Seventeen candidates are running to be Alaska’s next governor. Alaskans are already heading to the polls for early voting in the Aug. 18 nonpartisan, pick-one primary, which will narrow the field to four.
It can be tough to pick a favorite in a crowded field, so as the primary nears, Alaska Public Media is conducting interviews with some of the top candidates in the race. We've reached out to every campaign that's raised $50,000 or more, and nearly all have responded.
Today, we’ll hear from Republican candidate Dave Bronson, who spent one term as mayor of Anchorage from 2021 to 2024.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
You are running in a crowded field of Republican candidates, and I'm curious to start with what distinguishes you from some of your conservative competitors, folks like Bernadette Wilson, Shelley Hughes, Adam Crum, Treg Taylor.
Well, I think in a word, if we were to pick a word, it would be experience. If you look across the field, other than Bill Walker, no one has had any political executive experience, and that's a unique experience. Unlike military executive experience, leadership, or business, or anything else, or certainly legislative experience. Political elected — so mayors, governors, presidents, that kind of experience. So it's a tough business. It's very different than the military world I was a leader in. It's very different from the civilian corporate world I was in, and I think that experience is what matters.
And what do you think that experience has taught you about leading a government?
Well, certainly as mayor, it was a difficult three years. I was new to government then. It took me three years to learn a lot of things, but that was a very steep learning curve, and you learn things on who to trust, who not to trust, who to choose, who to hire. I did make a couple mistakes on some folks that I hired, and those lessons are hard-fought and hard-learned. So yeah, it was a tough three years, but we prevailed, and we actually accomplished a lot of great things while in office.
What do you see as your single greatest or handful of greatest accomplishments as mayor? Is there something that you did as mayor that you'd like to expand on if you're elected governor?
We secured the largest appropriation in the history of the state, and that may seem strange coming from a fiscal conservative, but we did. It was $200 million that we got for the Don Young Port of Alaska, because that piece of infrastructure is the most important piece of infrastructure by far in the state, because 90%, 95% of the people in the state are fed by what comes over that port and are supplied by it. So look at it this way: if the port fails — and it's in desperate shape right now, desperate shape — and somewhere on YouTube there is a video that I had commissioned through my office where we flew a drone around. We took close-up videos at a very low tide, and you can see it. And there's massive holes in the nearly 1,400 pilings that support that. So one bad docking of a ship, one bad earthquake, and that thing will collapse. And if it collapses, our best estimate was not less than 50% of the population of the state will have to leave the state until it's reconstructed.
So I came into office thinking I'd be dealing with homelessness and spending and all these other things, and as I got briefed on all the things that were going on early on, I learned real quick that that port went right to the top of the list, and we got it fixed. This was probably the big thing: that port construction project was being managed by a couple of municipal employees who had never obviously built a port in their life, and we had them supervising Jacobs Engineering, which is a great company, worldwide company, who had built ports around the world. And I reassigned — I made Jacobs, that engineering team, the prime on that, and then that project got back on track, because it was floundering desperately. It got back on track, and now I think in '28 we should be up to one of the two docks being seismically secure. That is new. Once we have that done, and it's supposed to be at the end of first quarter of 2028, we're in really good shape, and we can be confident to move forward. But without that port, there's no food. Without food, there's no workers. Without workers, there's no gas line.
So yeah, I do want to talk a little bit more about your time as mayor. You said that there was a steep learning curve, and you were defeated in your reelection campaign. I'm curious what you learned from that, if you've reevaluated any of your policy positions, and why Alaskans should believe that you're prepared to be the state's CEO.
Well, as I look across the field, everyone is going to have to learn if they get elected, other than me, to the governor's office. They're going to have to learn the same lessons it took me three years to learn.
So now, if you look at what went on in the city, I think we could see the political divide between me and the (Anchorage) Assembly. I had a 9-3 majority against me, and these weren't the old-school Democrats that at my age we were used to growing up, that you could differ with on issues of labor and spending, but you still went out and had a coffee with them or ate dinner with them. These were quite — and a lot of them are gone now. So my perception is, much of that problem, that dynamic on the Assembly, has been fixed.
And you've got to remember — and I'll just give you a little anecdote — there was multiple times on a Tuesday night, and I think (Alaska Public Media reporter Wesley Early) had covered a lot of that, where I had individuals on the Assembly, Assembly members, in the middle of an Assembly meeting look over at me and they say, "Dave Bronson, you're a disgrace. You're incompetent. You need to resign tonight." And then I would say, "Well, thank you very much. Let's get back to business." That's the world I lived in.
