Commonwealth North Gubernatorial Candidate Forum

September 17, 2026 | Hosted by GCI, Anchorage

Moderated by Moira Smith, Commonwealth North Board of Directors

Participating candidates: Treg Taylor, Dave Bronson, and Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins

Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Filler words, false starts, and audio-check chatter have been removed, and punctuation and names have been corrected. A short portion of the opening remarks was not captured in the recording. Commonwealth North does not endorse candidates.

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Jump to a section

• Opening remarks
• Candidate presentations: Treg Taylor | Dave Bronson | Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins
• Moderated Q&A
  • What makes you feel the most Alaskan?
  • One hard truth Alaskans need to hear
  • Your first budget
  • Growing Alaska’s economy
  • Working with a legislature that disagrees with you
  • Education funding and the BSA
  • Improving educational outcomes
  • Crime and recidivism
  • The decision that matters most to the next generation
  • If oil drops to $50 a barrel
  • The Alaska Disconnect: feature or flaw?
  • State agency vacancies
  • The first ask in Washington, D.C.
• Closing

Opening remarks

Moira Smith: Good evening, everyone. Let’s get started. Welcome to the Final Four.

I’m Moira Smith, a member of the Commonwealth North Board of Directors, and I will be your host tonight. We are grateful to have you join us this evening, both here in the room and online, for this important conversation about Alaska’s future.

For anyone who is new to Commonwealth North, the organization has been the leader in Alaska’s civic conversation for 45 years. It was founded in 1979 by two former governors, Wally Hickel and Bill Egan, one Republican and one Democrat, around a simple idea that still feels relevant today: we get better answers to Alaska’s hard questions when we set aside the politics, when we set aside the personalities, when we focus on the problems, and when we always put Alaska first.

That has always been Commonwealth North’s goal: to bring people together across sectors, across communities, and across points of view for serious conversations about the issues that shape our state.

In that spirit, I want to say at the outset that Commonwealth North does not endorse. We will not be endorsing any candidates, now or at any time between now and November. This forum is for you, not us. Our role is to create a setting for a fair, substantive conversation, and then give Alaskans time to consider, listen, and decide.

It’s worth taking a second to consider how we got here, because this has not been a normal election. There were 17 candidates on the primary ballot, including a dozen Republicans. The top four was not final until September 4, a full 17 days after the primary election, after a withdrawal, a disqualification, and a reversal. And of course, legal disputes continue. So if you lost track somewhere along the way, you’re in good company.

But tonight is simpler: three people, three questions, 12 minutes each, and then a conversation.

Here are the three questions:

• On fiscal policy: With no long-term fiscal plan and a budget more volatile than any state in the nation, how do we pay for the Alaska we want?
• On energy: From Cook Inlet gas to the Railbelt’s future, what is your plan to keep the lights on and costs down for Alaskans?
• On out-migration: Working families are leaving Alaska. What will you do to make this a state where they want to stay, work, and raise their kids?

The order will be the reverse of the primary finish, so the top vote-getter speaks last. We will begin with Treg Taylor, then Dave Bronson, and then Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins.

This is an interview, not a debate. No one responds to anyone else tonight. Each candidate speaks for themselves, on the same questions, to the same room. After the candidate presentations, all candidates will sit in the chairs for a moderated Q&A. Those questions were also sent in advance. At 5:30, the candidates will move to stations around the room, and the last half hour belongs to you, so you can have conversations with them directly.

I am going to call up Treg Taylor. He is the former Attorney General of the State of Alaska, and his running mate is Candice English. Thank you, Mr. Taylor.

Candidate presentations

Treg Taylor

Treg Taylor: Twelve minutes is a long time. There’s a really good chance that at the end of 12 minutes, I might not be on the ballot again.

I want to talk about some sad realities. Right now, we have some broken systems in state government that are not serving the people of Alaska as designed.

Here’s one example. Parents with a baby in the NICU are stressed out, wondering how they’re going to afford this, praying for their baby, wondering if their baby is going to be okay. They file for Medicaid, which they qualify for, and more than five months go by. No phone call, nothing back, no coverage.

That is just one case out of many. In the past three years, we’ve had over 23,000 kids fall off Medicaid. That doesn’t reflect people coming out of poverty. We’ve had some job growth, and the unemployment rate is down about two percent over that same period, but the child population has dropped by less than one percent. That tells me these children dropped off not because of eligibility requirements, but because of paperwork issues.

That’s unacceptable. One of the state’s biggest jobs is to look after those who can’t look after themselves. This is an epidemic across many areas of state government, and unfortunately many of them affect our children. Look at OCS. Look at the performance of our schools.

It also shows a big need for modernization, bringing in technology to help monitor these processes. McDonald’s provides great service because they care about service. They have the tickers on the wall and they get you through quickly.

What you may not know is that during the four and a half years I was Attorney General, I was fighting a silent battle against business leaving the state, and it was all done in the name of ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance. There was a big push during those years. We pushed back. We filed lawsuits, we filed opinions on rule changes the federal government was proposing, and we came up with Alaska’s ESG.

We showed that where Alaska has economic development, we have success. People come out of poverty. Look at the Red Dog Mine region: the poverty rate went from 75 percent to 21 percent. Think about the hope all of those families received because there was opportunity. On the North Slope, the poverty rate went from 50 percent to 12 percent. And life expectancy has grown by 12 years since the developments of the 1980s on the North Slope. This is Alaska’s ESG. This is why Alaska has a duty to develop its resources on behalf of its people.

As the chief prosecutor for the state, I saw crime rates and suicide rates drop precipitously in these areas, and it’s because of that opportunity. When people feel desperate and hopeless, you get alcohol, drugs, and all the crime that comes with that. This is our card. We need to be playing it. We have underperformed as a state when it comes to developing the resources God blessed us with.

In the ESG fight, I had a major corporation show me a shareholder complaint. It said, in the name of ESG and climate change, if you do not do these four things, we will forgive you if you pull your business completely out of Alaska. We saw that over and over in the insurance industry, in the banking industry, and with investment advisors who were downgrading investments in Alaskan companies or companies that simply did business in Alaska. There was a lot of pressure on companies throughout the United States to divest from Alaska.

We saw the same thing under the Biden administration, with its 30 by 30 goal: 30 percent of lands and 30 percent of waters in conservation status by 2030. That was never going to happen in Maine, New Jersey, Texas, or California. That entire thing was going to be hung on the backs of Alaskans, tying up our lands and preventing us from developing them. We just saw what resource development does for Alaskans. It gives them hope.

That’s why one of the major policies I want to push forward is: it’s our land. Let’s build our future on it. Right now, 62 percent of Alaska is owned by the federal government, and less than one percent is owned by individuals in Alaska. I am a big proponent of the idea that if you don’t have private land, you don’t have a private economy. We need to put more land in the hands of Alaskans.

I’m bullish on Alaska’s future. We have so many opportunities, and we are blessed with vast resources that we have a duty and an obligation to develop on behalf of Alaskans.

We spend all this time fighting in Juneau about the budget and the PFD, and yet our roads are still in horrible condition, especially the Haul Road. Travel any major highway in the state and you’ll ask what is going on. Homelessness is rampant. And we haven’t had a major infrastructure project in decades, even when times were good and the price of a barrel of oil was high. No infrastructure projects, no capital budget.

Our first priority as a state is to balance the budget, which means we have to make do with the revenues that come in. As your governor, I’m going to prioritize protecting the most vulnerable, public safety, infrastructure that will move the state forward, and unlocking and unleashing our resource potential: timber, minerals, rare earths. And education. But with education, we spend so much time talking about the amount we spend and very little talking about the outcomes for our kids.

The answer to all three questions we were asked is building our economy to provide prosperity for Alaska families. I’m proud of my record on that as Attorney General. I helped draft this president’s first-day executive order on unleashing Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential. We’re the only state that got an executive order. In it, we selected very carefully those projects we’ve been hoping and praying for in Alaska for the last 40 years, the projects best positioned to move Alaska forward and to help us access our vast resources on behalf of Alaskans. The crown jewel of that, obviously, was the gas line project. I worked very closely on that project and helped implement other aspects of that executive order.

We saw progress on many of those items. We got the rights-of-way for the Ambler Road to the Ambler Mining District. We had a record lease sale in the NPR-A, which, unfortunately, as Attorney General, I had to sue over twice. First, they weren’t going to hold the sale. Then the Biden administration held the sale but put so many conditions on it that they knew no one could possibly bid. We saw a record NPR-A sale, and with it we saw Exxon reinvest in the state and Shell come back. I was in the oil and gas industry when Shell announced in a morning meeting that they were leaving the state, and it was a gut punch. You could feel it for the Alaskans who were no longer going to be employed, for the Alaskans who so badly need economic development.

The second part is that we have to finally get serious about regulatory and permitting reform in this state. We keep talking about it, and yet we continue to be the least business-friendly state in the nation. This last year we were ranked number one, and in seven of the last 15 years we’ve been the worst state in the nation. That’s frustrating, because we know how to fix it. Government needs to get out of the way of business. Government needs to move at the speed of business.

When I talk to business owners, and Jodi and I are business owners, and Candice has a very successful business, Northern Solutions, you feel like the government has its foot on your neck. They’re not there to help you. They’re a roadblock. That has to change if we’re going to have new investment in the state, grow the businesses we have, and bring new businesses in.

We have 50 states, and we can see what’s working. Shapiro has figured this out and is moving Pennsylvania forward. Little in Idaho is moving his state forward. Youngkin in Virginia. They’ve all engaged in this, done it the right way, and already seen the benefits. We’ve got to implement it. In fact, we’ve talked to Little’s and Youngkin’s teams, and they’re interested in helping us with that project up here.

Here’s one example. Has anybody had trouble getting insurance? There are very few carriers in many industries, and yet it takes over a year for the state to process a new insurance product. You’d think we’d be bending over backwards to get new insurance products into the state. In other states it takes a couple of days to a week. We’re over a year. So insurance companies say, why would I go through that effort for a population of a little over 700,000 people? It’s not worth our time, and we’re just not going to do business in Alaska.

