Editor's note: The below excerpt from this interview is not the full transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full interview with Tom Begich by clicking on the audio link.
Tom Begich: "My name is Tom Begich, I am a lifelong Alaskan, resident of Anchorage right now, but I've also lived in Juneau, and for a little bit of time up Fairbanks as well, traveled all around the state. And the reason I'm running for governor is I've really seen the state communication and the way we work with each other deteriorate over the last few years. Now, when I served in the state senate, when I was minority leader, we could work across the aisle, we could work across caucus, we could actually develop solutions that were bipartisan, and what I've seen is just a lack of communication between the Governor and the Legislature, and that was my skill set when I was serving in Legislature but for decades prior to that as well, working in the fields of juvenile justice or substance use prevention, doing my part to try to bring people together.
So running for governor at this time is, it's probably the most crucial time in our state's history. We have to make real decisions about what the fiscal plan is going to be. We have to ensure that education is fully and forward funded. We have to also ensure that we move to less expensive and more affordable energy, you know, and Kodiak is actually an example of how you can do that, and you can do it in a thoughtful and in a productive way. So, those are some of the reasons that I'm running.
Katherine Irving, KMXT: In Kodiak there’s a lot of commercial fishermen, across gear types, sectors, and industry as a whole is kind of struggling. How would you propose addressing some of those issues that are currently plaguing our industry - poor vessel prices, Russian seafood, markets, etc.?
Begich: So, what are the three problems that really plague fisheries today? Number one, we obviously have climate change. Those who come into your station and don't acknowledge that are making a mistake. That's a critical component. It's affecting the genetics of salmon stock throughout Alaska, so you know when the water warms, it makes it more difficult for the salmon stock to thrive, but you also have the issue of abundance and resource. If you overfish the pollock fishery, you wipe out the resource in the long run, and you can concurrently damage other resources, and so you have to have a better understanding of how to better manage the trawl fishery, and then finally, in all of this, you have the disputes and debates that keep you from ever resolving anything in the first place. There are other issues. You mentioned Russian fisheries, you know, you have Russian farm salmon and other salmon that are getting, that are basically mixing up the genetic stock. A lot of that's part of our bycatch as well, so we have to measure that. So what are the solutions, is what you really want to ask here. And the number one solution is you have to recognize those three factors, and then say, all right, what do you guys want to do? Because we can all together join hands and wipe out the fisheries, and then you know, fish is supposed to feed the future, for the protein of the next three or four generations, and we can, you know, hold hands and watch each other go down with the ship, or we can actually figure out how we're going to collaborate and cooperate.
KMXT: And yeah, the other big thing that we have on our list to talk about is the permanent fund dividend. So yeah, how do you feel about the full statutory PFD? Do you support it? Why or why not?
Begich: I have a very simple solution to this. I want to change the statute itself, and I want that statute to create a dividend. Let the Legislature set the amount, but somewhere between $1,000-$1,500 as a starting point. And then I want to trigger it to the volatility of the fund, so if the fund in the prior year made money by a certain percentage, the dividend goes up by that percentage. If it lost money by a certain percentage, the dividend goes down. First, preserving a dividend is essential, because it's your connection to the permanent fund itself that avoids large interests coming in and wiping that permanent fund out, because that renewable resource is the future of Alaska's fiscal survival, our ability to maintain it. Second, because you have a connection through the dividend and you still get a dividend, you will be more watchful as to how the permanent fund is invested to ensure that it is producing at the highest level it can, but third, what this does is it gets rid of structural deficit in our budget, it ensures that we enter the year not lying to the public and saying ‘this is what the law says, and we are going to follow the law.’ We simply don't do that now, and that is deeply unfortunate, because it breaks trust between people and government.
KMXT: Circling back to our earlier discussions about the cost of living in rural Alaska, here especially in rural Alaska, it's especially high, continues to increase with fuel, groceries, and housing prices going up. How would you focus on keeping the cost of living down across the state?
Begich: There's a couple things I proposed. One of them is looking at some of the resources we have at the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, AIDEA, it's called. So AIDEA has some working loan programs for small businesses that we should retain, but I would like to take some of the largess from AIDEA. I'd like to devote a third of that toward retrofitting homes for retrofitting homes for energy efficiency but also allowing homes to begin to use alternatives. So, my electric bill last July was $2.69 because I have solar panels on my house. We should be providing grants and low-interest loans to those individuals who want to do this kind of work with their homes. So we do some kind of that, some programming like that now, but I'd like to see that expanded and made more available to all Alaskans. That will lower the energy costs for individuals. I'd like to take that second third of that resource, and use it for small businesses, fishing vessels who want to retrofit, and for nonprofits, and for schools.
Number two is looking at overall housing costs for new for those moving into a home for the first time. The state has vast resources of land in urban areas, that's university land, mental health trust land, some state lands. Working in collaboration with local communities, they can do sort of what they did in Sitka, with where the mental health trust and the Sitka Prevention, the Sitka Homeless Prevention Coalition worked together to develop small housing projects, permanent housing 24 units they built. They built them in about a year and a half."
The primary election is Aug. 18 and the top four candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will advance from there to the general election on Nov. 3. Here is a full list of all gubernatorial candidates running in this year's election as of this month:
- Gregg Brelsford (Independent)
- Former state Sen. Tom Begich (Democrat)
- Former state Sen. Click Bishop (Republican), and Lt. Gov. candidate Greta Schuerch
- Former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson (Republican) and Lt. Gov. candidate Josh Church
- Former state revenue commissioner Adam Crum (Republican)
- Current state Sen. Matt Claman (Democrat)
- Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (Republican)
- Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Edna DeVries (Republican)
- Organizer Meda DeWitt (Independent)
- Kasilof resident Jessica Faircloth (Independent)
- Anchorage podiatrist and state medical board member Matt Heilala (Republican)
- Former state Sen. Shelley Hughes (Republican), and Lt. Gov. candidate Blake Gettys
- Former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (Democrat)
- Author Hank Kroll (Registered Republican) and Lt. Gov. candidate Tommy Nicholson
- Angoon resident and former teacher James William Parkin IV (Republican)
- Former Attorney General Treg Taylor (Republican)
- Palmer resident Bruce Walden (Republican)
- Businesswoman Bernadette Wilson (Republican) and Lt. Gov. candidate Mike Shower