Also, too, especially when it comes to homelessness, I had presented a plan — and this would have solved the homeless problem — of a large navigation center over on MLK Drive, and we had the money. We had federal money for that, and the Assembly approved the construction of that building, and then, as we were halfway through the concrete pour, they withdrew their support for that building. And they had said, "Well, this is a great idea" — they said this in private session, but I got this from my supporters on the Assembly — they would say, "Well, this is a really good idea, but we're not going to vote for it because we're not going to give Bronson a win on anything."
So I'm just trying to convey to you the political world in which I lived at that time. Again, I relish the opportunity of dealing with the good old-school Democrats down in Juneau, where we can actually get things done, work across the aisle as professionals, not making it emotional, and just get the work of the people done.
You've got to remember that even in spite of all the challenges I faced and all the negative media, I won nearly 48% of the vote just two years ago in what I would call a purple city. So I'm a strong conservative, and I got 47% of the vote in 40% of the state. I don't see that as a failure.
You know, I led the city out of COVID. We saw back then, and I articulated this — we saw Anthony Fauci for what he turned out to be, and his policies, and I just said no. We're all done with six-foot spacing. We're all done with masks. We're not going to mandate vaccines like my opponent had proposed for nearly 3,000 city employees. I just said, you want — I'm not a — again, you want to wear a mask? Wear a mask. I'll get you one. You want to get a vaccine? Go down to the health department. You can have a vaccine, but I'm not going to make you do it.
And we're seeing now in real time today how deceptive the federal government was and how government officials in the state of Alaska just blindly followed along, when they could have got the alternative narratives from, say, Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas and others. We could have had the truth and not done this to our children. So that's what I did.
I got 48% of the vote in spite of being a conservative in a fairly purple city. So I think, other than including Governor Walker, I think I've gotten — we haven't added it up, but it's pretty close — I've gotten more votes in my two elections than all the rest of the field combined. So I think that's a pretty good record, and this is all about winning. It's all about just getting votes.
I want to return to something that you said about working with the Assembly and comparing that to the Legislature. I think you said that old-school Democrats down in Juneau, they're the sort of people that you could get a cup of coffee with. Is that right?
Yeah, go to dinner with. I'll give you an anecdote on that. Don Young told me this in my office. He was a bit of a mentor of mine, and he was a friend of mine. He says, "Dave, this is what people don't understand." He says, "In Washington, D.C., I had a weekly scheduled dinner — Anne and I did — with Nancy Pelosi every week, and we often made those dinners." He says, "But I got along with her." He says, "I disagreed with her on just about everything, but you know what that evolved into?" He says Nancy Pelosi would tell the legislators on the left there, on the Democrat side, that she controlled, she says, when Don Young wants something, just give it to him, because it's not worth the fight. And I think that stemmed from the fact that they had a very good personal relationship.
You know, this notion that you go down to Juneau and fight, and you make it personal — that's not me. I didn't do that in the city. I'm not going to do that in Juneau. I look forward to going down and working with a Legislature that's roughly 50-50 Republican-Democrat. I look forward to it, because it's not a 9-3, and I'll just say rather crazy, Assembly majority against me, like I had.
I have one more question about your time as mayor, and then we'll move to your vision for the future. But this is something that I think you alluded to a little earlier. An investigation found your health director had fabricated much of his resume. Your own administration's memo later said HR never contacted his references or verified his credentials or employers.
And of course, as governor, you'd nominate more than a dozen department commissioners and tons and tons of others on state boards. So I wonder how that would change your approach to vetting people.
Well, let's look at the health director that I had problems with. He was presented to me. Remember, he was working as a contractor for the city for the previous administration. He also had worked extensively for the state of Alaska. So after we found out that he had defrauded us, essentially, the state then came in. They learned through our investigation that he had defrauded them, and they wound up taking him to court and suing him.
So when my municipal manager hired him — obviously I'm responsible, but he was hired by the municipal manager. I approved that hire, and when it came to me, I had assumed he had been adequately vetted. I knew there was some consternation by folks about him, but you use your internal process to vet people. Obviously, we failed, but so did the previous administration, and quite frankly, so did the state of Alaska in that. So, can we do better, especially in that regard? Most certainly. But again, I'm not going to shirk my responsibility. I'm responsible, or was responsible, for every person that was hired in the city of Anchorage. That was my job.
I do want to turn to the issues that will face the next governor. First, I want to start with your approach to the Permanent Fund. This one was striking to me. I took a look at your website, I read some other interviews with you, and I've seen you talking about adjusting target returns, seeking double-digit returns rather than the current target, which is 5% plus inflation.
