'Right-sized government' team puts hit on Alaska college hockey

The hockey teams at the University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Alaska Fairbanks play a combined total of about 75 games a year.

The programs require a subsidy of about $3 million,  which is $40,000 per game.

Is this a function of state government?

At a time when academic programs are getting cut, the university and the state need to decide if we should keep spending $13 million of state funds and student fees on UA intercollegiate sports. The most expensive program is hockey because these are big teams and they spend a lot of time in airplanes.

If the goal is to end all general fund spending on college sports, as some legislators believe,  there is no future for intercollegiate sports in Alaska.

[University budget report puts Alaska college hockey in crosshairs]

This year the Republican team in Juneau wasted many hours blabbing about promoting guns in classrooms, while avoiding real issues — such as how eliminating college hockey in Anchorage and Fairbanks fits into the plan to make Alaska government the right size.

They will deny they had anything to do with this and claim they only want to cut the unpopular parts of state government.

I don't think that all UA sports programs will be eliminated, but according to a 14-member UA committee that reviewed the sports situation, one of the few benefits of such a drastic move would be that the Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage could be put to some new use, opening 200,000 square feet and 600 parking spaces.

Perhaps this is a joke, an exclamation point on a monumental policy and budget failure.

It wasn't long ago that Anchorage basketball boosters got legislator Bill Stoltze to define a $110 million Anchorage basketball palace as a core mission for the university, ignoring the objections of the regents, who identified pressing needs for the university, including a growing maintenance backlog.  The empty shell of an engineering building in Fairbanks is a constant reminder of haphazard  state planning for higher education.

Defenders of basketball, hockey and other intercollegiate programs will identify numerous recreational and social benefits to Alaska as reasons for keeping the status quo, ranging from community outreach and marketing to public support. These are hard to quantify but they are real and important.

While the new report on college sports may be a statement of just how bleak all the options are without millions in state subsidies, the option to cut some programs and operate UAA and UAF as a consortium has the makings of a compromise.

In Anchorage, that could mean the loss of hockey. In Fairbanks, that could mean the loss of basketball. Don't expect the crowds to cheer.

Even some members of the committee who wrote the report are bad-mouthing  the consortium idea, suggesting the NCAA will balk and it would be unworkable.

While the committee said the teams would all have to be identified as either UAA or UAF, regardless of whether they are in Fairbanks or Anchorage, that problem could be disposed of by calling them teams of the University of Alaska.

The NCAA has approved something like this in Florida for schools that are 55 minutes apart by car. UA could argue that two schools 55 minutes apart by air, part of a single system, are compatible.

The immediate reaction from defenders of Seawolf hockey and Nanook basketball will be that the university should keep the subsidies and cut something else, preferably waste, fraud and abuse.

Something else is getting cut, which makes it that much harder to defend the status quo.

The budget for the university this year is about $50 million below the request from the UA Board of Regents, with reductions taking place in every part of the system. There is more to come.

UA President Jim Johnsen has groups looking at all operations for ways to cut costs and keep the doors open.

Along with the options for sports, there are alternatives to restructure college programs on education, business and engineering, as well as internal operations on procurement, information technology and research.

Johnsen has yet to decide what he will recommend to the regents with this first round of reports and is accepting comments online. Public meetings are set in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau starting Sept. 1.

The exercise will make people angry and raise doubts about the future of higher education in Alaska, though some legislators and candidates will insist that this is not what they mean by "right-sized government."

Columnist Dermot Cole can be reached at dermot@alaskadispatch.com

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