I want to end on a positive note. I am bullish on Alaska. We have so much potential: our strategic position within the world, our position as an Arctic nation, the Arctic shipping routes opening up, and our vast resources. I think the future for Alaska is bright, and I think the future for Alaska families is bright. Thank you.

Moira Smith: Thank you, Treg. Next, we’ll call up Dave Bronson, Mayor of Anchorage from 2021 to 2024 and a retired Air Force pilot. His running mate is Josh Church.

Dave Bronson

Dave Bronson: Thank you to Commonwealth North, GCI, and Ron Duncan for doing this. This is a great venue. Twelve minutes. I have to agree with Treg. We’ve never had 12 minutes to talk about anything, so this is kind of cool. Thanks to the board for hosting this.

If you don’t know me, I’ll give a short bio, because there are a lot of new people here who aren’t on the regular stump. My name is Dave Bronson. First and foremost, my wife of 41 years, Deb Bronson, is here. She’s the poor gal who has had to put up with me all these years, and getting dragged into politics in the last few years has been a real challenge for her, with a lot less time on the beaches of Hawaii.

I grew up in northern Wisconsin, went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an economics degree, and went off to the Air Force. I did that for nine years, flying mostly B-1s and B-52s. I came up to Alaska with Northwest Airlines and flew 747 cargo airplanes for about 18 years, then transitioned to Delta Airlines through a bankruptcy and a merger. By the way, I lost my defined benefit plan in that process. That’s a story in and of itself.

When COVID hit, I was bought out of my contract with Delta and decided to run for mayor. I won, and that was an interesting three years. We led the city out of COVID. There were a lot of restrictions. We all remember the dots on the floor at retail stores and the six-foot spacing, which turned out to be meaningless. A lot of people were forcing masks; I didn’t. Mandatory vaccines were coming into the municipality, and I didn’t do that either. We got people back to work at the city, and that was a tough challenge. After that, Governor Dunleavy selected me as director of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, which was a very interesting and, to be honest, great job. Then last September I decided to run for this position. Doing the math, in the last six years I’ve campaigned for three of them, so I’m getting used to this.

I’m going to stay very high level, because a governor has to stay high level. If the governor gets down into the weeds, he’s going to lose. Every executive knows that. My leadership style is to hire really good people, give them the authority, and give them the resources to do their job.

On a long-term fiscal plan: we have to live within our means, and we just don’t do that.

This slide is probably the most important one I have. Look at the date, 2007 to 2008. What happened there? The red line is actual state appropriations. The blue line is the line we were on. Go back to 2001, and our funding was matching our inflation-adjusted budget. Then something called ACES, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share, happened. Our government made some big mistakes, and the vertical difference between the red and blue lines is overspending. That’s growing government. We’re still suffering from it. It has come back closer, but this is our deficit spending. A rough estimate of the total gap between the red line and the blue line is $25 billion.

That’s $25 billion we overspent, $25 billion that could be in our reserve accounts, $25 billion that could be funding a full PFD, because remember, the line before that was funding a full PFD. We grew government way too much. We simply did, and there are a lot of Republicans and Democrats implicated in that. There’s blame to go around. I’m not looking back; I’m looking forward. But this explains how we got into the mess we’re talking about, because as Treg said, a lot of our fights are about money.

People talk about a full PFD. I said it in a forum earlier today: the math doesn’t work anymore, because we made a $25 billion mistake over quite a few years. A full statutory PFD is about $3,800 to $4,000, and about 600,000 people are entitled to it. Is it their money? Yes, it is our money. That’s $2.4 billion a year. The notion that you can tax your way or cut your way to a full PFD is nonsensical. If you cut every last state employee, roughly 15,000 of them, all their pay, permanently gone, that’s $1.2 billion. You could get rid of every state employee and be at one half of one year’s full PFD. It doesn’t work.

I’ve been a professional pilot for nearly 45 years, and I never once argued with mathematics. That’s why I get to stand here. I’m not going to start arguing with it now. All the money we were supposed to have in our funds to build and maintain our roads and pay for a full PFD is that cumulative gap between the red and the blue lines. We screwed that up, and it was screwed up even before that. Now we’ve got to fix the problem, and it’s going to take years.

How are we going to do that? You have to protect the Permanent Fund. You simply have to. The $90 billion Permanent Fund is one of two big engines that will grow us out of this. The other is resource development. We need to capture revenue not through taxes but through royalties. Some will propose more taxes and say we’ve got to tax more people so we share the burden. No, we don’t. We need to develop our resources, our gas, our oil, and our minerals, so we can capture royalties. That’s how we grow. You don’t penalize business, and you don’t penalize their employees with a state income tax or a state sales tax to solve a problem that can be solved by growing and developing our resources statewide.

We need to build the Ambler Road. We need to build the gas line. That’s the big one, and I don’t think anyone in this room disagrees. We need to build the West Susitna Access Road, and there are several other roads to mines we’ve got to build.

Growing the corpus of the Permanent Fund is what we have to do. Fifteen years ago, 78 percent of our budget was tied to royalties and income off oil, and 30 percent was from our investments. It’s now reversed: 70 percent of our budget is funded by earnings off that $90 billion, and the other 30 percent is funded by oil revenue and royalties. That is the engine we’ve got to support. I support a single-fund endowment model, because we need to protect that $90 billion within the Constitution so it can pay for government and pay the dividend for generations.

The trouble is that the legislature always focuses on how to tax to get more revenue for state government. I’m not blaming them, but that’s wrong-headed thinking. We need policies that stimulate private business development, because the government doesn’t build roads. The government contracts with private enterprise to build roads. The government doesn’t dig mines. The government doesn’t develop our oil or our gas. The government too often gets in the way of the private industry that does those things. Government has to get out of the way and allow private enterprise to grow. You don’t do that by taking S-Corps and taxing them as C-Corps. You don’t do that with a statewide sales tax when we’re talking over and over about the cost of living in this state. We’ve known how problematic taxes are throughout 6,000 years of recorded history. Do you need some taxes? Certainly. But this notion that we can keep taxing and taxing doesn’t work.

One quick story. In November, I started dealing with a major data center development company. They did two and a half months of due diligence on bringing a data center up here, and after that they told me, “Dave, we’re not going to invest in Alaska, because we think your legislature is going to do to us what they’ve been doing to Hilcorp for the last 12 years.” That’s bad. We need a stable tax structure and a stable business environment that encourages businesses to come, invest in our state, and bring their people up.

On energy: get the gas line built. It simply has to be done. Glenfarne is here today, and I think they’ll speak in favor of that, and I think everyone else with common sense would say the same thing. We need to think in decades. We need to think long-term. That’s why we need to stabilize our tax structure. The legislature needs to treat businesses far more favorably and stop picking on Glenfarne and Hilcorp, because if they can tax S-Corps as C-Corps, every doctor’s office and every small business in this state will eventually be taxed the same way, and that’s not good for any of us.

On out-migration: we’ve got to retain people. A quick story. When I was mayor, a major corporation you would all recognize came to me and said they were coming up and bringing about two dozen executive positions with them. A few months later I asked how it was going. Only two of them wanted to come. They went and looked at our public school system in Anchorage and said, “We’re not subjecting our kids to that.” That’s a detriment. Do you think that helps our tax base at all?

So funding for education, forward funding education, is absolutely critical, but we’ve got to demand education outcomes that are positive, good for our kids, and good for all of us. Thank you very much.

Moira Smith: Thank you. Now we turn to Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who represented Sitka in the Alaska House for ten years and whose running mate is Zac Johnson.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: Good afternoon. I’m Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, and my more economical initials are JKT. It’s great to be here with everybody. Zac Johnson, my running mate, and I are candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, and we’re really excited to create some positive change in this state. The high-level goal Zac and I have for the future of Alaska is to turn the page on the last eight years and take a high-agency, problem-solving, bipartisan approach to the huge problems in front of us as Alaskans.

Responding to the three questions our Commonwealth North facilitators outlined, I’ll start with the budget. How do we pay for the Alaska we want? How can we have a durably and sustainably balanced budget? This is arguably the single most important question waiting for the next governor and the coming legislature.

I share Mayor Bronson’s belief that the Permanent Fund is a cornerstone of the state, and it is the single most important reform I want to pass as governor, working with the legislature. Dave touched on many of the merits of creating a single-account endowment for the Permanent Fund that is constitutionally protected from overspending. I have some history with this. In 2019, I introduced House Joint Resolution 18, which did exactly this, working in partnership with the Permanent Fund Corporation trustees. That legislation is still active in Juneau, and the co-sponsor list gets longer with every passing legislature.

It’s one of the most important reforms we need to pass, for a variety of reasons. First, a healthy portion of the Permanent Fund is vulnerable to simple-majority appropriation at any moment in time. I strongly believe it is a question of when, not if, a future legislature will overdraw the Permanent Fund, because the right combination of political pressure and economic factors will create the short-term temptation to dip in and grab an extra couple hundred million or an extra billion dollars, just that one year, under extenuating circumstances. I can hear the press release already. The moment we do that, we go down the path of fiscal ruin for Alaska. The Permanent Fund is the single most important asset for our state. It needs to be managed prudently and responsibly, and it needs to be afforded a level of constitutional protection it does not currently have.

The legislation I advanced had great bipartisan sponsorship. This should be a bipartisan issue, and it is a bipartisan issue. That is priority number one for our fiscal future.

Another reason a single-account endowment is so important is that it reduces political complexity. With the earnings reserve account vulnerable to simple-majority appropriation, every year is the ultimate political marshmallow test. If you know the marshmallow test from child psychology, you give a kid a marshmallow, and if they can muster the discipline not to eat it for three minutes, they get a second one as a reward for self-discipline. Right now, every year, the legislature has to go through the fiscal equivalent of the marshmallow test, and the political energy and oxygen consumed by not overdrawing the Permanent Fund distracts from the fundamental fiscal issues we should be focused on. We have a governor who has proposed budgets for eight years running that overdraw the Permanent Fund. Taking that off the table lets us focus on the more important, and frankly harder, questions and trade-offs.

