Former Alaska State Sen. Tom Begich stopped in Haines this week as he campaigns back and forth across the state. The 65-year old Democrat currently leads the race to be the state’s next governor, according to a range of polls. While in Haines, he competed in the singer-songwriter contest at the Southeast Alaska State Fair. He also spoke to CVN reporter Will Steinfeld about a range of issues, including education, state-funded infrastructure, tribal sovereignty and resource development.
You’ve been traveling all over the state. What’s the scope of the concerns you’ve been hearing from people? Is it a lot of local issues, or are there consistent big picture issues you’re hearing about?
It’s a little bit of both. But mostly it’s been two main issues. They talk about education and whether or not it will ever be fully funded again, and there’s a real feeling that we’ve allowed our education system to really fall apart. You know, we’re 48, 49th in the nation now, depending on which categorical area you’re looking at,
Then, when we talk about affordability, energy costs are outrageous. Where they have been able to shift to renewables, it’s lowered costs significantly, but there has been a real pullback at the federal level for that renewable funding, and I think the state has to pick up the slack there.
On education, do you hear from people that it’s a money issue, that communities just need more funds to work with?
You hear that, but it’s a quality issue too… . How do you make a more stable education system? I’ve proposed some ways that we can do that. Most school districts aren’t able to recruit new teachers because they don’t know their budgets until, in this case, we don’t even know them today, and we’re already in the new fiscal year for these school districts. I’ve proposed taking the education budget as a separate component out of the operating budget, and placing it so that we address it in the first 60 days (of the legislative session). That’s a process issue, not a money issue.
But the second piece to that is a money issue. I wouldn’t have vetoed the pension plan that the bipartisan majorities passed in the Senate and the House. We’re the only state in the union that doesn’t give what we call a defined benefit of pension plan to teachers. So when our teachers reach their peak teaching ability after four or five years, they’ve been educators in Alaska, they can compete for jobs in 49 other states that will give them a pension plan. So we lose them, and we know that because we’ve actually studied that.
To fully fund education, you’re probably looking at somewhere around an additional $185 million to $215 million a year. I have a plan for how you get there and how you can pay for that. And I don’t think any other candidate for governor does have a fiscal plan that is as detailed as mine is.
If your fiscal plan can’t deliver that new revenue in year one or two, or at all, do you see education as a priority enough to take from other pools of funding?
Well I think you can have a fiscal plan that gets there in year one, and I’ll talk about that in a second. But it is a priority, and we will find the funding for it because it must happen. A failed school system does not provide opportunity for young people. And if you’re looking to have kids here, you don’t want to raise them in a place that doesn’t provide an education. I simply won’t stand for it, and I don’t think most Alaskans will either anymore. So how do we get there?
This governor twice vetoed the internet fee, which would, like 36 other states, simply put the international internet companies into our corporate tax code.
Number two, we must fix what’s called the S-Corp exception. This has allowed over 100 million in tax revenue we used to get from BP, British Petroleum, to fall off our books immediately, and it fell off our books because an S-Corp, Hilcorp, bought their assets. That was never the intent of the S-Corp law. It was to support small businesses. Just fixing that is worth between $100 million and $150 million annually, according to our own state Senate Resources Committee.
Finally getting rid of the tax credits on Prudhoe, Kuparak, and Alpine, the three legacy fields on Prudhoe. You don’t provide tax credits to a field that’s been producing for 20, 30, or 40 years. You provide it for new development. That will produce between $200 and $250 million annually into our state budget.
The first two have or nearly have consensus already. If we get the third one, you’re talking about $400 million a year we’re not collecting today. That is more than enough to pay for that education and also do some of the other issues that have come up around retrofitting for energy efficiency or ensuring that we’re looking at our healthcare and housing issues in a manner that will actually reach Alaskans.
People seem to be afraid to talk about the tax credit issue. They’ll talk about the S-Corp and they’ll talk about the internet fee, but they’re all afraid to talk about getting our fair share from the oil industry. Just remember, those are our resources, and our Constitution demands that we create maximum value from the production of our resources. We should do that because ultimately, in the end, those resources aren’t going to be there forever.
