Michael Tavoliero: The silver-lead lie, Alaska’s home rule, and the illusion of local control

By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO

I remember being eight. 

Traveling down Silver Mine Road in the heat and humidity of a Brookfield, Connecticut summer. My world was small then. I played, rode a bike with no helmet, and stayed outside from morning to past dark. Going to Scott and Peter Brittingham’s home on Silver Mine Road, I never wondered why the road was called Silver Mine. It was simply the name of the path that led to playing, scraping knees and palms, and building stick forts in the woods.

As a child, I accepted my world as it was given, as if names simply are selected with no intent and simply land where they belong. It never occurred to me that Silver Mine Road triggered a mysterious prevarication, like tin treasure buried just beneath the pavement.

Only recently, more than six decades later, did I learn the truth. There was no silver. The name was a misdirection, a shimmer hiding something much duller: lead and zinc.

Galena, the main ore of lead, and sphalerite, the main ore of zinc, were dug from a shaft off that very road in the nineteenth century, part of a forgotten mine that opened long before I was born. Silver Mine Road was named not for silver, but for something else entirely.

Presumptuousness.

We all wear it, like a child wears a cape, unaware of the wind, thinking it makes us fly. We walk down familiar paths assuming we know where they come from, never imagining we might have misunderstood them all along.

In the end, it’s not just children who accept illusions without question. It’s all of us, until the truth quietly taps us on the shoulder and shows us the dullness of the lead behind the shine.

In 1959, Alaska became a state with a state constitution. Conservatives have long criticized this Rockefeller Foundation document instituted by FDR Democrats to be flawed by its centralized government foundation. Yet, deep in this document lay the single most remarkable section ever produced by a state constitution.

“Article X, Section 11, Home Rule Powers. A Home Rule borough or city may exercise all legislative powers not prohibited by law or by charter.”

Home Rule municipalities in Alaska have the authority to govern themselves and enact any laws not specifically prohibited by state law or their own charter. In contrast, general law municipalities can only exercise powers that are explicitly granted to them by state statute. Home Rule municipalities offer broader local autonomy. General law municipalities require state permission for most actions.

While Alaska’s Constitution proclaims “maximum local self-government” under Article X, Section 1, and explicitly requires a liberal construction of municipal powers, the actual implementation of Home Rule has been constrained by state preemption and administrative authority, benefiting centralized interests over local control.

Alaska’s constitutional approach to Home Rule is unusually broad. Rather than narrowly listing allowable powers, as most other state constitutions do, Alaska grants Home Rule municipalities all legislative powers not otherwise prohibited by law. In theory, this is a recipe from the menu recognized as the Declaration of Independence ordering expansive local autonomy.

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Yet in practice, Home Rule municipalities have been restrained by the Alaska Legislature through its inexorable corruption by special interests. To a freedom-loving mind, the result is a constant confrontation with limitations when trying to exercise that autonomy. Where conflicts arise between local ordinances and state regulations, state agencies and statutes interpret and insist their opinions as prevailing, even when the subject matter appears primarily local in nature. 

These recurring conflicts underscore how state policy and regulatory uniformity have been elevated over local governance, often to the benefit of entrenched bureaucracies or industry-specific interests. This reveals the ultimate difference between top-down and bottom-up governance: the former imposes centralized control based on abstract authority, while the latter empowers communities to shape their own destinies based on consent and accountability. Alaska’s Home Rule promise was built on the latter but is increasingly shackled by the former.

Despite these trends, the Alaska Constitution explicitly requires that the powers of local government be construed liberally, not restrictively. The courts, when upholding this principle, serve as a necessary corrective force against overreach by the legislature or state agencies. However, when courts defer too readily to centralized policies, the intended balance of power under Article X is undermined.

Just like this former eight-year-old and the road’s namesake to my enjoyment, the presumptuousness of the average citizen is not a flaw of character; it is a learned response to complexity. 

In Alaska, we presume that local control exists because the Constitution says it does. We presume that Home Rule means what it sounds like: that our communities, through democratic self-determination, can govern themselves. But presumptions are dangerous when systems are deliberately engineered to exploit them.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the structural contradiction found in Alaska Statutes Titles 14 (Education), 29 (Municipal Government), and the Public Employment Relations Act.

Title 29 of the Alaska Statutes gives the appearance of empowering Home Rule municipalities with broad legislative authority; stating they may exercise “all legislative powers not prohibited by law or charter.” The Alaska Constitution even requires that these powers be interpreted liberally, suggesting a strong commitment to local self-government.

However, that appearance is often misleading. In practice, Title 29 is structured with state-imposed constraints that reassert centralized control in critical areas such as elections, local governance structures, and others. These restrictions frequently benefit entrenched bureaucracies and special interests that thrive on top-down uniformity rather than community-level discretion.

And yet, Title 14, which governs school districts, segregates educational authority from the broader municipal authority, creating a separate class of government that is statutorily limited and operationally beholden to state control. 

Title 14 even imposes rigid limits on Home Rule by requiring school board members to serve three-year terms. This restriction prevents local communities from aligning school board elections with higher-turnout national election cycles effectively suppressing voter participation and weakening local accountability. It’s a quiet but powerful way the state undercuts true self-governance and dilutes the voice of the people.

Then comes PERA, the Public Employment Relations Act, which allows for municipal exemptions (AS 23.40.255(b)), meaning a municipality could opt out of collective bargaining obligations, except for its school district. The statute explicitly denies this exemption to municipal school districts, thereby stripping local education authorities of the same flexibility granted to their corresponding general government units.

This is not accidental. It is the product of legislative design, carefully shaped and continuously reinforced by special interests, especially public-sector unions, bureaucratic agencies, and centralizing legal frameworks. These entities benefit from maintaining statutory entrenchments that prevent local communities from fully exercising the powers the Alaska Constitution promises them. 

Education is held hostage by this arrangement: while municipal governments may choose their fiscal and administrative paths, their school districts are trapped in mandatory statewide bargaining schemes.

This fragmented structure denies the spirit of Home Rule. It invalidates the presumption of local autonomy and exposes the citizen’s trust as misplaced. When the legal framework discriminates between parts of the same local government, it reveals its true nature, not as a tool of empowerment, but as an instrument of control.

To move toward genuine Home Rule, Alaska must reform Titles 14 and 29 and amend PERA to allow for unified exemptions or local determinations across all arms of municipal governance, including education. Anything less perpetuates a false narrative, one in which the citizen is free in name only, and self-government remains a myth gilded in statutory silver, while the lead of special interest control lies just beneath.

Alaska’s local governments were meant to serve as dynamic, responsive units of governance, not subsidiaries of state agencies. The constitutional goal of maximum local self-government can only be achieved if state institutions, including the courts, honor the directive to interpret municipal powers broadly and allow communities to govern in ways that reflect their distinct values, needs, and circumstances.

And so, the lesson returns, what we presume to be silver is, in truth, lead. What we believe is freedom is already bound by invisible chains. Only by asking, by digging, by refusing to take the names and narratives at face value, do we discover what was buried and what can still be restored.

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Michael Tavoliero: Alaska’s path to true local control in education