The Permanent Fund seeks maximum long-term risk-adjusted returns — that's their mandate — and managers have told lawmakers repeatedly that even that is a pretty tough bar to meet. So I guess I'm curious why you think it's realistic to increase the target returns, and does that risk Alaska's nest egg and the source of the majority of the state's revenue at this point?
Well, let's look at where we stand as we stack up against our primary, say, competitors, other sovereign wealth funds. So the Harvard endowment is about $60 billion. We're at $90 billion. And just so you know, mathematically, as you manage these funds, if you have a larger pool of money, your cost of administration per unit of revenue should go down, because you have economies of scale. So we're a third bigger than they are, at least, and they're averaging about 11.9% on a 10-year moving average. We're at 8%.
And then the other thing, let's keep in mind, too, is we have an entire team of employees at the state that manage those investments. Some of them are extremely highly paid, and we grossly underutilize them, because we spent — I think the number was $890 million last year to pay outsiders to manage that fund in incentives and management fees. And I believe our total PFD last year was $863 million. Don't quote me on that number. So we effectively spent more in management fees than we actually gave out in dividends. So we can do better.
And if you look at it, we're at about the 74th or 75th percentile in performance on sovereign wealth funds within the United States, for these kinds of funds and these endowments. And that's 75% — if I remember right from college, that's a C student. I'd just like to get to a B-plus. And just remember, on $90 billion, every time you increase your rate of return by 1%, that's $900 million a year increase to the corpus of the fund. That's not $900 million back to the Permanent Fund dividend, but it's to the corpus. And the magic is a little bit here financially: is that if we can get to about $110, maybe $115 billion, and we still have — and we do better on our returns on that — formulaically, we can then actually provide the statutory full PFD and run government.
Because remember, 70% of our state revenue comes no longer from oil, it comes from earnings off the Permanent Fund. Thirty percent of our revenue, roughly, comes from oil revenue. It's switched in the last 10 or 12 years. It used to be about 60, 70% oil. So we need to grow the big thing, which is the returns on the fund. We also need to grow the smaller but growing thing, which is the throughput of oil. And there's a lot of talk — I mean, I think we're at, don't quote me, about 465, 470,000 barrels a day, and there's talk that we are targeting a million barrels a day. And when I got here, the pipeline, 34, 35 years ago, the pipeline had nearly 2 million barrels a day. So I'm really bullish on Alaska. We've got to do some things better — and we've got to do a lot of things better, actually — and one of those things is getting better returns on the Permanent Fund.
You mentioned Harvard's 10-year average is, I think you said, between 10 and 11%, or a little above 11%. Looking back 10 years, we haven't had a recession in 10 years, or we haven't really had a large-scale economic disruption since 2008, 2009, that sort of time frame. And I guess risk and return are (directly) correlated.
So do you think that the Permanent Fund should be taking bigger risks to chase higher returns? You talked about management fees, but that's around about 1% of the value, and that still leaves 4 or 5% left to make up there. I mean, should the Permanent Fund be chasing riskier investments, or am I framing the question wrong?
Well, no, it's a good question. That's up to the financial professionals on that. We have mandates — there's pretty narrow guardrails on how we can invest, but those same guardrails apply to the other sovereign wealth funds, or the endowments would be a better phrase, and they have the same thing. It's not like the Harvard endowment is out there investing in particularly risky things. The financial experts have told me that they're constrained the same way our Permanent Fund managers are, and that's fine. That's what we want. It's just that we're not doing a good job, and we're incurring $800 or $900 million in costs that we've got to question.
Certainly, I'm a firm believer right now in active management. Those fees come from this philosophy of active management of the fund. You can go to passive management, have almost no costs, but then I think your returns are — in fact, I know — your returns are going to be less, and there's a balance that you have to strike there. But I'm just saying, Alaska, we've got the biggest fund in the country, endowment essentially in the country, in the Permanent Fund, and we should be doing the best, or at least get us to a B-plus, A-minus, and we're just not there.
Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit more about dividends in particular. You've said that you would propose a statutory dividend in your budget, but you've also acknowledged — and I'm paraphrasing here — that cutting a billion and a half dollars from the state budget would be difficult or impossible, and that you acknowledge you'd have to negotiate with the Legislature on what a final amount would be.
But I'm curious, in your own view, what is a reasonable amount for Alaskans to expect in a dividend during your four-year term?
Well, the key word there is statutory. It is statutory that the governor submits, every Dec. 15, a statutory PFD, and I will do that, knowing full well the money is not there. Knowing full well that the money is not there.