Which is a good segue to the next item: a sustainable Permanent Fund dividend. Again, I find myself in general alignment with Mayor Bronson. As a legislator, I voted for what I considered sustainable PFDs: dividends consistent with a balanced budget, that wouldn’t overdraw the Permanent Fund, and that would afford a reasonable and adequate level of state services. Right now, our statutes are out of alignment with how the legislature has been exercising its constitutional power to appropriate, and we need to bring the two into harmony. That is a difficult political question, but it is a compromise I believe needs to be brokered, and one I would support as governor.

Element number three: reasonable revenues. Right now, I don’t believe there is parity within the oil and gas industry on corporate income tax. One of our major oil and gas producers does not pay corporate income tax, while Exxon, Conoco, and soon Santos will be paying it, which is a fact we should celebrate as Alaskans. New development on the North Slope is great for the State Treasury, great for our economy, and great for jobs. There should be parity within that industry, so closing that loophole is important.

There is also common-sense legislation that has passed Juneau with bipartisan support: collecting sales tax from online commerce businesses. I think it was a 26 to 14 vote in the House and a 15 to 4 vote in the Senate. I might be off by a couple of votes. It was vetoed by this governor. There are common-sense revenue measures with bipartisan support that we should get done, and as governor, I would sign them. We also have to have a conversation with the legislature about more diversity in revenues and what broader-based revenues look like for Alaska. That’s a responsible conversation to have, and it should happen in partnership with the legislature.

Item number four, which might be a bit of a surprise to the room: downward pressure on the operating budget. There are parts of the budget where Alaska has made short-sighted decisions in how we fund core services like education, and education funding needs to increase. But, not mutually exclusively, we should also be looking at how state government is fundamentally structured, where there are inefficiencies, and where there is opportunity to deliver services more efficiently and find operating budget reductions.

My real frustration as a legislator was that a lot of operating budget conversations at the Finance Committee table, or God forbid on the floor of the House or Senate, were highly reductive, almost politically performative conversations about hacking at the budget with decrements. My strong belief is that the State of Alaska will find operating budget efficiencies by going to the studs: looking at the fundamental statutes of how state government is structured, how agencies deliver services, and the questions that ultimately bind a legislature to certain levels of funding. This is really hard work. It doesn’t surface in a floor speech when you’re trying to pass the operating budget. It’s a year-long or longer process where the legislature and the executive branch work together, perhaps mediated by a third party with expertise in service delivery, a Boston Consulting Group or a McKinsey, to figure out how the State of Alaska can do the same things more efficiently and better.

I want to endeavor in that process in good faith. It’s good on the merits. And especially coming from a Democrat, I think it shows good faith and common cause with conservatives who are concerned about budget growth. That shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and as part of brokering a broader compromise, it’s something the State of Alaska should pursue.

That’s a segue to the second question: energy, and how we keep the lights on and costs down for Alaskans. I’m a big believer that the state should be making generational investments in energy. Right now it is one of the biggest question marks for our economic future. The state has taken big swings in the past. Bradley Lake passed by a hair in the legislature in the late 1980s, but it was one of the wisest decisions the state ever made for its long-term future: four cents per kilowatt-hour, 120 megawatts. Can you imagine where the Railbelt would be right now if the legislature hadn’t made that generational investment? We are due to make similar investments, both in new energy sources and in transmission infrastructure like the intertie project that currently has a $145 million funding gap.

We also need to look at the system of energy delivery in the Railbelt and work toward an integrated Railbelt grid. Economic dispatch is something we should work toward, and the governor and the legislature need to provide leadership to get there.

As part of energy, we need to maximize the Cook Inlet basin. I believe DNR has been doing a very good job maximizing the public interest in Cook Inlet. DNR’s plans of development for both Kitchen Lights and Cosmopolitan have forced those producers to step up and produce more gas, which Southcentral desperately needs. That needs to continue. We should be open to targeted royalty reductions that would incentivize more natural gas production in the basin. In the short term, getting everything we possibly can out of Cook Inlet is an urgent priority.

The last question is how we reverse out-migration and make Alaska a place we want to be. I’ve already touched on some of it: energy, and fully funding education. As Mayor Bronson said, it’s a retention problem right now, especially for professionals. We need to drive down the cost of housing, unlock state land for new housing, and create regulatory certainty for prefab and modular housing.

But with my last 30 seconds I want to speak to quality of life. We can have nice things, too. It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. The last eight years have felt like a wet blanket era for Alaska. We can rip that off. The state is capable of investing in and supporting small businesses that create quality of life, the Anchorage Wolverines, Showdown Productions, you name it, that make a community a place you want to live. Trails and cabins: I want to see more public-use cabins built, I want to see the Alaska Long Trail built, and I want to see an alpine hut-to-hut system in the Chugach like they have in New Zealand, Alberta, and the Alps. These are things we can have as Alaskans, and investing in those kinds of assets is a really important priority as well. Thank you so much.

Moderated Q&A

Moira Smith: I have to compliment each of you for being so time-adherent. Thank you for not making me get out the hook. Let’s set aside the campaign and set aside work, and start with a warm-up question that should make all of us feel good.

When you’re not working, what do you do that makes you feel the most Alaskan? Treg, we’ll start with you.

Treg Taylor: It has to be being in Alaska with my kids, whether it’s fishing, hunting, or hiking. Doing the Alaska things: showing your kids how to tie a knot, pulling hooks out of your kids’ cheeks, watching the smallest one fall in the river and get wet and cold. These are things every child should experience. For me, that’s where I find the most joy. It’s with my family.

Dave Bronson: My kids are grown and gone, and very successful, by the way, so it’s changed. Now it’s my wife and me snowmachining, or flying my plane out to Lake George for a picnic at the lake, hiking in, camping a little bit. Pretty simple stuff, but that’s what we like to do.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: Not an original idea, given the last two, but running my skiff up the coast from Sitka. The outdoors are what make Alaska, Alaska. Crabbing, being outdoors.

Moira Smith: Thank you. We’ll start with Dave and transition to the serious stuff. What is one hard truth you think Alaskans need to hear from their next governor?

Dave Bronson: I addressed it earlier. As painful as it is to say, the money for a full PFD, year over year, isn’t there. It just isn’t. We can work toward it, and it will take several years to get us there, but we’ve got to do it.

The other thing that’s more pressing right now is this: we’ve got to build this gas line. We should have started this summer. Because of relationship problems between the legislature and the governor’s office, it didn’t get done. That’s our future. Just like TAPS. Where would we be without TAPS right now? Where are we going to be in five, ten, or fifteen years without that gas line? Cook Inlet has a lot of natural gas, but it doesn’t have enough. We need to get to Phase 2 quickly and monetize it by exporting our LNG. That has to happen yesterday.

Moira Smith: Jonathan, what’s one hard truth Alaskans need to hear from their next governor? And a reminder to all of you that these answers are 60 seconds. Austin has the time card, and I will give you an urgent look when it’s time.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: There are trade-offs in a balanced budget. The puppies-and-unicorns notion that you can have it all, a $4,000 PFD, no taxes whatsoever, and a level of services that doesn’t make Alaska look apocalyptic, is intellectually dishonest. Having a balanced budget and all of those things in balance is going to require trade-offs, and for some, that is a hard truth.

Treg Taylor: I touched on it in my introductory remarks, but the State of Alaska is failing our children on too many levels. These are the core responsibilities of state government. Whether it’s the precipitous drop of children on Medicaid because we’re not processing applications on time, or our public education system. Do you know the percentage of kids reading at grade level in Western Alaska? Four percent. Do you know what the Anchorage and Fairbanks school districts’ goal for kids reading at grade level is? Not 90. It’s 48. Where is that a passing grade on any level? And the sad thing is, we know what works. Don’t get me started on OCS and child protection. Some of these things can be fixed simply by following the law and the timelines in statute. We’re failing our kids on those three levels.

Moira Smith: We’ll start with Jonathan this time. This is a long one, so I’ll read it once for all three of you. You would take the oath, if elected, on December 7, and by law a budget goes to the legislature by December 15. In practice, you inherit your predecessor’s budget and amend it on the fly. What’s the most significant change you would make to that first budget, and what does it cost or save?

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: It would be balanced, which I am embarrassed to say would be a fundamental departure from the last eight years of budgets our current governor has delivered to the legislature. It would not overdraw the Permanent Fund. It would be a balanced budget.

Treg Taylor: I agree. The first responsibility of a governor is to propose a balanced budget. In future budgets, we also need to implement a zero-based system, so it’s not just an automatic increment for every department, agency, commission, and board. You have to justify your budget every year, and part of that is auditing. There are departments that haven’t been audited for years, and positions that have been empty for years. You’ve got to figure out whether those positions are empty because we’re not competitive and desperately need them filled, or whether they’re just being used by departments to pad their budgets. There are things we need to do on day one, but a balanced budget is the primary responsibility.

Dave Bronson: A balanced budget is actually required, and I would certainly work toward that. But this notion that in eight days you can take a roughly $15 billion budget and make big changes: you’re a victim of the process. You’re stuck with it. You can make one, two, or three big changes, but you still have to balance the budget.

On zero-based budgeting, when I was at the city I essentially did that, and it is time-consuming in the extreme. We had a $600 million budget at the city; the state’s is $15 billion. The executive has to be involved at a very detailed level. I remember as mayor arguing over a $12,000 expense in one department, out of $600 million. That’s important, maybe not mathematically, but in principle, because it communicates to your directors, or at the state your commissioners, that you’re deadly serious. Josh’s and my proposal is that every four years we do zero-based budgeting.

Moira Smith: Treg, what policies will you prioritize that will grow Alaska’s economy?

Treg Taylor: Energy, land, and regulatory and permitting reform.

On energy, the next governor has to pursue all energy sources. We know there’s gas in Cook Inlet, and we’ve got to incentivize that production. I got letters from the legislature telling me to force these companies to produce more oil and gas and take on the capital expenditures, but there was no economic reason for them to do that. They’d be putting themselves out of business.

On land, we need to get lands into Alaskan hands, and we need to hold the federal government to its promises at statehood and get the lands we were promised, whether it’s the submerged lands under navigable waters or the rights-of-way to access our critical minerals, other minerals, and oil and gas.

On permitting and regulatory reform, we have to change the business environment in this state. We need to be inviting to business. It’s hard to do business here. We’re remote, and the cost of goods is naturally higher. We’ve got to do everything we can so that government supports business.

