Don't blame APOC

By Michelle Bonnet Hale

We’ve all been there, at DMV for a Real ID or to update our car registration, the waiting room full, only two employees behind the counter, and…one of them takes their lunch break. Collectively, the entire waiting room sees red. People grumble about those damn state workers. Some in the waiting room leave in disgust — they just don’t have time for this!

This scenario plays out daily in our state government, across all agencies. We’ve seen it playing out recently with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, or APOC. In response to Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom’s recent whiplash decision to put Treg Taylor back on the ballot for governor, our own governor has been calling for a study of APOC. He seems to ask, how did APOC not discover dozens of campaign disclosure irregularities? What is wrong with this agency?

We should not wonder why a state employee would take a lunch break with a waiting room full of people, and we certainly should not echo our governor’s disingenuousness about APOC. Instead, we should wonder why there are only two employees behind the counter when the waiting room is full. We need to ask why APOC’s budget has consistently been slashed by the very Legislature and governor they watchdog.

Perhaps we can wonder if that state worker who took their lunch break has to do this every single working day because there are never enough workers.

A term kicking around these days, that I don’t like to use because I like to “keep it clean” when I write (mostly so my mother doesn’t chide me), is “enshittification.” This means basically taking something that was working and turning it to, well, crap. This effort has been aimed at our state government for the entire debilitating eight years of the Dunleavy administration and had a good start even before then when Gov. Dunleavy was Sen. Dunleavy. 

It fulfills a self-perpetuating prophecy: Government is bad and government workers are incompetent and lazy. We’ve heard it repeatedly from the governor. In response to poor school test scores, he argues that we need to keep cutting the education budget. 

This argument for cutting government funding and jobs and government worker pay then makes government worse. The lines at DMV become longer. APOC employees struggle to provide the services they are tasked with. Test scores race to the bottom and tragically our own children suffer the consequences. 

The ferry system and the school system cannot find enough workers. The person on the end of the phone can’t help you since they just started at the agency in question, because the workers with years of experience have given up and left.

When I first ran for office in 2018, APOC employees were tirelessly helpful although they were overworked even then. This year, I hear from those needing help from APOC that the help is slow to come. There just aren’t enough people doing the job they are tasked with.

I’ve been one of these state workers. I managed a division that was already running lean and that suffered year after year of budget cuts. I cannot emphasize enough how exhausting it is to be one of those workers, dedicated to your work and the people you serve, struggling like Sisyphus day after day to just meet the bare minimums. 

It takes compassion to meet these workers, our friends and neighbors, with understanding instead of anger when we can’t get the answer we need. And it takes action on each and every one of our parts to elect those who will fix this system that has been hammered on so long. We need to learn about those running for office, we need to talk with our friends about them, we need to help where we can with campaigns, and we need to vote, vote, vote.

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives and three dogs. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.