But the thing I will do after submitting that — because the first governor comes in and does not submit for a full PFD, never in the future again, I believe, will we get back to a full statutory PFD. It just won't happen, because they'll say, "Well, we've capitulated. The governor's quit. Previous governors quit. Legislature is doing what it's doing." And I don't think we should do that.
But as I submit that, I will come back, then, to the Legislature and say — and I'll be very proactive on getting to a Permanent Fund and a funding of government that works for everyone, because we have some compulsory spending that we have to do. We have to provide for public safety. We've got to provide for schools. We have to manage our resources, and so there's some costs.
But in this model, people don't understand the numbers, and if I can take a moment, Eric, and explain that. So there's some candidates that will say, "Well, I'm going to cut government, get you to a full PFD." In fact, there's one candidate that said, "I'm going to do it in 90 days, and I'm going to get you to a full PFD." And I says, OK, well, here's the numbers.
OK, there's a little over 600,000 people entitled to a full statutory PFD, and the full statutory PFD formula is about $3,800 — let's say it was last year $3,892, I think. So you multiply that, that's $2.4 billion every year, every PFD, $2.4 billion.
Well, you're going to cut government? Really? So let's take up — and we've got, I think, 14,800 employees, W-2s, in the state. That's the governor down to everyone else. You add up all those W-2s, it's about $1.4 billion. You can cut all of government. You can eliminate every last person in the state, and you're at one-half of one year's PFD.
Slice it another way. You can get rid of 13 of the 15 departments, the smallest departments, and you can get rid of them, their vehicles, their buildings, their rent payments, their heating bills, their employees — you get rid of it all, and you're at $1.1 billion.
You see, the problem is, this thing has been — and I'll just be blunt — it's been screwed up for nearly 40 years. I'm not blaming it on any one party or any one governor or any one Legislature, but it's been screwed up for so long, and we've grown government so much under both Republican and Democrat administrations that we broke the system. The problem is so big, and we're standing so close to it, it's like we don't see it.
But I'm not going to give up on a Permanent Fund dividend, because it's statutory and the people are supposed to get it. A lot of people get mad at me. They say, "Walk away from it, Dave. It's never going to happen." I don't quit. We're going to get to it. And it’s going to take — this group that's working on the PFD issues says it's like six to eight years of getting better returns, trimming government where we can, right-sizing government everywhere, and we can get to a full PFD plus a funding of government. But it took 40 years, roughly, to break this. It's going to take some time to fix it.
But with all the investment coming into this state and the potential for revenue growth, both for the government and for private industry, there's a lot of potential to solve this problem going forward.
The volume of money coming in is good, is really good, and that means jobs for our kids. Hopefully it means lower cost of living for our kids, because I just want our kids to come back and be able to afford to live here, and they can't. That's just a fact. Writ large, our kids can't afford to come back here. We've got to grow the state, grow revenue.
Speaking of affording things, I want to talk about balancing the state budget. You've talked about growing the state's economy. At the same time, though, I went to a presentation this past winter to lawmakers from folks at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, that's basically a think tank based at the University of Alaska — Anchorage. And they talked about a concept called the Alaska Disconnect. And that's basically, increases in economic activity in the state, they increase demand for state services. That costs money, but they don't necessarily raise state revenue.
So my question is, how would you realistically make revenues meet expenses?
Well, did they say it raises revenue for private industry? Because most of the employment by far is in the private sector. So this is the disconnect that I see. Legislators are always — and this is, I just came from the legislative office building over there on Minnesota, and we had a big group presentation. I just came from there moments ago, and they're presenting on the gas line. Everyone wants the gas line. The trouble with a few legislators is they're so narrowly focused on the treasury. "Well, this project, we don't want it until we maximize the return to the treasury." Well, we just stalled the project for another year. That's what's going on.
Well, I look at it — there's another thing that they're missing, and it's the most important part of the job, is what's best for the people. And the people need lower energy costs. They need a better supply of natural gas. They need future revenue once we liquefy in Nikiski and send it to Japan. That's what we're missing. And so before you ask what's good for the government treasury, I'm going to ask what's good for the people. Because if you take care of small business, private industry, that will be good for the people, and it'll eventually be good for the treasury.
So yes, does extra construction, extra workers coming into the state, put an increased demand on law enforcement, housing, schooling, all the other stuff? Yeah, it does.
But not doing the project is even worse, because we are a state that is in decline. Our revenues are decreasing, our population is decreasing, and that's a failure. And we've got to reverse that. And we do that by enticing business back to the state, business investment, and the government will get its fair share in due time.
You've spent a lot of energy this campaign talking about trawling — big boats with giant nets off the back, catching things like pollock and groundfish. They also, of course, catch a lot of other fish known as bycatch. And I'm curious if you can just sort of talk about why this issue is so important to you and how you would approach it as governor.