Dave Bronson: There are a lot of opportunities for success here. I’m a big believer in data centers. I know that might be unpopular with some folks here, but I think it works if done right. In Alaska, our challenges always come down to logistics. We’ve got to produce something and ship it, whether it’s mining, logging, whatever. With a data center, you’re creating ones and zeros. It’s data. You put it on a fiber optic cable and send it to Seattle or Portland. The logistics are minimal, and there’s a lot of money in data centers.

You’ve got to deal with the noise, the cooling, and certainly the electricity. The groups I’m talking to have said they won’t take our electricity because it’s not reliable enough. It’s not five-nines electricity. They will produce their own and build their own data centers. That’s good for us. That’s a very strong revenue source.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: I would focus on the fundamentals. That’s where state government should be focused when it comes to growing the economy: creating a foundation the private sector can build on. And the fundamentals are a little wobbly right now. Energy, as already discussed, is a huge crisis in Alaska and also a huge opportunity for state investment. Brick-and-mortar infrastructure: you need ports and harbors. The Port of Alaska, and the harbors and harbor infrastructure of coastal Alaska, power the fishing industry that powers coastal Alaska. Roads need to be suitable for commerce. And the last is education, which is very fundamental for the state. If you don’t have schools that parents or employers have confidence in, that ultimately hamstrings your ability to grow the economy.

Moira Smith: Dave, we’ll start with you. It’s a long one, so everyone, please listen. For most of the last decade, the Alaska Legislature has been organized by bipartisan coalitions rather than party caucuses, and whoever wins will have to work with legislators from different parties. What have you done in your career so far that shows how you would work with a legislature that disagrees with you?

Dave Bronson: I think I’m the one person here who has already done that. I look forward to going down and dealing with a roughly 50-50 split in the legislature. You’ve got to understand that a Republican governor, and I’m a Republican, is the leader of the Republican Party, and therefore the leader of the Republican caucus in Juneau and throughout the state.

I had a challenge with the Anchorage Assembly, which was about 9 to 3 against me. But guess what? We agreed on 70 or 80 percent of things. We still got the roads built and the projects done. The other 20 percent was largely about homelessness. I had a great solution for that. They didn’t like it. Halfway through a concrete pour, they stopped the project. But we still got things done, and remember, that was during COVID, when the whole environment was supercharged. We still worked together. I’ve done that, and I’m looking forward to working with the legislature.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: One of the most important things for a governor is establishing a respect-based, trust-based relationship with the legislature. My last six years in the legislature, I was in a bipartisan coalition of Democrats, independents, and Republicans. I believe in that model of governance. Some of the pieces of legislation I worked on most were collaborations with people on the far other end of the ideological spectrum. Mike Shower and I wrote an elections omnibus bill in 2021 and 2022 as the respective House and Senate State Affairs Committee chairs, and that legislation just passed the legislature, only to be vetoed by the governor. Finding common ground with Mike Shower is something I’m motivated by. I want to bring that spirit of governance to the third floor.

Treg Taylor: As Alaska’s Republican Attorney General, I was voted unanimously by the Democratic and Republican attorneys general of the Lower 48 to chair the bipartisan Attorney General Alliance. We worked together, and what we did was basic: we communicated, and we treated each other with dignity and respect. We got a lot done, so much so that PBS did a series on us, asking why, in a time of total dysfunction between the parties, we were able to get so much done.

We held Big Pharma responsible for the opioid epidemic when they were lying about how addictive opioids were, and I received $100 million to fight opioid addiction in Alaska because of that. We went after tech companies that were abusing our privacy rights, and we did that successfully together. We also approached social media companies that were letting children onto their sites at inappropriate ages without adequate parental controls. We had discussions with those companies, and if they didn’t heed us, we would file lawsuits.

Moira Smith: Jonathan, we’re going to turn now to two questions about education. We’ll start with funding and move to policy. The base student allocation is $6,660. Each $100 increase costs about $25 million a year, and inflation-adjusting it over the past decade would have put it near $7,600. Give us the number you’d put in your first budget. If it’s higher than $6,660, tell us where the money comes from. If it isn’t, tell us what you would change so districts can live within it.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: Ultimately, the state needs to get back to a place where education funding is in approximately inflation-adjusted terms. Look at the state of public education in Alaska right now. If schools aren’t outright closing, you’re seeing electives shut down, sports shut down, teachers leaving the profession, and the highest teacher vacancy rate in recent history, two to three times the national average. Every indicator light is blinking red. Our education system is at a breaking point. So funding is really key.

It’s also “and both.” We should be looking at policies and structures that promote improved outcomes along with increased funding. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. But the beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves approach of a defunded education system isn’t working. Morale is underwater.

Treg Taylor: I’m not sure what that number is yet, but I am committed to fully funding our children’s education. It’s a big focus for me, maybe because I have six children, three of whom are still in the Anchorage School District. What we know is that our schools are failing our children, and we know that increased funding hasn’t produced increased scores. So it’s not all about funding. Our discussions in Juneau will be about how we get the results our children deserve.

It’s really about more money going to teachers and into our classrooms, not funding administration, properties, or buildings. And the sad thing about this predicament is that we know what works. We’ve seen states completely turn this around in a matter of years. Mississippi went from dead last to almost the top. Florida went from the middle to the top. We implemented part of that with the Reads Act. What we failed to implement was the accountability portion, and without accountability, you don’t get the results you’re looking for.

Dave Bronson: Not unlike Treg, I believe we need to forward fund education in the budgeting process, by March 1. I don’t know what the number is, but it’s probably around $6,660 to $6,700 going forward. It’s not just a matter of how much; it’s a matter of when. By March 1, we need to have that number locked in so we’re not pink-slipping teachers and then trying to hire them back in June. That’s a lot of the reason teachers say they’re done. They can’t plan. It’s not unlike what we’re doing to the oil industry: we keep changing the tax code, and developers don’t want to come up here because they don’t know what we’re going to do to them. Anything big that involves money needs programmability and long-term stability, and we’re not providing that now.

And I hate to talk about the funding of education without talking about performance. We’re dead last in the country. We have the worst-educated kids, but guess what? Some of our kids are the best, and they’re in our charter schools. They’re some of the best-educated kids in the country.

Moira Smith: You’re anticipating my next question. Treg, we’ll start with you. Alaska’s educational performance ranks among the bottom of all states. What specific non-fiscal tools would you use as governor to improve educational outcomes?

Treg Taylor: There are a lot of things we can do that don’t require an increased budget. One is forward funding education so districts can adequately plan for the next school year. The second, which I’ve already mentioned, is fully implementing the Reads Act so there’s accountability, and coupling it with a math act. Those are the two skills we are completely deficient in right now.

The other thing is protecting parental options. I have six kids, and they’re all completely different. They’ve all taken different educational tracks, and because of those options, whether charter school or correspondence school, we’ve been able to put each child where they’re going to be successful, and the parent knows that. We’ve got to protect that. As Attorney General, when the teachers’ union tried to take away our correspondence program, which serves 22,000 kids, I fought back and we won. We kept that option open. What we don’t need is less competition. We need more competition to improve those scores.

And then we need to knock down the credentialing and housing problems we see in rural Alaska, so we can better serve those students with teachers who are ready to go and ready to teach.

Dave Bronson: This is certainly complex. Treg mentioned a lot of the challenges we’re facing. But we need to ask why we have a funding problem in education, and it’s because many parents are taking their kids out of public school. Why? I’ll tell you the reason: too many parents find us indoctrinating their children instead of educating them. What we’ve got to get back to is educating in a classical, liberal arts environment. Teach our kids the classics, teach them to read, and teach them to compute. You’ve got to teach them to read so they can teach themselves. Learn to read so you can teach yourself.

Mississippi did that. It was called the Mississippi Miracle. I know this question is about non-fiscal tools, but it was a funding issue. What they did is put reading coaches throughout the state, serving 460,000 students. They went from dead last in 2012 to the top ten today. We can model that. This isn’t rocket science.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: I agree with Treg and Dave that forward funding should be a bipartisan structural reform. It doesn’t cost a dollar more, but it adds value through less administrative waste, better retention of teachers, and the ability to proactively and positively plan for a coming academic year. It’s a huge reform the state should pursue after talking about it for decades and never acting on it.

The other area I’d focus on is cultivating a culture of constant improvement within the teaching profession. As a legislator, I was really interested in providing recognition for National Board certified teachers. In the data and evidence on education, the single best predictor of a student’s educational growth is an excellent teacher. We should be focused on having excellent teachers at the head of every classroom and on helping teachers continually improve their craft. Teaching is a craft, and we should support that.

Moira Smith: Dave, we’ll start with you. Now we’re going to talk about crime. Alaska spends about $523 million a year on corrections, about $114,000 per person in custody, and more than six in ten are back in custody within three years. Name the one change you would make to decrease crime and recidivism, and tell us how we would know in four years whether it worked.

Dave Bronson: We know what works in the prison system. You’re right that recidivism is 60 percent, but inmates who go through faith-based programs within the prisons have a recidivism rate of 32 percent. That’s almost half. We need to entice prisoners to enroll in those programs, and within DOC we need to support the ministries in the prison system that give us those really good results. That drops our costs, and it’s good for them.

We also need to give inmates who are in for a short enough time the technical training they need, so they have the hope of an actual job when they get out: welders, plumbers, carpenters, the kind of people we’re desperately in need of.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: Recidivism reduction should be a bipartisan goal. On a societal level and on a fiscal level, it’s something we really pay for. There’s a national organization called Recidiviz that has been doing a lot of data-based analysis of which interventions demonstrably reduce recidivism. As a state, we should take a comparative approach, looking across all 50 states and other jurisdictions around the world for interventions that are proven to work. It’s a highly measurable outcome, and we should have a data-forward approach to reducing it. As a legislator, I passed legislation that created more educational resources for inmates in our correctional facilities. Those kinds of measures are really important. But ultimately, follow the data, and when you see success, double down, if not triple down.

