The full slate of candidates for the October municipal elections is now set, with a total of 20 residents running for seats on the assembly, planning commission, school board, and for mayor. Three citizen’s petitions are also headed to the ballot, and the assembly will vote on final approval for an additional two ballot measures during its meeting Tuesday.
Mayor
- Doug Olerud
- Jan Hill
Doug Olerud and Jan Hill are the two candidates running to replace Tom Morphet as mayor. In some ways, it’ll be a familiar race: Olerud and Hill were the last two mayors to serve before Morphet, and they were the only two candidates in 2020, when Olerud won the mayorship over then-incumbent Hill.
Assembly
- Beau Bradley
- Diana Lapham
- Anne Marie Palmieri
- Lee Robinson
Candidates for assembly will compete for two open seats, each three-year terms. Neither incumbent in those seats, Kevin Forster and Craig Loomis, are running for reelection.
Lapham and Schnabel have previously served as assembly members, and Schnabel was borough manager from 2017 to 2020. Bradley and Robinson are local business owners; Bradley co-owns The Bookstore on Main Street, and Robinson owns the Rusty Compass. Palmieri is a program manager in the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s contaminated sites program and previously served on the school board.
Planning Commission
- George Campbell
- Zeke Frank
- Erika Merklin
- Nathanael Reams
- Kimberly Rosado
- Nick Szatkowski
There are four open seats on the planning commission; three of them for three-year terms, and one for a one-year term.
Brown, Merklin, and Reams are incumbents running for reelection. Current planning commissioner Derek Poinsette’s term is also up, but Poinsette is not running for reelection.
School Board
- Cara Gilbert
- Carlos Jimenez
- Burl Sheldon
- Kevin Shove
- Michael Wald
- Jenn Walsh
There are four open seats on the school board, three for three-year terms, one for a two-year term. Shove and Wald are incumbents.
Citizen’s petitions
The borough clerk’s office has approved three ballot initiatives for October’s election. All three seek to reverse previous initiatives voted into law in recent elections.
One of the approved initiatives is mayor Tom Morphet’s effort to cut the senior property tax exemption from $300,000 of exempt property value to $200,000 of exempt property value.
That would partially roll back a change from the 2024 municipal election, when residents voted to increase the exemption from $150,000 to the current $300,000. That vote passed by a margin of 654-543.
The second approved initiative, organized by resident Kimberly Rosado, would return the planning commission to being an appointed, rather than elected, body.
Voters approved making the planning commission an elected body in a 2023 special election, and have chosen planning commissioners at municipal elections each year since then. Previously they were appointed by the mayor and approved by the assembly. Rosado believes the change has led to a less effective body.
“We need people on the planning commission who know what they’re doing,” she said. “The planning commissions that were selected by the mayor were the best we’ve ever had. They followed code, they did their homework, they knew how to read plans.”
Rosado argued the mayor would be more likely than voters to select commissioners based on professional expertise in industries like construction that might be relevant to the planning commission.
The last petition, organized by Barbara Nettleton, would roll back the seasonal sales tax that voters approved during last year’s election.
Nettleton’s petition was the only one, at the borough’s initial Aug. 12 deadline, to fall short of the required 297 signatures to get on the ballot. Nettleton said Thursday the clerk’s office counted her effort as 22 signatures short, and gave her another week to collect signatures.
In an email Wednesday, deputy clerk Kiersten Rowley said when reviewing signatures she had been surprised at the number of longtime residents who had signed, but were not listed as registered voters, and thus couldn’t count as a valid signature for the petition.
Rowley contacted the state’s Division of Elections, who said the invalid signatures may have been due to the division’s actions this summer removing voters from active voter rolls using Department of Motor Vehicles data. The move continues to be heavily controversial, with more than 600 citizen voters erroneously marked by the division as non-voters and removed from active voter status. The state legislature’s legal counsel wrote in a memo this month that the division’s actions may have violated federal law.
Rowley also cited borough code section 11.24.050, which expressly allows the clerk to return petitions and reaccept with new signatures until the statutory deadline on Aug. 22.
Rowley then called all three petitioners and offered them extra time to circulate their petition, she said.
Going forward, borough staff plan to update language going forward so petitioners have to hit a “target date” for submission rather than the “deadline” as is currently written. After that target date the clerk will process the petition and “allow people to cure deficiencies in their petitions so long as they meet the statutory deadline of 45 days prior to election day,” Rowley said.
“I believed then, and I still believe, that protecting citizen’s rights to petition their government is a fundamental right,” she added in an email. “We have heard concerns about how difficult it can be for citizens to place questions on the ballot… we are committed to helping citizens understand and navigate the process while ensuring that the applicable requirements and deadlines are followed.”
In the extra time given by the clerk, Nettleton successfully collected the required signatures and her petition was certified for the ballot Tuesday.
Additional ballot measures
The full ballot will be finalized Tuesday, after a set of final public hearings at the assembly. The assembly has put forward two more ballot measures for voters to decide on. To reach the ballot, the proposals will need to be approved by one more vote of the assembly at their meeting this week.
One proposal would pass an additional 2% sales tax on alcohol. The other proposal would put into place a severance tax in the borough. The severance tax would charge a set rate on raw materials extracted in but sold outside the borough — and thus not subject to borough sales tax. That would include timber, mineral ore, sand, gravel, and rock.
The first $1,000 of tax per year would be exempted in an effort to protect small-scale, local producers. The proposal also places some restrictions on payments-in-lieu-of-tax, or PILTs, with mining companies. Under a PILT, a company would agree with the borough to make a set payment each year rather than paying according to the tax structure outlined in code. However, the proposal requires any PILT be ratified by the voters.
This story has been updated with the final list of candidates for election. Two people, Debra Schnabel and Patty Brown, withdrew their names from consideration.