Well, first and foremost, I think we’ve all got to look at our own personal internal compass, moral compass. This is a moral issue. The bycatch issue is a moral issue. We waste fish. And if I didn't want to risk shutting off your phone call here, I'd get into my phone and start giving you numbers, but the number of crab that are lost every year to bycatch — and it's not just king salmon, it's herring, it's crab, it's juvenile halibut, in the millions — that's got to stop. It just has to stop.
And they say, because there's a thing called midwater trawling, pelagic trawling, and they say, "Well, we're not on the bottom." Well, we have your captains admitting they're on the bottom. We have a captain on YouTube in a video admitting, he says, "I can't make money unless I drag the bottom." So there's the greater issue of trawling, there's bycatch, there's dragging the bottom, there's the volumes, there's the numbers, there's the federal government. The most complicated thing I've ever seen in the world is Alaska fisheries, because there's so many jurisdictions and so many agencies involved.
But at the end of the day, the governor swears an oath to the Constitution. That includes Article VIII, Sections 2, 3 and 4, and that's, you will manage the fish and wildlife for the benefit of Alaskans. And nowhere in there does it suggest corporations out of Seattle that own trawlers. It says what's best for Alaskans, and we have to manage for abundance and sustainability for Alaskans, and that's what I intend to do. My job is to protect a fishery so that commercial fishermen can fish and their kids can fish for generations.
But we're on a path right now — and the trawl industry will dispute this — we're on a path right now where the same thing is going to happen to us that happened to England, to Iceland, to Newfoundland, to the Grand Banks, and up the West Coast of the United States. Trawling will be banned because there won't be enough fish to trawl. And look at what happened in California, Washington and Oregon. They had to ban trawling, and now their fish are finally recovering.
What I want to do is stop the music, do what we can. Because I'm tired of subsistence fishermen taking cuts, sport fishermen taking cuts, personal use fishermen taking cuts, but the trawl industry, from the Lower 48, I might add, the trawl industry takes no cuts. They just keep going, and they're wasting fish. The volumes would astound you, and they just keep right on going. They say, "Well, we bring all this money into the state." No, they don't. Sport fishermen bring more money into the state than the factory trawling industry out of Seattle, because they buy their fuel down there. We looked at the manifest of one crew. It was about 130 crew members. They employed eight Alaskans. I believe the captain was Norwegian. The mechanics were from all over the world. And I'm saying, you tell me how that helps Alaska. Do they show up in the port every once in a while and pay a tax? Yeah, they do. I think the last number I got, their port tax for factory trawlers in Dutch was about $26 million.
Sport fishing — just sport fishing, I'm not talking about subsistence and all the others and the setnetters on the south shore of Cook Inlet — sport fishermen bring in about $1.5 billion a year, and they're being limited, and their limits are being cut back, even as the trawlers just keep taking and taking and taking.
In the interest of equity — I guess I don't want to use, a kind of a hot topic — but in the interest of fairness, maybe the factory trawling industry from Seattle and Tacoma needs to take a cut and start reducing them, so that we can sustain our populations. So that's my thought on that. I hope it's clear. I'm here to represent Alaskans, by, in this regard, protecting Alaska fisheries, and that's what I'll do. But a lot of the decisions are made by the federal government, specifically the secretary of commerce.
But I will fight like crazy. But as a prediction, I think, with the power that the industry has, I think they're going to be allowed to keep fishing until the populations fail, and then they'll be shut down, and then they'll move to probably South America with their ships and do what they always do. But I'm going to fight like crazy. I'll tell you that.
How would you compare your approach to trawling and fisheries generally to other resource questions? You might hear — in fact, you often do hear — people talk about oil and gas businesses, including folks like Hilcorp, basically supporting a Texas billionaire. That's the line you hear a lot from Senator Bill Wielechowski.
I'm curious how you would approach the oil and gas industry, and how that is similar and different to the way that you would approach a resource like fisheries.
Well, you have to govern — I don't know of any Alaskan billionaires who own an oil company or a natural gas resource exploration company. I just don't know of any. I'm wondering, where's Shell from? BP, where was that from? ConocoPhillips, where's their headquarters? Why are we picking on Hilcorp all the time?
This is what bothers me, and I've never been able to answer this question. Eric, you might be able to, but I've been here 35 years, and the first day I come up here, this is what I see. Well, there's these attacks on the oil companies, the resource development companies. They just attack them until in the autumn, when all the charity drives start, it seems like every year, and then they're going to these same corporations, hat in hand, begging for money for their various charities. And then the Christmas season ends, and now they're back to attacking. Oh, and by the way, the Legislature's in session. I never could figure this out. If someone could answer — don't bite the hand that feeds you.
