Happy Friday, Alaska! It’s Day 46.

In this edition: Department of Health officials were in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday to answer for the state of the state’s food stamp backlog, promising that things were improving. Legislators were not particularly sure that was the case with a range of questions that essentially ranged from simmering anger to “blink twice if you’re OK” as they wondered whether Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s funding requests would really meet the need. The administration followed that hearing up by appointing noted accused racist Judy Eledge to a national education committee. Facing pressure from the Dunleavy administration, Walgreens says it won’t distribute abortion pill in Alaska. Also, the reading list and weekend watching.

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Senators demand answers on food stamp backlog. 'We're not afraid of problems.'

Officials from the Department of Health found themselves in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday to answer about the months-long backlog for the state’s food stamp program, which has hit rural Alaskans particularly hard with stories of elders being hospitalized for malnutrition. As lawmakers get to work on the budget, they specifically sought to understand the problem and whether the funding requests made by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration would truly be sufficient to fix the problem.

“I know it’s not fun to come to the Finance Committee and talk about problems, but I find it's a lot better to air the laundry out on the line, have the whole neighborhood look at it and we just fix it, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist,” said Senate Finance Committee co-Chair Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, at the end of the meeting. “We do recognize the size of the department and its complexity and trying to keep the growth of the department reasonable, so it doesn’t have runaway costs, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna sit back and watch the department implode on itself.”

Department of Health Commissioner-designee Heidi Hedberg told the committee that the backlog was largely a product of the pandemic and the 2021 cyber attack drawing attention away from still-in-progress technology changes in how the state handles its public assistance programs. On that front, she talked about how the state is attempting to hire additional eligibility technicians (it has more than 50 vacancies currently) and contract out to fill gaps, and is finding ways to automate some elements of the enrollment process and has redirected some money to food banks.

“I can’t change the past,” Hedberg told the committee, “but I can own what happens now, going into the future.”

Add on top of the backlog of food stamp applications, which Hedberg acknowledged are some of the most difficult and complex forms that require as much of an hour of staff time to process, the state will also soon be under the gun to process Medicaid eligibility re-determination applications. That’s a product of the federal government unwinding the covid-19 pandemic legislation that increased the benefits for all enrollees. The state now has to get all 260,000 beneficiaries—about a third of the state’s entire population—through the re-determination process by June 2024.

Questions from senators seemed to range from simmering anger over the situation and being left in the dark to “blink twice if you’re OK” as they asked whether the Division of Public Assistance really had the resources it needed to appropriately and quickly address the backlog while also meeting the incoming wave of work once Medicaid re-determinations begin in April.

“We can’t fund repairs if we don’t know there’s something wrong,” Stedman said. “That’s the concern. Can you help me understand why the agency can’t get us information about the problems that are coming at them? … Can you ensure the committee here that we’re not going to need additional funding or assistance to deal with the repercussions of concentration on this one solution jeopardizing other areas? We want to look at it holistically. We’re not, frankly, that concerned about what it costs. … We’re not afraid of problems.”

Hedberg conceded that they’re still trying to understand the scope of the problems facing the state’s public assistance programs, but that upgrades to the technology will go a long way to addressing it. She said she can’t be sure there won’t be new problems, but said the funding “definitely addresses most of the issues.”

Senators on the committee weren’t particularly convinced.

They frequently pointed out that the positives touted by the administration don’t come close to really fixing the situation. The $1.6 million the state diverted from its food security program to food banks this week is less than 10% of what the food stamps program would send out in a month. While officials praised changes that will handle some cases automatically, legislators pointed out that eligibility technicians are still having more and more added to their plates. Even with efforts to hire and train new technicians, the state eventually conceded that it doesn’t even have the capacity to train and deploy workers into the state’s 54 vacancies. They currently have just three openings posted online.

And even with those jobs, the full course of training for an eligibility technician is about two years. Two years! And the training just for the food stamp program is roughly two months. The pay isn’t particularly competitive considering the amount of training at a range of $22 to $24 an hour.

Sen. David Wilson, R-Wasilla, said he was frustrated to see in all the presentations about new technology and private contracts no mention of efforts to rethink and rework the hiring and training process. He said regardless of the fixes they make, they’ll find themselves in the same spot again if it really takes as much as two years to get someone fully online when the pay isn’t even particularly competitive.

“If it takes at least two months or two years to get me fully trained, and I just need a high school diploma to make $24 at max, I could do a lot less work and get paid the same wages somewhere else,” he said. “It seems like you’ll have the same systemic problem occur later on in the future if you have a large staffing turnover at any point in time. This problem will just pop up again.”

Again, state officials said it’s something that they’re in the process of looking at.

The hearing largely left things at a wary spot. Officials with the Department of Health pledged to work better with the Legislature moving forward, like making some additional documents available to the Legislative Finance Division in a few weeks. Stedman ultimately said he would rather the whole thing be voluntary, rather than add “encouragement into your budget.”

