Alaska News

Alaska governor's budget cuts expected to hit diverse services

JUNEAU -- Restaurant patrons, public radio audiences, state firefighters and a community jail program could suffer under Gov. Bill Walker's proposed budget cuts, according to a review of budget documents and interviews with administration officials.

Food safety inspectors would visit fewer restaurants, leading to more illnesses. A statewide radio network used by emergency responders would see less maintenance, increasing the risk of a failure. And at least one local jail, in Sitka, would probably have to shut down, likely forcing the state to house more inmates away from their home community, in a Juneau prison.

Those are just a few of the impacts of the cuts Walker has proposed. On Thursday, he unveiled hundreds of pages of budget documents that for the first time showed how he'd achieve some $280 million in cuts to state agency spending as his administration confronts a $3.5 billion budget shortfall.

Lawmakers here, who will examine and adjust Walker's proposal over the next few months, have said little so far about the plan. Most are waiting for legislative staff to finish a budget analysis over the weekend. But a review of the budget documents submitted by a handful of Walker's departments shows that the cuts will impact the lives of people across the state, in cities and in rural Alaska -- affirming what Walker's budget director, Pat Pitney, said at a news conference Thursday: "There's no painless reduction."

"It means you either do something completely different, or you do less because you have fewer people to do the job," she said. "Each of these reductions that come out, somebody's going to notice."

Fewer inspections, more illness

The cuts to the state's food safety program are one example. In an effort to save about $800,000, the Department of Environmental Conservation proposes cutting eight positions from its food safety and sanitation division, which, it bluntly warns in budget documents, will likely result in "an increase in the number of individual complaints of illness from food."

In a phone interview, Elaine Busse Floyd, DEC's environmental health director, said the department would reduce its inspections of permitted retail establishments by about half, from 40 percent annually to 20 percent -- though it aims to maintain a focus on food processors, which handle more products and, Busse Floyd said, "present a greater public health risk."

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"So the plate you get at the restaurant, the restaurant may not have been inspected," she said. "But if they're serving fish and other products processed in Alaska, we've been there."

When it comes to places that serve food, Busse Floyd said, the department would prioritize inspections "where people don't have a choice," like at hospitals, nursing homes and labor camps on the North Slope. (In Anchorage, municipal health officials run their own inspection program that won't be affected by the state cuts.)

The reductions, Busse Floyd added, go "past the core." But other options would have imperiled a lab that supports shellfish testing, or a drinking water testing program. She said she expected the cuts to the food safety program to be "self-correcting," since restaurants that serve contaminated food will likely develop a bad reputation and lose customers.

Busse Floyd added that there would have to be a "culture change" as the public to adjusts to the reductions.

"They're going to have to get used to not having services funded by government until they decide to vote to fund government," she said.

Rep. Paul Seaton, R-Homer, the chair of the House health committee, said he wasn't familiar with the details of the cuts to the food safety program. But, he added: "We've got to make smart cuts."

"I'm not sure that that's one," he said.

Local jails hit

The state Department of Corrections, meanwhile, said it would save $9.5 million by ending its contracts with 15 communities that run local jails around the state, from Kotzebue to Homer to Unalaska to Valdez.

The jails have room for about 160 prisoners total, but average only about 50 percent occupancy, according to Remond Henderson, deputy commissioner at the corrections department.

"We're paying for the difference between that, whether those beds are occupied or not," he said in a phone interview Friday.

Henderson said it was not yet clear what the impact of the cut would be, whether some of the community jails would have to close, and the degree to which potential closures would generate new costs for prisoner housing or transportation.

Corrections officials didn't assess impacts before the release of the budget, he added, because the cuts were only confirmed recently and the department didn't want to unnecessarily alarm local officials.

"There hasn't been time to discuss," Henderson said. "We want to do that now."

One factor in the proposed closures was that the corrections department needed to find savings in its budget for the upcoming year. It's exploring other ways to make substantial cuts, and Henderson said the department is planning a closure of the Palmer Correctional Center in the next year and a half -- but for now, the community jails are "a place for us to start."

He added he'd already heard the cuts would have a severe impact on some jails, and he said he will meet with members of the Dillingham City Council next week to learn more.

Sheldon Schmitt, police chief in the Southeast city of Sitka, said the government there receives some $600,000 from the state each year to run its jail, which has 12 beds and is typically half full. Without the money, Schmitt said, the jail would probably have to close.

He said he'd just finished a phone conversation with the police chief in another Southeast community, Petersburg, and the two concluded that the corrections department's decision "was probably some sort of inadvertent cut based on some sort of lack of understanding what community jails do."

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The closure would likely end up costing more money than it saved, Schmitt said, because detainees would still have to be held temporarily, then transported to a Juneau prison instead, with the state paying the bill. And the closure of a local jail has social ramifications for prisoners, too -- not just financial ones for the state, he said.

"Allowing them to stay home, with their family to visit them, is a huge thing to the community," Schmitt said.

He predicted the cuts would ultimately be reversed.

2 communications systems cut

The state's Department of Administration will save about $1.5 million from cuts to a pair of communications systems.

The department's proposed budget would remove some $830,000 in grants to public radio and television, with the bulk of the cuts going to about 30 radio stations.

Steve Lindbeck, president of the Alaska Public Radio Network, said the reduction amounts to an 18 percent "overall hit" to public radio and television. State money makes up only 8 or 9 percent of the budget of Alaska Public Media, which includes Anchorage's public radio and television stations, but other stations rely more heavily on the grants, he said.

"It'll have different kinds of impacts at different stations around the state," Lindbeck said in a phone interview. But, he added: "18 percent is a pretty substantial hit, and it will affect people and service quite significantly."

The administration department would also save more than $750,000 by cutting costs for a contract that supports maintenance and equipment upgrades for another network called the State of Alaska Telecommunication System.

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State firefighters use the system so that they don't have to rely on mobile phones, and it's also used by the federal government and the state's transportation and natural resources departments.

It's expensive to maintain, with some equipment placed in remote areas -- such as atop Saddle Mountain near Juneau -- and helicopters are required to do some of the work.

The cuts to the program, however, could "potentially cause irreparable damage to site infrastructure," the administration department's budget documents say, and "most certainly could result in the loss of public safety communications throughout the system."

Other changes in the department's budget include $600,000 in savings from reducing maintenance for public buildings. And as part of a broader effort within the department's finance division, officials there will stop printing 215 hard copies of the state's annual financial report.

Last year's 316-page document said on its cover page that it costs $17.98 to produce and print it in Juneau.

Nathaniel Herz

Anchorage-based independent journalist Nathaniel Herz has been a reporter in Alaska for nearly a decade, with stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. Read his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com

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