So in 2011, 2012, 2013, we had some blackout threats in Cook Inlet, in the Railbelt. So Anchorage was still up, all the way along the Intertie area, the electrical grid, because 80% of our electricity is produced by natural gas from, by and large, Cook Inlet, and we had problems. So Hilcorp and the Legislature got together. Hilcorp came up, invested. They started drilling, producing more natural gas, and then they also created an underground structure, a natural structure, called CINGSA, the Cook Inlet natural gas storage area. So in the summertime, when you have an excess, you're not producing a lot of electricity, you're not producing a lot of heat, they keep pumping gas out at the same rate, essentially, and then they put it into CINGSA and they store it. Because in February, when we need lots of electricity and we need lots of heat, it's there. Hilcorp came in and did that for us. That's what they did. And now, what, 12, 14 years later, we're broke and we're going to them. We want to change their corporate status. We knew they were an S corp when they came to this state. We knew that. Now we're changing the rules.
So let me transition this to another industry. I've been dealing with a group of data center investors. They want to come to Alaska and they want to invest, and they were doing their due diligence for two and a half months over the winter, so roughly December, January, February. And they came to me in February, after I'd helped them for a few months find what to look for, where to look. And this is what they said: "Dave, we like a lot of what we see, but we're not going to invest in Alaska by creating electricity and therefore data centers. We're not going to invest because we think" — and this is a quote — "your Legislature is going to do to us what they've been doing to Hilcorp."
So I'll just be honest with you: there's a few people in our Legislature that don't understand business. They don't understand the capital that is required to invest in the development of natural resources, and we have a very unhealthy investment environment right now due to the Legislature, not due to the governors, Republicans or Democrats alike. It's due to the Legislature changing the rules, being hostile. It doesn't happen in Texas. Doesn't happen in Oklahoma. It doesn't even happen in California. You know what he also said? He says we would rather do business in California, where the tax structure is quite high, but they're stable. Sacramento doesn't do what Juneau does. So we've got to get our house in order politically. Now I'm not saying give away the farm to the energy companies. Certainly not. It's kind of like dealing with Russians or Soviets back in the day. Trust but verify.
But don't attack them and don't change the rules. Come to an agreement and lock it in so they can have a very stable investment future going forward, and they invest on our behalf. Our gas under our ground, our oil underground, is meaningless until somebody comes in and puts it in a pipe and brings it somewhere. And that's not us. We don't do that. They do.
I want to talk a little bit more about energy, and specifically on the consumer side. Alaskans are facing, already in the Interior, very high energy bills, and there is a shortage of natural gas looming in Cook Inlet. You've talked about supporting the gas line, but even the Alaska LNG project would take years and years to develop and start producing gas.
So I'm curious, how do you keep energy prices down in the meantime? How do you make sure costs don't rise to a level where folks have to leave?
Well, I'm glad you said that, because I spend about every two weeks, I spend a few days in Fairbanks. Fairbanks is absolutely critical to this state, because it's the city that mostly supports the North Slope and a lot of the infrastructure that we need. And I talk to small businessmen a great deal, and even medium-sized businesses, and their concern is the cost of energy. And it goes like this: "Dave, what are you going to do about the cost of energy in the Interior and in Fairbanks? Because my employees can't afford to heat their homes." And he says, "Even I'm noticing" — these guys say this, and women, actually — "even I'm starting to notice my heating bill." It's like, holy cow. Because they heat with wood, they heat with coal, and they heat with oil. And now there's a little bit of trucked-in natural gas coming online.
We need this gas line. We need this gas line so we can get to that spur, that 30- or 40-mile spur into Fairbanks, and bring them up to the 21st century and get them on plentiful, cheap natural gas. And there's people that have told me, if the gas line doesn't happen this session, which it looks like it's not, they're packing up and leaving, because "we see the future and we can't afford to live here." That's a tragedy. Even as we need workers to build the gas line, that's going to solve the problem.
I just came out of that briefing, and this is what they said: it's going to need at peak 6,600 jobs and a total of 12,000 jobs. Peak construction will be the 28th of June of 2028. Those are the workers' numbers. We don't have anywhere near the workers we need. And oh, by the way, we're creating an environment where the workers are going to pack up and leave. That's what we're doing. It's kind of crazy.
But until the gas line comes online, how would you address the short-term problem of not having enough gas, having energy prices be very high?
