Alaska’s gubernatorial election is this year and former mayor of Anchorage Dave Bronson is one of about a dozen candidates in the running. He spoke with KRBD about his goals and priorities during his most recent trip to Ketchikan.
Sydney Dauphinais: Why are you running for governor?
Dave Bronson: I think my experience in the mayor’s office in Anchorage lends well to this job. I’ve got a lot to offer, and I’m just interested in keeping the state going in a direction where it’s a great place for our kids to come back and live, which means cost of living issues. I think I’ve got the experience to make those things happen.
Dauphinais: You were the mayor of Anchorage from 2021 to 2024. Are there focuses or practices that you would like to carry over if elected?
Bronson: Well, there’s principles that always carry over. I think they transcend a lot of things that we do. Practices, not so much, because it’s a different statutory structure. So yeah, there’s things I’d like to carry over in principle. I mean, limited government, efficient government, friendly government, user friendly. I think there’s a lot of things that we’ve got to get done as a people, as a state, to prepare for the future. There’s some areas where we’re languishing a bit. We’re desperately short on workers. For example, we don’t have enough heavy equipment operators to build the gas line that we’re kind of all hoping for. That’s just an example, so the next administration is really going to have to focus on those things.
Dauphinais: Can you speak to your top priorities if elected?
Bronson: Well, there’s several things that have to be done. We’ve got to develop our resources to start paying our bills, because a lot of the conflict I see across the state has to do with money, you know, a shrinking pool of money, and seems to be an ever growing demand for state revenue. We’ve got to grow the PFD. The corpus of the PFD, it’s $88 billion but we’re only making 6% on that when every other endowment in the country, Harvard, Yale, they’re into double digits. If we could improve our return from up from 6% on the corpus to to 10% or even 11% we could bring a lot more revenue into the state. Most of our revenue comes from the fund. It doesn’t come from oil. Only about 30% comes from oil. About a third, the vast majority of it comes from our earnings on our $88 billion.
Dauphinais: what do you foresee being one of the bigger challenges if elected?
Bronson: In all things, bring stability. So you’ll ask, well, what do you mean with stability? So we need to bring stability to the Permanent Fund. We have politicians that keep dipping into it and going through the era, dipping into that money and using it for things that probably shouldn’t be used for. Well, that causes instability. That causes the board then to invest in very highly liquid investments that only return 6%. We’re only getting 6%. We’re back to that money issue again, and so I believe we need to get to a single Endowment Fund, and that’s protected by a three quarters vote of the legislature. And that’s a very, very high threshold. And if we can do that, and we don’t have this opportunity to dip into this fund every session, then we can start investing in longer term investments. And again, an example is Harvard or Yale, their endowment funds are 10% and 11%. If we can get to that, we’ve solved a lot of our problems.
So we need stability in the Marine Highway System. We don’t know every year if we’re going to have or if we’re going to have our ferries. We need to lock that in, and we just need to say, ‘this is the level of ferry service we are going to have for, say, the next 10 years.’ Then people like businessmen and women who are dependent on the ferry system say, ‘well, I can develop my business because I know I’m going to have regular ferry service.’ Right now, you don’t know if you’re going to have any, or it’ll be very sparse. I don’t know if it’s three a week, four week, five a week. I don’t know those answers, but I do know that you need to know what you’re getting on the ferry system, because you don’t have roads down here. We’ve got to get the investment community the confidence that they need to to invest in their own business.
Dauphinais: The ferry system is definitely a big deal here in Southeast. Is it something that you would hope to develop further or just stabilize as it is?
Bronson: Well, it depends on which ferry, which route, which city, and I don’t have those particulars, but it’s got to be stabilized at a functioning, high enough level that that government and the economy can function. Mostly the economy. Private enterprise counts on it, and you can’t make long term business decisions if you don’t know if you’re going to get one every two weeks or five a week. And so with that in particular, I think the higher the level, the better. I can commit to that. We need to plan. You need to plan. Private enterprise needs to plan.
