Alaska's ethics committee wants out of harassment training so it can get back to ethics

Alaska's legislative ethics committee has decided it has too much on its plate — and what it wants to give up is running the Legislature's sexual harassment and civility training.

In a unanimous vote Friday, the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics directed staff to ask legislative HR and Legislative Counsel to hand the training to a more appropriate office. It isn't going away; the committee just doesn't want to be the one running it.

The reason, members said, is that the assignment has crowded out the work the committee exists to do: teaching legislators and staff about ethics. Joyce Anderson, the public member who made the motion, said tacking harassment training onto the committee years ago shrank the time and attention left for ethics instruction itself. She was emphatic the training must continue — "It absolutely needs to be done," she said — just not by them.

Members also questioned how the job landed on them at all. The 2018 policy that assigned it leaned on a legal opinion asking only whether the training "may be included" in the committee's work, not whether the committee was the right body to run it. And since the pandemic, members noted, the training has been the same recorded videos played over and over — no updates, no live instruction.

For now, the committee isn't transferring the duty outright, only asking to be relieved of it and leaving HR and Legislative Counsel to figure out where it lands.