Well, let's look at the facts. There's 3 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves in Cook Inlet, and there's 19 trillion cubic feet of discoverable natural gas. Two categories of natural gas. There is not a shortage right now of natural gas in Cook Inlet. There is a shortage of contracted deliverable gas from the basin.
So how you do that is the notion of blending. We need to keep — we need to robust our drilling in Cook Inlet, and that's about 30 wells a year. Hilcorp is drilling 28, HEX is drilling three, so that's roughly 31 holes this year. And assuming for failures, that's what we need to sustain deliverability for us.
The gas is there. It's just, Hilcorp has said, "We've spent money here. We need to get back to the North Slope where our profit margins are greater. We solved your problem for the last 12 or 14 years. Happy to do it, but we're not contracting to deliver any more gas." They're drilling more holes, and they're trying to not put us in a blackout situation. But we're going to have to, for a short term, import LNG into Nikiski to feed the gas grid until phase one and phase two of the gas line are done.
It's kind of crazy. We've got a lot of gas. It's just, we're not contracting to discover it, and it's the same company that's being attacked by the Legislature, Hilcorp. So they're the biggest driller and the biggest developer in Cook Inlet, HEX is the second, and HEX is all Alaskan owned, and we need to blend that as the natural gas comes off from the Slope once the 42-inch line is done.
We, in my opinion, as a former military guy, we cannot exclude Cook Inlet natural gas, or even kill that supply. Because guess what? A gas line is exactly that. It's a line. If I was an enemy of America, I would do a drone strike in one single day on the gas line and on TAPS in one day. Will we get it fixed if that happens? Well, certainly. If it takes a week or a couple months, we'll get it fixed, but it'll disrupt the markets. In the meantime, if we're completely dependent on gas from the North Slope for heating our own homes, and we've somehow killed the deliverability in the basin in Cook Inlet, we've created a real problem for ourselves. I think Cook Inlet natural gas is absolutely essential as a matter of energy security.
I have two more questions for you, and one is about education. You've talked about wanting to get woke ideology out of Alaska's schools, and Alaska's schools have a lot of local control. So I'm curious, number one, as governor, how you would accomplish that, and then number two, more broadly, what you would do to stabilize Alaska's public schools as districts cut programs and close facilities around the state.
Well, whenever we talk about education, the first question I ask is the quality of education. So the federal Department of Education monitors 53 jurisdictions, to include, I think, Puerto Rico, D.C. and the Marianas area. And out of those 53, Alaska public schools in fourth and eighth grade reading and math score number 51. So this is transactional in a sense. These are our kids. It's the most important thing in the world to us, is the education of our kids. Also, we're required constitutionally to publicly educate our kids. And why are we doing so bad?
So before you come to me and ask for more money, tell me what you're going to do to get us into the top 10. Because I think we're number three or two in the country in per capita spending. We're spending $23,000 a year per kid. And you can't blame it on, "Well, the Bush is the problem." No, the Bush isn't big enough to drive that average down that much. We have a problem in the major school districts. We're not doing a good job of educating.
And then that follows the funding, because this is the process. We're indoctrinating our children more than we're educating our children, and the parents don't like the indoctrination. So what do they do? They pack up their kids and put them in private school, or they homeschool them. That's what they do. So all of a sudden now we don't have enough kids in the public school. So now we're begging for improvements on the BSA, so as to pay for the school for the kids that remain. And by and large, it's the kids that can't escape, because they come from poor families. That's the tragedy.
Everyone should have the — the money should come to the kid, not to the district. The kids should be able to move around. The parents should be able to select where their kids go to school. It's called the backpack concept. The money goes into the kid's backpack. The kid goes to whatever school the parents want, and that stimulates competition.
But one good thing is this: some of the best-educated public-educated children in the entire country come from Alaska charter schools. But right now these public education systems, these districts, are attacking the charter schools. This is kind of crazy. Find out where we're doing things best, find the best practices and just repeat them over and over. Make more charter schools, not less. And we're doing the exact opposite.
My thing is, education's got to get back to the teacher and the parents. We used to call that PTA. What they're called now is charter schools. So the parents have the voice, should always have control over the kids' education. I'm trying to understand why a union — which I'm a card-carrying union member — why the unions, the NEA, is into what is educated and how is educated, when they should be focusing on benefits for their teachers, retirement packages, pay rates and everything else. But no, they're deep into what is being taught. They're one of the prime facilitators of this indoctrination. The parents are deciding they're going to pull their kids if we keep this up, and it comes down to this indoctrination, this woke indoctrination. You can love it or hate it, but the parents are making their own decision, and now it's impacting the financials of the public education system. It's a tragedy.
