enough common ground. We just had a nice chat with the minority leader on the way out of the chamber, and you know, we know we need to work together, and there’ll be other opportunities to work together.”
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