Treg Taylor: I’m proof that when we focus on these types of problems, we can actually make a difference in Alaska. As Attorney General and chief prosecutor, working with law enforcement, we got crime down to 40-year lows. Violent crime down five percent. Domestic violence down 26 percent. We went after cold case murders and successfully prosecuted ten of them. And by the way, we’re still the worst in the nation on domestic violence even after that drop, so we’ve got a lot of work to do.

When you work together and use data-driven tactics you know work, you get results. One of those tactics is following the law. You can’t let a person on supervision continually break the rules until, by the time they finally get in front of a court, they’ve got six violations and they’re going away for a long time. We need quick responses. Second, we’ve got to keep drugs out of our prison system. I talked to a young man who thought that when he went to prison, he was finally going to get over his drug addiction. Nope. Drugs are available in the prison system. He had a hard time kicking it, but he finally found an addiction recovery program that worked for him, and it happened to be faith-based. And we need job training. They have to have a skill when they come out.

Moira Smith: Jonathan, we’ll start with you. What decision facing Alaska in the next four years will matter the most to your or my grandchildren’s generation?

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: Protecting the Permanent Fund and balancing the budget, and those two are interrelated. The Permanent Fund is so key to the future of the state, and to having a budget that can balance five years from now and 20 years from now. Very importantly, a Permanent Fund that can grow in real terms, not just nominal terms, is an incredibly important policy decision a coming legislature will make. There will be a temptation to have an annual draw that allows for nominal growth but not real growth of the fund. I worry about that. It is worth having a little more short-term pain for the immense long-term benefit of allowing the fund to grow in real terms for future generations.

Treg Taylor: We need to build Alaska’s future while we still have the wealth to build it. We need to make the investments in our state that are so necessary. Again, we haven’t had a major infrastructure project in this state in decades. The first one is build the pipeline. Imagine Alaska without TAPS, without the oil pipeline. Can you even imagine where we would be as a state? The gas line has the same ability to transform what we do in Alaska and the quality of life we have here.

Second, we have to lock up the Permanent Fund. We have to protect that corpus. JKT had it right: there’s too much temptation to raid it. We’ve got to lock it up, because that is our future. My first grandchild, born at Easter, is not going to remember who gave the best speech up here, but they’re going to live in the Alaska that we build. So we’ve got to do what’s best for them.

Dave Bronson: You’re going to find some unanimity here. The first three things we’ve got to do are build the gas line, build the gas line, and build the gas line. The fourth is to stabilize education, demand very positive outcomes, and get us into the top ten on fourth and eighth grade reading and math scores. Those are the top two. And then certainly securing the Permanent Fund as an endowment, because as a financial tool, it can help us even as we develop our resources and build the gas line.

Moira Smith: Treg, I’ll start with you. If oil drops to $50 per barrel in your first year, what do you cut first?

Treg Taylor: What you don’t do is raise taxes. You have a struggling economy, Alaska families that are struggling, and businesses that are struggling with high costs. If you want to see the downfall of Alaska, if you want ACES to happen all over again and stop development on the North Slope, which is Alaska’s future, then raise taxes. Pick a project on the North Slope; it exists because of the right tax structure.

What you have to do as a government is focus on your core responsibilities. You have to do public safety really well. You’ve got to do infrastructure well, and you’ve got to do K-12 education really well. When you focus down on those and get rid of some of the fluff, yes, there are going to be hard decisions. But we have to live within our means. Alaskan families have to live within their means, and we as a state have to live within ours.

Dave Bronson: Again, going back to the slide I showed, with the red line over the blue line: we’ve got to go back to about 2008 and look at the government functions we were doing then, and maybe we need to get back to just those. When you grow government, you grow programs, and what government programs breed is dependence on those programs. You create jobs and positions, and people are paying their mortgages based on those jobs. We need to wind a lot of this down, because that roughly $25 billion is $25 billion we could really use right now in our rainy day fund, and we don’t have it.

Rightsizing government matters, but you can’t cut your way to success completely. You can grow yourself out of it, and that’s through the 70 percent of revenue that comes from Permanent Fund returns and through developing our resources so we can capture more royalty revenue, whether it’s oil, mining, logging, or whatever.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: There has to be uniform downward pressure on the operating budget. If the price of oil tanks and revenues fall off a cliff, then unfortunately, as history has proven, the capital budget is the primary short-term shock absorber, which is not sustainable in the long term.

I’m going to flip the question a little. When oil prices are high, what should we do? A sign of success for me, if I’m elected, is that the Statutory Budget Reserve has more money in it when I leave office than when I enter. The discipline to save money when there is revenue and prices are high is incredibly important, and we are in that moment right now. That’s a very important goal for the coming legislature and governor: save money while we can.

Moira Smith: Dave. Alaska is the only state with neither a statewide income tax nor a sales tax, so when the economy grows outside of oil, the Department of Revenue barely notices. Economists call it the Alaska Disconnect. Feature or flaw? If a flaw, name the mechanism you would use to fix it.

Dave Bronson: In a sense, it’s both, and that’s the politician’s answer. The disconnect is that the legislature, which drives all of this as the appropriating body, is so focused on revenue to the state that it forgets what’s important: jobs, cost of living, and revenue for private enterprise, because that’s what creates jobs, which eventually creates revenue for the Treasury. We’ve forgotten private enterprise because we’re so focused on the government treasury. I know that’s part of the legislature’s job, but we’re missing things. We don’t have a gas line, and Fairbanks can’t afford to heat their homes, and that’s coming to the Railbelt as well, because for years we have forgotten what’s good for the people, the voter, small business, and large business. So, feature or flaw? If I have to make a choice, I would say it’s a flaw.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: I would agree, ultimately, a flaw. When economic growth has an inverse relationship to the state’s ability to balance the budget, we’re in the Twilight Zone. Having a more diverse revenue base is the responsible direction for the state. It just does not work for us to live and die by the price of oil and whatever geopolitical chaos is unfolding in the Middle East. We should control our destiny. We’ve been through so many of these cycles, and it’s not a healthy way to plan the long-term future of the state. We need a more diverse revenue base.

Treg Taylor: It’s a feature. We can’t tax our way to prosperity. The slide Dave Bronson showed illustrated that government was doing just fine until we spiked the growth of government with the ACES tax, which, predictably, robbed Alaska of part of its future. Now we’re digging out of that hole. The way forward is to grow your economic base. You have to grow your economy, and with it, Alaska grows.

Moira Smith: Jonathan. State agencies have carried high vacancy rates for years, and we feel it in permitting delays, benefit backlogs, caseloads, and lost federal revenues. Is the fix pay, management, or a smaller state? Which comes first?

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: To some extent, a combination of those. I would highlight retirement as a primary driver of the high vacancy rate, which right now is higher than at any time in recent history. Anecdotes abound, agency to agency, about the difficulty of filling professional roles in state government, and Alaskans feel the downstream consequences.

Part of it is also a culture question. There’s a sense that within the ranks of state government there has been a combative dynamic, coming ultimately from our chief executive. Restoring a culture of respect and appreciating the dignity of state employees’ work is really important, and I would want to establish that as governor.

Treg Taylor: Management. It’s all about leadership. It’s about inspiring those around you to accomplish a vision and do great things. As governor, you can put the most capable people around you, and if you don’t have the right leadership, you’re not going to accomplish much.

I experienced that at the Department of Law. I came into the department at an all-time low. If anybody remembers, there had been two scandals. Morale was at an all-time low. Public trust in the department was at an all-time low. We had all kinds of problems keeping people and hiring. We went after it. I did a lot of communicating with the employees and the attorneys to get them to adopt the vision. We reformed how we supervise, and we reformed how we train, so employees could do the job properly. Then we coupled that with going to the legislature for pay raises, which made us at least competitive.

Dave Bronson: Some 45 years ago, when I was a young lieutenant in the Air Force, I learned one thing: you lead people and you manage things. I’ve never managed a person in my life, and I wouldn’t insult them by saying that I manage them. I’ve followed great leaders in my lifetime, and I think I’ve done a good job through the military, the airline world, the mayor’s office, and the airport.

On vacancies, that’s really important. There’s a notion that if a job hasn’t been filled in one, two, or seven years, we should get rid of it. That’s very two-dimensional and very unproductive. You have to ask why that job wasn’t filled in the first place. I’ll give you an example. At Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, I was the director and had 480 people reporting to me. Forty-five of those positions were heavy equipment operators who plowed the snow. We don’t pay enough, so I only had about 18. We pay $29 an hour. The city pays $34.50. When they build the gas line, the North Slope is going to pay $92 an hour. Where do we find those people?

Moira Smith: Dave, starting with you again. Washington owns about 60 percent of Alaska’s land and funds about a third of the state budget, if you count federal receipts. Name the first thing you’d ask for in D.C., and what Alaska has to do on our end to get it.

Dave Bronson: First and foremost, we’ve got to ask for control of all of our lands, even the acreage that hasn’t been properly ceded to us yet. We’re only about 3.5 million acres short, so we’re getting it, thanks to the current administration. But what we’ve got to have is control. It’s control of our land that we have to have. We want what every other state has. We should not think of ourselves as a resource colony, and we do, because we keep going hand in glove, begging the federal government to control our fisheries, our hunting, and our subsistence. That simply has to end.

It comes down to one word: control. We want control of our lands so we can develop them. Yes, they’re federally owned, but either the State of Alaska operates as a state like every other state, or we just have to assume we’re a resource colony for Washington, D.C., and I’m tired of that.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins: I would say permitting certainty on the North Slope. Given the tremendous sale that just unfolded in the NPR-A, there are tens of billions of dollars of capital investment happening on the Slope, which is very positive for the state treasury in terms of royalties and severance tax. Having a federal government that can work with industry and provide certainty around investment is very important to our state’s future. The current administration is more oriented toward certainty, and I will recognize that the previous administration created some uncertainty. As governor, I would be committed to creating an investment climate on the North Slope where, regardless of who is in the White House, continued investment and growth can occur.

Moira Smith: And for our final answer of the evening, Treg.

Treg Taylor: Hold them to the promises they made at statehood. We entered statehood with promises from the federal government that have never been realized. I know that really well, because as Attorney General I had to litigate a lot of these things, waterway by waterway, over who controlled the submerged lands. I had a conversation with Secretary Burgum about that. I told him we’re having to fight water body by water body, river system by river system, and at the current rate, we still wouldn’t have all the lands we were promised in 400 years. His eyes got big and he asked if that was real. I said yes, we’ve calculated it out.