And my plan — (running mate Josh Church) and I's plan — is we're going to imitate, again, finding something that works and repeating it. In Mississippi in 2012, they had the same problem. They were commonly recognized as the worst-educated kids in the country, and they've got about, I think it's 440 or 460,000 kids in a public school system. They made a decision: we're going to teach our kids to read, because guess what? They can't. And so they spend $15 million a year to bring in reading coaches into the public school system. Roughly $15 million for 460,000 kids for reading coaches.
We tried to emulate that in the Reads Act here in Alaska, and it kind of failed. They didn't follow through. But guess what? (Mississippi is) in single digits now. They're in the top 10. And so I'm just going to repeat that. We call it the 10-10 plan. In 10 years, we're going to be in the top 10, and we're going to do that by funding reading coaches. Because before you can learn, you've got to learn to read. Once you've learned to read — we all know this, it's very fundamental — then you read so that you can learn. The kids aren't learning to read, so they can't even do math because they can't read, and we're failing.
And I say this kind of jokingly: I'm a 30-year commercial airline pilot, 42 years professional pilot. If airlines flew airplanes like the (National Education Association) does education, there'd be dead people everywhere. It's a failed system. We have to stand up. I'm not picking on any one person, but what I'm saying is we've got to get back to teachers and parents controlling what is being taught and how it's being taught, and we're going in the exact opposite direction.
I want to close with this. We are in the home stretch here of the primary campaign, so I'm curious what your closing argument is to voters. And if you make the final four in the primary, how you would approach campaigning for the general election, especially how you would reach out and look for second-choice votes.
Well, I'm a Republican. I'm conservative. There's almost twice as many registered Republicans in the state as there are Democrats. That's helpful. However, the big corpus of the voters are undeclared and independents, and I do need to appeal to them. Which way they will break in this general election on Nov. 3, I don't know.
But what I'm not going to do is sit there and — hearkening back to cutting government to give you a full PFD — I'm not going to tell you a lie. I'm just not going to tell you I'm going to do something that I know can't be done. I mean, I told you that in the PFD. I'm going to submit a full PFD knowing that it can't be done, but I'm going to be honest about it up front: the money's not there. I'm just going to tell you the truth.
And if you want somebody, a candidate that's going to go in there and scream and fight and everything else, I'm not your guy. I'm just not. It'll be not unlike what was in the city — and I know I'm condemned for fighting. Show me where I actually fought. There was a couple things, mistakes I made, sure. I took down this nonsensical plexiglass shield in the Assembly chambers one night. Should I have done that? No, I shouldn't have. But if you look at it, I was resoundingly condemned in public by the Assembly when I was providing answers, solutions to problems that they admitted in private were good, really good ideas. So it was a very challenging environment.
I'm going to go down there and just tell the truth. I'm going to campaign that way, and so I'm not going to be portrayed as a flip-flopper. So when an issue comes up, we're going to do a lot of research, and then we're going to tell the public what we're going to do and what we're going to try and do. Now there's a Legislature, there's a public, there's lawyers that have a voice in all this.
But I'm just going to tell you what I'm going to fight for. I'm going to fight to limit trawling, to end trawling, until we get this fisheries thing figured out. I'm going to fight for a full PFD, knowing that the money is not there.
There's no clean wins anywhere. We broke the system for so long. Government is not functioning well at all, and I'll give you an example. Last year, I was the director of Ted Stevens International Airport. I have 45 positions that have to be filled by heavy equipment operators, the guys that maintain the field but also plow during blizzards, keep all three runways open. We only have about 16, maybe 18 positions filled. The reason being is that we start at $29 an hour, and the city right next door starts at $34.50. Commercial private enterprise, they start in the low- to mid-40s. And guess what? The gas line is going to pay heavy equipment operators $92 an hour. So how do we recruit and retain people? How do we do that?
There's going to be fortunes made by heavy equipment operators in the construction of the gas line, and good on them. You know, if I was a young man starting over and didn't know what I wanted to do, I'd go get my permit to operate heavy equipment, get the training, put my name on the list and plan on going up in there and working for three years. That's the construction window. Three years. Small fortunes are going to be made by young men and women who want to operate heavy equipment. So things need to function better. Government needs to run better in every aspect.
There's a couple bright spots. You know, there's AHFC, Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, run by — I'll just mention Brian Butcher — they're doing a great job over there. I think AIDEA is doing a great job, run by Randy Ruaro. But other than that, we're struggling everywhere. And government has to function well, but it has to be lean as well, and that's a tough nut. That's what will take up most of the time of the next governor, and there's going to be some really hard decisions to make.