I have a slightly different question for you, a more local question. Week to week, I hear a lot of people bring up the old lumber mills pretty frequently: this idea of a search for what kind of industry is next that will bring some kind of local employment base. Do you think in these kinds of Southeast towns, the state has some role to play in looking for a next option? Do you think there is a next option?
There’s always a next option. You know, I look back in the 80s, we had pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan that were really the mainstays of both communities. In Sitka, what they did was they began a multi-year plan to figure out how they could expand tourism, how they could expand the university, how they could expand their arts community, and they also developed and supported small businesses. Sitka ended up thriving, being a diversified community that had all these different sectors that were then represented.
That requires comprehensive community planning. The state could lead that effort with the community, but only if the community wants that effort. The administration at the state level is really not very interested in that. I am. I cut my teeth on community organizing, community development, whether it was strategic planning in the Northwest Arctic Borough or working with school districts like the Yupiit School District in Western Alaska. That’s the same kind of skill set I want to bring to bear as governor.
I think this community ought to be a thriving community and it doesn’t have to be built on whether or not you’re cutting timber everywhere. In fact, we have a law in the books. It’s a carbon credit bill. Sealaska took 117,000 acres, sold carbon credits, and are making $100 million a year. I was up in Klukwan talking to folks there, one of the things we talked about was, instead of building a bridge to that state land and cutting timber on that land, maybe building a road to mines that might not be built, what if we instead carbon credited that state land, producing millions of dollars a year that we could use to help Haines plan for its future, and for the village to do the same thing. Now you’re protecting commercial fishing grounds, you’re protecting subsistence hunting and fishing habitat, and you’re making income in doing so. And that income could be used to reimagine what this community could be like
Recently the CEO of Vizsla Copper, the Palmer Project owner, said his company was working with the state to fund work on a new industrial port facility in Haines. We don’t know exactly what it looks like yet…
Whoa whoa. So he’s telling you about this, but the community doesn’t know anything about it?
The community didn’t know about it, as far as I know, until he said this.
Let me just say this again. I don’t know whether y’all support that dock or not, but not on my watch. Nothing moves forward in a community without the community identifying what it wants to do. The state does not have a role in bypassing community interests, ever. That has been the role of this administration, to pick a project and to impose that project, whether a community wants it or not. I’d rather have that debate and that discussion in the community and decide what you guys want to do. Now, if you want to work with them and do a dock, that’s your decision. I’m going to be intervening to say, do you have a meaningful place at the table, or are they just shining you on?
How does the public process change to facilitate that?
If I were governor and somebody came to me and said, hey, I got a great idea for Haines, my first question would be, how does the community feel about it? In this case, it sounds like the answer would be, well, I haven’t talked to them yet. I would say, “well, you come back to me after you’ve talked to the community, and then let me go talk to the city manager and the mayor and ask what they’re thinking.”
Are there specific ways you could codify that so that at an agency level, even if people aren’t coming to your desk, that would still be the case?
Yeah, you could even do it by executive order. I was up in Fairbanks, and a bunch of community members from Esther Dome came up to talk to me because there’s a mining operation happening up there, and they didn’t want it. I said, what was the public process? Well, there wasn’t one. They didn’t even know how it had occurred. That can’t happen. The Ambler Road. People talk about that all the time. You know there are 88 resolutions of villages opposing the Ambler Road. You probably didn’t know that, because the governor has used AIDEA as a tool to push that road through without even talking to communities that are going to be directly impacted by it. And that, to me, is the wrong approach. Government should never have the approach of imposing on a community a development it doesn’t want.
How do you think the state’s dialogue with the borough of Haines, for example, or the general population of Haines, should differ from consultation with local tribes? Should it be different?
I think there shouldn’t be a difference in the long run. We have, by statute, said we recognize local tribes. I want to take that a step further and ensure that we’re doing full recognition of our tribes because our tribes have sovereignty. We never conquered them here. There’s no treaty. There’s an understanding that they have some sovereign power, and so that relationship should be fraternal, not paternal. What I mean by that is, the government works with its municipalities to try to find solutions. Government does have the power to impose some decisions, eminent domain, and things like that. I want to be sure that our discussions with tribes are on a fraternal relationship basis: not, “nice, thank you for your opinion. We’re going to do this anyway.”