That’s just one example. Then there are the rights-of-way that were promised. It’s right in the statute for the Ambler Road: the state gets a right-of-way to access the Ambler Mining District. Yet we had to litigate it over and over, and under this administration we finally got the rights-of-way. And then I would say, let us use the federal lands. The Tongass National Forest is the largest national forest in the world, bigger than the state of West Virginia, and yet we’re arguing and litigating over a road rather than the use of the resources, like long-term timber leases. By the way, we got three of those under this administration. Thank you.

Closing

Moira Smith: Before we move to the next part of the evening, join me in thanking the candidates. I appreciate the thoughtfulness, care, and consideration that went into this.

I’d also like to thank GCI, which feels somewhat self-serving, but thank you for hosting this event tonight and for your continued support of Commonwealth North.

Most importantly, thank you to all of you for being here. One of the things that makes Commonwealth North special is that we bring together people from across the political spectrum to listen to each other, ask questions, have hard conversations, and engage thoughtfully on the issues that matter to the state. If you value that mission and the opportunity to participate in conversations like this, you can become a member. We would happily welcome you.

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At a forum co-hosted by ISER and Build Alaska’s Future, three University of Alaska economists sized the federal government’s grip on the state economy. The engine they described is now running in reverse on the one side we can actually measure.

ANCHORAGE (06/23/26) — Forum Summary by Ross Johnston, Executive Director

Online forum, June 23, 2026. Co-hosted by Commonwealth North, Build Alaska’s Future, and the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). Presenters: Bob Loeffler, Brett Watson, and Brock Wilson.

Watch YouTube Below

Half.

That is the share of Alaska’s economic growth over the past decade that traces back to a single source. Not oil. Not fish. Federal spending.

That number framed everything else three economists laid out this week, and it cuts against the story most Alaskans tell about their own economy. We think of ourselves as an oil state, a fishing state, a state that runs on resources pulled from the ground and the sea. The data the presenters walked through tells a quieter and more uncomfortable story. Over the years Alaska spent climbing out of recession, the largest single engine of its recovery sat in Washington. And that engine, on the one side we can currently see clearly, has begun to contract.

The Bucket

To understand why half is the right number, you have to start with the lens the forum used to see the economy, because it is not the obvious one.

Bob Loeffler, a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, opened with a sketch of Alaska’s economy as a leaky bucket. Money pours in from outside whenever the state sells something to the rest of the world, and money leaks out every time an Alaskan buys something made elsewhere. The water level depends on the balance between the two flows.

Roughly a third of the money pouring in, Loeffler estimated, comes from the federal government. And here is the point that gives the model its bite: you do not have to work for the federal government to depend on it.

Take a piano teacher. None of her students work for the federal government. Neither do their parents. And yet she does, because a federal paycheck spends at the hardware store, which spends at the coffee shop, which spends on piano lessons. By the time the water has circulated through the bucket, a third of what powers the whole thing entered through one tap.

That reframing changes how you weigh an industry’s importance. The instinct is to measure a sector against the whole economy. Loeffler argued the better denominator is the share of new money a sector brings in from outside, the water entering the bucket rather than the water already sloshing inside it. Measured that way, the federal government is the largest single source of new money in Alaska, ahead of oil and gas, with fishing, mining, tourism, air cargo, Permanent Fund earnings, and retiree pensions trailing a good distance behind.

The Biggest Leg

So how big is the federal leg of the stool? Brett Watson, associate professor of applied and natural resource economics at ISER, put numbers to it over a specific and consequential window: 2015 to 2023, the years Alaska spent clawing out of one recession only to stumble toward another.

Over that stretch, federal spending in Alaska grew by about $8.7 billion in nominal terms, from just under $11 billion to just under $20 billion. Strip out temporary pandemic spending and the figure lands near $18 billion. The growth was not evenly spread across the kinds of money Washington sends north. Watson broke the 2023 total into its major channels:

• Direct payments: about $6.5 billion. Social Security and Medicare, the largest single category, flowing to individual Alaskans.
• Grants: roughly $4 billion. Including the Medicaid dollars that climbed after Alaska expanded eligibility under the Affordable Care Act.
• Contracts: about $4.5 billion. The fastest-growing piece by far, up 150 percent over the period, much of it Department of Defense procurement for construction, utilities, and goods bought from Alaska communities.
• Wages: about $3.1 billion. The federal civilian and military payroll, which Wilson would return to in detail.

Then came the comparison that anchors this summary. Alaska’s gross domestic product grew by roughly $16.5 billion between 2015 and 2023. Federal spending grew by just under $9 billion across the same years. Set those side by side and about half of the state’s total economic growth over the decade was federal spending growth. For scale, Watson placed oil and gas, the state’s second-largest source of new money, at between $3 billion and $4.5 billion of growth over the same window. Mining grew by just under a billion. Fishing, by roughly a quarter of that.

The federal leg, in other words, did not just hold steady while the others carried the state. It did most of the lifting.

Where It Pools

A leg that large still does not press evenly on the floor. Federal money lands in particular places, and the map matters as much as the total.

Military spending concentrates at the hubs. Eielson and Fort Greeley near Fairbanks, JBER in Anchorage, the Coast Guard base on Kodiak. The civilian map tells a subtler story, and this is where two presenters’ data fit together. Wilson noted that if you ask where Alaska’s federal civilian workers physically sit, 53 percent are in the Anchorage area and 21 percent around Fairbanks, which makes the workforce look like an urban phenomenon. Loeffler’s maps, measured as a share of each area’s total jobs, flip that impression on its head. Denali shows up dark because of the national park. Hoonah, because of Glacier Bay. Southeast Fairbanks, because of the civilians who support the military there.

And in much of rural Alaska, Loeffler observed, the single largest civilian federal employer is the local postmaster.

The synthesis is the part worth holding onto. The raw headcount is urban. The dependence is rural. The communities where federal jobs make up the largest slice of the local economy are precisely the small ones with the least to fall back on, which means a national decision to shrink the federal workforce does not land where the workers are clustered. It lands hardest where they are most load-bearing.

The Instruments Are Dark

Veronica Slajer of Build Alaska’s Future asked the economists a plain question. Has it gotten harder to find out what the federal government is actually doing in Alaska? Watson’s answer was unguarded. ISER itself holds federal research grants, and even it struggles to learn the status of its own funding, often relying on unofficial conversations with program officers. Replicating that exercise across every grant and contract recipient in the state, he said, is nearly impossible. McKinley Research Group has attempted a version of it for the construction industry through large-scale surveys, contractor by contractor, asking whether the money arrived. It is grueling work, and it covers one sector.

This is why the two halves of the forum sit slightly out of step in time, and it is the asymmetry every reader should carry away. Wilson’s workforce data runs nearly to the present, because federal personnel records were finally pried loose. Watson’s spending data stops at 2023, because that is the most recent year anyone can apportion with confidence.

We can see, in fresh detail, the experienced people walking out the door. We cannot yet see what is happening to the far larger flow of federal dollars that does not move through a payroll.

We simply do not know what got spent last year.

The Tide Goes Out

Brock Wilson, research assistant professor of economics at ISER, carried the story up to April 2026.

Alaska is home to roughly 15,500 federal civilian workers earning about $1.5 billion a year, nearly $100,000 per job. Among all fifty states, Alaska ranks third in reliance on federal workers as a share of its workforce, behind only Maryland and Hawaii. The capital region and Alaska, Wilson observed, sit in the same uncomfortable bracket. National decisions about the federal workforce fall harder here than almost anywhere else.

Between April 2024 and April 2026, the national federal civilian workforce fell 14.8 percent on Wilson’s matched measure, which excludes Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice for consistency. Alaska fell further, by 15.8 percent. One of the steeper declines in the country.

But the shape of Alaska’s decline is the finding that deserves the spotlight, because it diverges sharply from the national headline. The probationary firings and reductions in force that drove the news cycle were aimed largely at the capital region. By Wilson’s accounting, only about half a percent of Alaska’s federal workforce was cut through those involuntary tools, against 4.3 percent in Washington, D.C. Alaska did not get fired. Alaska took the buyout.

And the people who took it were not the newest or the most marginal.

They were, on average, ten-year veterans. Experienced workers carrying institutional knowledge that, as Wilson cautioned, will not be quickly replaced.

What Experience Costs

Here the workforce numbers stop being an accounting exercise and start being a question about capability, and a second analytical thread, drawn partly from the Q&A, deepens it.

Look at which jobs left. Not the administrative offices. The agencies losing the most were Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Transportation, and the work was field work: park rangers, biological science technicians, maintenance mechanics, forestry technicians. The hands that keep public lands and federal facilities functioning.

That detail reframes the loss, because of a point Wilson made when asked whether private industry might simply absorb the displaced federal work. He cautioned against the assumption. The federal workforce, he argued, is better understood as a complement to Alaska’s basic industries than a substitute for them. Cruise passengers come to see Denali. If there are no rangers to keep Denali accessible, the cruise economy feels it too. A shrinking federal presence, on that logic, can pull private activity down with it rather than clear space for it to rise.

Refilling the Bucket

If the federal tide is going out, what flows in behind it? The forum’s forward-looking thread, almost all of it surfacing in the Q&A, sketched the candidates without overselling them.

Loeffler was candid about where Alaska’s economic talents genuinely lie. The state is passable at growing tourism, oil, and mining, he allowed, but what Alaska is truly good at is extracting money from the federal government through the work of its congressional delegation, whoever holds those seats. He pointed to a run of recent federal moves in critical minerals: a federal equity stake in Trilogy Metals in the Ambler district, grants accelerating Graphite One near Nome and NOVA Minerals’ antimony work toward a processing facility near Point MacKenzie, and the Terra carbon-capture project southwest of Skwentna. He and Watson openly disagreed on the size of the Terra figure, somewhere between $45 million and $80 million, a small but honest reminder of how provisional these numbers remain.

On contracting, much of which moves through Alaska Native corporations, Loeffler offered a striking statistic. Among the top ten Department of Defense contractors in the state, five are Alaska Native corporations, led by ASRC and Doyon. New money, in this case, that is also Alaska-headquartered and Alaska-owned.