Stay tuned.

Follow the thread: The Senate Finance Committee holds a hearing on SNAP backlog

Dunleavy appoints Judy Elege to national education commission

Anchorage right-winger Judy Eledge has been at the heart of a load of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s controversies during her time at the city’s library system, including accusations that she’s been racist toward Alaska Natives while on the job. Instead of taking those accusations seriously, Bronson decided to fire the investigator in a move that created a lawsuit with its own. Even prior to that, Eledge’s 2021 campaign for Anchorage School Board crumbled after a series of social media posts that ranged from conservative nonsense to, you guessed it, racism against Alaska Natives surfaced.

That must not have been much of a problem for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, whose administration on Thursday appointed her to the national Education Commission of the States, a national education group that shares policies between states. It’s a position that doesn’t require legislative approval, so she’s got it through July 1, 2025.

Matt Acuña Buxton @mattbuxton

Today, Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced another round of board appointments. At the very end of the list: Education Commission of the States Judy Eledge – Anchorage Term: 3/1/2023 - 7/1/2025 #akleg #anchgov

Following pressure by Dunleavy administration, Walgreens announces it won’t distribute abortion pill in Alaska

Gov. Mike Dunleavy during his annual State of the State address on Jan. 23, 2023.

When Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he’d make Alaska “the most pro-life state in the entire country” during his annual State of the State address, we could all predict that any effort to undo the Alaska Constitution’s protection from abortions wouldn’t fly with the Legislature (where it’d require a supermajority of both chambers to advance to a public vote) but that hasn’t stopped his administration from working in other ways to restrict abortion access in this state.

When pharmacy chain Walgreens starts distributing the abortion pill Mifepristone, it won’t be doing so in Alaska despite abortion being a right protected in the Alaska Constitution, the company said this week.

That’s because the company is bowing to pressure from a collection of Republican attorneys general—including Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor—that threatened legal action if the company began distributing the drug in their states. In a letter reported on by Politico, the company notified the participating attorneys general that it won’t be dispensing the pills from from or shipping them into any of those states.

“Walgreens is not currently dispensing Mifepristone in any of its locations. As you know, to become certified by the FDA, participating pharmacies must satisfy a range of safety and risk mitigation requirements to dispense this drug. At this time, we are working through the certification process, which includes the evaluation of our pharmacy network to determine where we will dispense Mifepristone and training protocols and updates for our pharmacists,” explained one letter posted in the Politico article. “Walgreens does not intend to dispense Mifepristone within your state and does not intend to ship Mifepristone into your state from any of our pharmacies. If this approach changes, we will be sure to notify you.”

Alaska is also party to a lawsuit before a Texas judge that seeks to overturn Food and Drug Administration approval for Mifepristone altogether, an effort of anti-abortion administrations to deny access to one of the most used forms for ending a pregnancy even in states, like Alaska, where abortion remains legal after the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year.

As for that Texas case, abortion providers in Alaska worry that it will have a particularly harsh impact on Alaskans living in rural and remote locations where there’s limited access to clinics that perform the procedure. About 1,200 to 1,300 people seek abortions in Alaska each year, with about half choosing the abortion pill over a clinical one.

“Mifepristone is safe. It’s effective. It has been used by more than 4 million people since the FDA approved it more than 20 years ago,” Rose O’Hara Jolley, the director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates in Alaska, told KTOO/KDLG. “So this case is baseless. There is no reason from a science standpoint, from a health care standpoint. It is simply about restricting access to abortion, even in states where abortion is legal.”

Reading list

A really interesting read from Noah Smith’s substack by guest columnist Aaron Carr that debunks all the classic things people blame homelessness on—drugs, mental illness, progressive social policies, etc—and focuses on the one problem most people seem to avoid talking about, the availability and affordability of housing. From Noahpinion: Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong
From the Alaska Beacon: ‘Living memory’ of influenza pandemic inspired both COVID-19 protection and a sense of resiliency
From the Alaska Beacon: Rapes and aggravated assaults push Alaska’s violent-crime rates up; property-crime rates fall
From the ADN: Assembly members call for resignation of Anchorage commission member for ‘appalling and racist’ comment
From Alaska Public: State says Anchorage faces more than $600K in fines for safety violations. City officials say they’ve been addressed.
From Alaska Public: Mat-Su school bus drivers reach tentative contract agreement, potentially ending month-long strike

Weekend watching

The Pacific Northwest was hit by a really bad (by their standards) snowstorm last week, which got me on the YouTube channel of the local TV news station I watched for much of my childhood and that brought me to this video. It’s an deep dive into a rail station in Eastern Oregon with a level of shadiness that, well, ought to sound pretty familiar to us in Alaska.

Have a nice weekend, y’all.

The Alaska Memo by Matt Buxton

Day 46: Senators demand answers on food stamp…