I guess beyond general principles, do you think that in terms of the process, there’s a difference between dealing with a municipality and dealing with a sovereign government?
There is, and part of that difference is that a sovereign government has a lot more authority than a municipality has. How we negotiate that and how we make that look will be something we work out with sovereign governments on a regular basis.
(The Chilkat Valley News) has been following the federal Department of the Interior policy going back and forth on the status of allotment land, like in Eklutna. I wish I was more educated on the topic, but it seems like the Department of Law and the state have been relatively consistent across recent administrations on how the state views state sovereignty over allotment land and tribal land. Do you feel like there’s a change of direction to be had?
I don’t share that view. It will be a near reversal of direction. I look at this very, very differently. I think this administration has created an antagonistic relationship with a fifth of our population, and I think that it reflects prior administrations as well. I said there’s an exception in the Walker-Mallott administration that was much friendlier, but not since the Knowles administration have we had a strong working relationship outside of Walker’s administration with tribes. In fact, prior to that, we didn’t even fully understand tribes until the Clinton administration recognized our tribes up here. Prior to that, it was all about the corporations, and there were (Indian Reorganization Act) entities that were demanding recognition.
Everyone should be treated in a manner that is respectful to their existence. You’re not threatening subsistence rights all the time because you believe that a particular sport fishing organization is more important than people who’ve lived here for 10,000 years. I don’t buy that, and what I want to do is find those collaborative places we can work that will preserve subsistence preference, while at the same time ensuring we have a commercial fishing industry here, and the two are compatible.
How deep are you into the marine highway? Like, are you thinking at the level of we should have more day boats, should invest in mainliners, that kind of planning? Are you more thinking about the broader process of ‘let’s change how the board is composed and how we fund the system?’
I want professionals who understand the board, not a bunch of DOT bureaucrats determining how that board, how that marine highway system is run. I want us to stop looking at it as, boy, we don’t make enough money off the people on the ferry system to justify it. You don’t make enough money on the Glenn Highway either. In fact, you make no money on the Glenn Highway. Why do our students pay $60,000 (for transportation) in sports leagues in Southeast because they don’t know if they’re going to have regular ferry service, so they have to have a backup plan with Seaplanes? You know, this is stuff that the community deserves to get fair treatment on. If you have a board that’s coming from these communities, you will be able to deal with these issues on a regular basis. More importantly, if you have that $200 million to deal with those deferred maintenance pieces — you have a lot more than that deferred maintenance, but that’s a starting point — It jumpstarts your ability to be successful. If you have bonding authority, that means you can be looking at a 10- or 20-year plan and doing replacement and envisioning what that system looks like.
Do you feel like legislators from other parts of the state would go for extensive bonding for the marine highway system? Like, do you have any indication that that’s possible?
I do. The revenue bond isn’t just for (the Marine Highway). The revenue bond would be a $850 million general obligation bond. $200 million would be for the marine highway system. $250 million would be for the deferred maintenance. Over $2 billion for the University of Alaska. You’d have $200 million reserved for the major maintenance list and the maintenance and the school construction lists, and then you have $200 million for roads and bridges that are falling apart across the state. That’s $850 million. It’s not even a billion dollars. It’s a general obligation bond, which gives us a time period to pay it back over time, and that time period allows us to jumpstart every one of those areas. That fiscal plan I laid out earlier, coupled with using carbon credits appropriately and some of the other ideas that are out there, could produce enough income for the state of Alaska to allow us to finally have a capital budget that we can count on every year. These are all part of the planning process that I’m looking at. I want to see a state that is not just reflecting on the past, but looking to the future. And I think we can get there. I’m sure we can get there.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly wrote the Yupiit School District as the “Upan School District.” The story also wrote that Begich plans to issue $2 million in bonds for the University of Alaska. Begich plans to issue $2 billion in bonds for the University of Alaska. The story has been updated to reflect these changes.