Other prospects drew lighter treatment. Coast Guard icebreakers may home-port in Juneau, Kodiak, or Nome, and a new fighter wing is bound for interior Alaska. Watson made the useful point that such investments look trivial at a statewide scale yet land enormously on the small communities that host them. And the Rural Health Transformation Fund, Watson estimated, will deliver on the order of $250 million a year for several years, real money that nonetheless amounts to a fraction of the roughly $9 billion in growth the state saw over the prior decade, and that was designed partly to offset Medicaid reductions still working their way through.

What the three economists could not tell us is what the bucket looks like right now. The spending data lags by years. The workforce data, fresher, shows experience draining out. The decisions that determine whether that water gets replaced, by minerals or icebreakers or something not yet on any map, are being made in real time, with the meters running and the gauges a year or two behind.

That is the harder thing to sit with. Not that the numbers are bad, but that for now we are flying with the instruments partly dark.

This summary is a recap of the information presented. It is not an official record, transcript, or position statement. The content reflects only the views and statements made by the individual presenters and participants at the time of the forum. It should not be interpreted as representing the official views, opinions, policies, or positions of Commonwealth North, its leadership, board members, staff, or affiliates.

Reference Materials

• Brett Watson, “Federal Spending in Alaska: What’s Changed?” (slides, ISER) 
• Brock Wilson, “The Federal Workforce in Alaska: What’s Changed?” 
• Bob Loeffler, “The Leaky Bucket” regional economy model (slides)

A federal contracting program most Alaskans have never heard of moves a massive amount of money into Alaska’s economy. Four speakers explained why its future is suddenly uncertain.

ANCHORAGE (05/21/26) — Forum Summary by Ross Johnston, Executive Director, Commonwealth North

$13.5 billion.

That is the combined 2022 revenue of Alaska’s twelve Native regional corporations, according to Katie Berry, who leads McKinley Research Group. For scale: Alaska’s entire 2025 seafood harvest came in around $1.6 billion. North Slope oil, in a good year, sells for upward of $10 billion. By that measure the regional corporations sit in rare company, one of the largest economic forces in the state.

Most of that money is earned somewhere else. About two-thirds of it comes from operations outside Alaska, then flows back home. And when it lands, it lands wide.

$300 to $350 million a year, distributed through dividends, elder benefits, and scholarships.

Berry offered one way to anchor that figure. Only one other program in Alaska reaches into 200-some communities with that kind of consistency. The Permanent Fund Dividend.

The reach does not stop at distributions. About 110,000 Alaska Native regional shareholders live in the state, roughly 15 percent of the population. And in a fiscal detail that tends to vanish in Juneau’s revenue debates, Alaska Native corporations are required by the structure of ANCSA to organize as C corporations. That makes them the one category of Alaska business obligated to pay state corporate income tax. Berry, watching the fiscal debates in Juneau, argued the point deserves to be elevated. In a state with no broad-based personal tax, that is not a small thing to leave out of the conversation.

Behind much of this sits a federal contracting tool most Alaskans have never heard of, and one now under renewed scrutiny in Washington. That was the subject of Commonwealth North’s May 21 forum at the Petroleum Club of Anchorage. The SBA’s 8(a) program lets federal agencies award work to socially and economically disadvantaged businesses, including Alaska Native corporations. Four speakers had gathered to explain what it does, how the money flows, and what stands to change.

This summary is a recap of the information presented. It is not an official record, transcript, or position statement. The content reflects only the views and statements made by the individual presenters and participants at the time of the forum. It should not be interpreted as representing the official views, opinions, policies, or positions of Commonwealth North, its leadership, board members, staff, or affiliates.

 

Forum Recording – YouTube  

How We Got Here

To understand why a contracting program matters this much to Alaska, you have to start more than a century before the program existed.

Emil Notti walked the room through it, and few people alive are better positioned to. Notti wrote the 1966 letter that called the first statewide meeting leading to the Alaska Federation of Natives. He helped negotiate the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act itself.

Nicole Borromeo, president of the ANCSA Regional Association, filled in the legal arc. When the United States bought Alaska in the 1867 Treaty of Cession, the territory sat in a kind of limbo for roughly a century, too big and too far away for the federal government to know what to do with. Congress had also, in 1871, ended the practice of settling Native land claims by treaty. So when the question finally came due, it came due through legislation rather than the treaty process that had governed land claims elsewhere.

That legislation was ANCSA, in 1971. Native people gave up claim to hundreds of millions of acres in exchange for 45 million acres and a cash settlement. The land, Borromeo emphasized, was always meant to be the engine of self-determination. The corporations would use it, develop it, and support their people.

Then came a complication. The 1980 federal lands act overlaid parks and preserves across much of the state, including ANCSA lands. Development on those lands, Borromeo noted dryly, turned out to be harder than promised.

The 8(a) pathway arrived in 1986, when Congress amended the Small Business Act to let Native corporations and tribes participate in federal contracting. Notti placed it in the longer history of the program, created by Congress decades earlier to help disadvantaged individuals, later broadened to disadvantaged communities. That broadening is what brought ANCs in. Borromeo was quick to add that Native corporations are not uniquely privileged here. The same federal contracting world includes set-asides for veterans, for women-owned businesses, and for others.

Borromeo made the historical point land with one observation about her work in Washington. The thing that consistently stops members of Congress short, she said, is the reminder that they wrote this law. They imposed the corporate structure. They settled the land claims this way.

What 8(a) Actually Is

Strip away the assumptions, and 8(a) is not what its critics in Washington often take it to be.

Notti was the bluntest on this point.

It is not DEI. It does not create individual wealth. It is not corporate enrichment. It distributes earnings broadly.

He argued the program runs without guaranteed contracts and without preferential pricing, that ANCs are among the most audited federal contractors, and that its purpose is building sustainable businesses where unemployment is high and private capital is thin. He recalled a time when Alaska’s banks lacked the capital to finance projects, and 8(a) profits, drawn from operations around the world, brought outside money home.

Borromeo offered the working metaphor of the afternoon. Calling on an 8(a) contractor, she said, is akin to calling on special forces. Agencies use the program because it is fast and because they are working with known, vetted partners. She put the time savings at roughly 75 percent, with some awards landing in 30 to 60 days against the year or more a full procurement can take.

Speed is not the same as cutting corners, she emphasized. The contractors arrive with full books and records, and a contracting officer reviews everything before an award. Awards go to performance, not preference: rigorous cost schedules, audits, CPAR ratings, measured delivery. She added a detail from her own seat as a village corporation chair. The federal government will hold a contractor to delivery even when the work runs at a loss.

Where the Money Comes From, and Where It Goes

Berry had a pet peeve, and it turned out to be a useful one. The phrase “economic driver” gets attached to almost any industry, she noted, but it has a specific meaning. A driver brings new money into an economy from outside, rather than recirculating money already here. By that test, Alaska’s traditional economy runs on selling raw or near-raw resources to the world. Oil. Seafood. Zinc. ANC regional corporations, she argued, work differently. Much of their revenue comes from operations outside Alaska, then returns to the state as profit. That is the distinction behind the $13.5 billion: of that total, only about $4.5 billion traces to Alaska-based operations. The other $9 billion was earned elsewhere and carried home.

Two figures from the same McKinley work, commissioned by the ANCSA Regional Association, fill in the picture:

• Employment: 50,000+ worldwide, about 8,000 to 9,000 in Alaska. Berry noted the in-state figure is close to the number of people working in Alaska oil extraction with support services.
• Shareholders: roughly 150,000, about 110,000 of them in Alaska. The rest are domiciled outside the state and around the world.

And here is the gap at the center of the afternoon. Nobody has quantified how much of that $13.5 billion runs through 8(a) contracts. There is no single number. Berry was direct about it, calling the question low-hanging fruit for future research. “We enter the land of rumor and conjecture in Alaska a lot,” she said, and 8(a)’s exact weight is one of those places, somewhere between “they’re not that important” and “it’s everything,” with no firm figure to settle it.

The uncertainty runs in both directions at once. Notti put 8(a) at roughly 4 percent of all federal contracting, a figure that tracks with recent federal data showing about $35 billion in 8(a) awards against a federal contracting total well north of $800 billion. But that $35 billion is the entire national pool, the work every 8(a) firm in the country competes for, individual, tribal, and ANC alike. How much of it Alaska Native corporations actually capture is its own open question. A program that looks marginal from Washington can still be load-bearing for a single state, and the numbers exist to confirm neither claim.

Carlton supplied the detail that keeps the gap from being mistaken for the whole story. Many corporations are not betting everything on the program. Chugach learned that lesson in a roughly 2008 contracting fight, when government work made up close to 90 percent of its revenue. The company spent the years since deliberately diversifying, building lines of business that do not lean on 8(a) at all. It has not seen a revenue dip yet. The worry, Carlton said, is the years ahead. The exposure is uneven across the 12 regional corporations, which means any change to the program would not land evenly either. The most dependent firms would feel it first and hardest.

Berry was equally candid about a second limit. The McKinley numbers cover regional corporations only, not the village corporations that rank among the largest companies in the state. Every figure, she said, should carry an implied plus sign.

What that money does once it gets home was Katherine Carlton’s territory. Carlton, president of Chugach Alaska Corporation and policy chair of the Native American Contractors Association, took the program out of the abstract with a single story.

Tonia Burrough is a Chugach shareholder. As a teenager, she counted on her annual dividend to buy school clothes. Later, after years away from the workforce raising two sons, she returned through a Chugach internship, earned a bachelor’s degree, completed a graduate certificate, and now works as a senior security specialist. Her sons went to college on Chugach scholarships. One graduated this year. Chugach interviewed him for an internship the same week as the forum.

When a contract performs, Carlton argued, the value does not leave the community. It recirculates through education, careers, and dividends. She called it a multiplier effect.

The corporate scale behind that one story: Chugach runs roughly 5,000 employees across 110 locations, 28 states, and 10 countries, and returned $66.8 million to shareholders and communities in 2025. Carlton tied the company’s path into contracting directly to crisis. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill devastated businesses in Chugach’s region, the company moved into government work, and 8(a) helped it get a foothold. That foothold now reaches NAS Fallon, home of the Navy’s Top Gun program, Fort Greeley’s ballistic missile defense site, and Navy and Coast Guard command-and-control systems. Not entry-level work, and the agencies that depend on it have a stake in the program’s stability too.

The Real Concern Is Not a Policy Change

Carlton spent much of her time on a distinction she thinks is getting lost in Washington. The risk, she argued, is not a formal change on paper. It is erosion of confidence before any change arrives, agencies growing hesitant to use a lawful tool because the climate around it has turned suspicious.

She drew a careful line between oversight and suspicion. Native-owned 8(a) firms already operate under SBA eligibility rules, annual and financial reporting, subcontracting limits, and community-benefit reporting, evaluated continuously through CPAR ratings and safety performance. Chugach, ARA, and NACA support that oversight, she said. The concern is when oversight tips into a presumption of guilt.

The near-term evidence Carlton offered was concrete. SBA has stalled the applications that let ANCs renew entities and bring new ones into the 8(a) space. That freeze does not hurt this year. It hurts in the years that follow, slowly narrowing the pipeline of firms able to compete. She named two pressures driving the scrutiny: an early framing of the program as riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse, and the current administration’s move away from anything labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion. The panel pushed back on both. On the first, Borromeo argued the program simply does not carry the levels of fraud and abuse found elsewhere in federal contracting, because the barrier to entry is high and the awards are constantly audited; Notti called ANCs among the most scrutinized contractors in the system, recertified again and again on the strength of their performance. On the second, both argued the DEI label misreads the structure entirely. ANCs participate as entities representing communities, not as individuals claiming a demographic category.

Where the Panel Disagreed With Itself

The closest thing to friction came in the Q&A, and it is worth surfacing because it cut against the room’s grain.

Ross Johnston posed a doom-and-gloom hypothetical. If 8(a) went away, where would the work go? Borromeo’s answer was that the contracts would not vanish, the federal government still needs the goods and services, but the work would consolidate among the largest private firms rather than reaching small businesses.

Berry pushed back on the premise itself. She said she heard in the question an assumption that ANCs are not competitive without the program, and she rejected it, in her words, in a really stringent way. Many corporations have decades of qualifications and proven delivery behind them. Losing 8(a), in her view, would not collapse their competitiveness. It would intensify the competition and disadvantage the smaller corporations specifically.

The two positions are not flatly contradictory. Both expect consolidation toward larger firms. But they place the established ANCs differently on that field, and the panel did not resolve which view is right. The reader can hold both.

Berry flagged one more question worth watching: the coming closure of Red Dog Mine and what it does to the revenue-sharing streams that many village corporations depend on. A topic for another forum, but a consequential one.

What Comes Next

Notti, asked to close with advice for the next 50 years of corporate leadership, kept it short. The corporations, he said, have to pay more attention to their shareholders.

It was a fitting last word from the man who wrote the first letter. The afternoon had spent two hours on revenue, federal procurement, and missile defense infrastructure. Notti brought it back to the people the money is supposed to reach. Tonia Burrough’s school clothes. A son interviewed for an internship the same week his mother sat in a forum about why the program might not survive.

The decisions are being made 4,000 miles away. The clothes were bought in Alaska.

Join us. If you find value in forums like this, consider joining Commonwealth North as a member. Individual memberships start at $300, corporate at $2,500.

Reference Materials

• McKinley Research Group, ANCSA Regional Corporation Economic Impacts, May 2026 (presentation slides, PDF) (link)
• Katherine Carlton, Chugach Alaska Corporation, 8(a) panel slides (link)
• Nicole Borromeo, ANCSA Regional Association, Slides

Ice-Free Doesn’t Mean No Ice

Three federal and state leaders came to Anchorage with a shared message that the Arctic is in motion. What separated them was the question of what Alaska should build, for whom, and on whose timeline.

Forum Summary by Ross Johnston, Executive Director, Commonwealth North

ANCHORAGE (04/13/26) — The room at Williwaw was full, the sponsors were maritime, and the panel was federal. That combination alone signaled something about where Arctic policy has arrived. The chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, the Administrator of the U.S. Maritime Administration, and the executive director of AIDEA had flown in during Arctic Encounters week to tell an Anchorage audience where the federal and state posture on the Arctic stands in the spring of 2026.

They agreed on the premise. The Arctic is no longer a remote idea. Vessel traffic through the Bering Strait has been climbing every decade. Washington is actively deciding where to homeport icebreakers, where to land subsea cables, and how to reopen bases that have been closed for most of a generation. What happens in the next five years will shape Alaska’s maritime economy for the next fifty.

Where the speakers parted company was on the harder question underneath the consensus.

Ready for what?

That phrase belongs to Capt. Stephen Carmel, the Maritime Administrator, and he used it to pressure-test assumptions the rest of the room was arguably taking for granted. His message, delivered in the plainest language of the evening, was that shipping runs on cost per unit of cargo, that most proposed Arctic trade routes fail that test, and that Alaska’s port system as currently built is oriented inward rather than outward. His co-panelists, Tom Dans and Randy Ruaro, made the case for moving faster on federal investment and state-backed infrastructure. Both arguments rested on data. They pointed in different directions.

Event	Ice, Iron, and Infrastructure: The Arctic and Alaska’s Maritime Future
Date	Monday, April 13, 2026
Venue	Williwaw, Anchorage
Sponsors	Gold: Port of Alaska, JAG Alaska  |  Silver: Maritime Partners of Alaska  |  Cornerstone partners: GCI, ConocoPhillips

 

Reference materials are listed at the end of this summary.

The Inflection Point

Tom Dans, chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, opened by placing the evening inside a longer arc. Appointed in December 2025, he brings three decades of investment experience across the Arctic and subarctic, including early work on Russian Arctic projects in the 1990s. He spoke less as a regulator than as someone who has watched the window for Arctic development open and close several times.

His framing of the present moment was blunt. Energy prices in the last six weeks have not been seen in twenty years. The governor has signed a $450 million supplemental. The Secretary of Energy has publicly raised the possibility of a transformational Arctic LNG investment on the order of a TAPS-scale event, something Dans described as a roughly $45 billion build. The Arctic, in his telling, has become geopolitically hot in ways that are now showing up in the commercial record, from a gas tanker attacked in the Mediterranean to a Ukrainian drone strike on a new-generation Russian battleship icebreaker in a shipyard outside St. Petersburg.

Dans’s analytical through-line was that the United States has the capital, but the execution will have to come from Alaska. The Commission oversees a federal Arctic research enterprise he estimated at roughly $500 million to $1 billion per year, spent principally through the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, NOAA, and the Department of Energy. He also disclosed, for context, that outside his Commission role he works with Damen, the Netherlands-based shipbuilder that he described as the world’s largest builder of icebreakers and ice-class vessels.

“The capital is there. What we need is the imagination and the execution.”

His specific recommendations carried that theme. The Arctic deep-water port conversation, he observed, has centered on Nome, but the Commission’s recommendation is that one port is not enough. Multiple ports spread the strategic risk and support different mission sets. Adak, with its existing naval base and 20 million gallons of avgas storage, is on the Commission’s list for reopening. Seward, he said, has potential as a multi-use port. A Commission initiative is also underway to return a federal research presence to Attu Island in the Western Aleutians, which has been uninhabited since Casco Cove Station closed in 2011 and is still peppered with World War II unexploded ordnance. The near-term step there is a research station. The longer-term aspiration, Dans said, is to eventually facilitate a return by the traditional Aleut community if they wish to go back.

The logic binding these proposals together was presence. Dans argued repeatedly that the Aleutians sit astride every surface route into and out of the Arctic, including the Great Circle Route that carries Asia-to-North America cargo past the chain on its way to Seattle and Los Angeles. Presence, in his framing, is a precondition for influence.

A Shipping Guy’s Skeptical Lens

Capt. Stephen Carmel, the Maritime Administrator, took the same set of facts and pulled them in a different direction. His background sharpens the contrast. Confirmed by the Senate in December 2025 as the 21st head of the agency, he is a 1979 graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, held his first command of a 40,000-ton tanker at age 26, spent decades as a senior executive at Maersk, and has worked Arctic waters north of Svalbard. He does not approach Arctic shipping from the policy side.

Carmel began by dismantling vocabulary. “Ice-free,” he reminded the room, does not mean “no ice.” No credible projection shows a no-ice Arctic in any lifetime in the room. What you get instead is variable ice, poor visibility, and storms. For commercial shipping, that combination translates into schedule variability, which modern logistics chains do not tolerate well.

Then he offered the sentence that did the most analytical work of the evening.

“Distance doesn’t matter. Distance is not the issue. The correct unit of measure is cost per unit of cargo.”

From that principle, Carmel worked through the three Arctic route candidates methodically.

The Canadian Northwest Passage, in his assessment, will be useful for nothing except cruise entertainment for the foreseeable future. As the ice pack loosens, prevailing gyres sweep loose ice into McClure Strait, the only deep-draft entrance on the western end. That forces any commercial transit down through Amundsen Gulf and a labyrinth of poorly charted, shallow channels with a controlling draft of about eight meters. Small ships carrying small cargo bases generate high costs per container. International shipping will not accept those economics.

The Russian Northern Sea Route, he said, will remain important to Russia, since roughly twenty percent of Russian GDP is generated along its northern coast, and oil and gas from the Barents needs to move east toward Asia. But the route’s shallow sections, around twelve meters in places, cap ship size at roughly 2,000 TEU. The workhorses of Asia-Europe trade are 22,000- to 24,000-TEU vessels. The per-container cost gap is structural.

The transpolar route, directly across the pole, would require roughly five degrees Celsius of warming to yield six months a year of ice-free operation, which is the threshold logistics networks would need to consider switching. No credible projection produces that warming in any operationally relevant timeframe.

What Carmel did believe, strongly, is that the transpolar route would open first for data, not for ships. Subsea cables can be laid seasonally. The distance is shorter. The U.S. runs a $660 billion trade surplus in data-deliverable services, and those flows are precisely what transpolar fiber would carry. His conclusion reframed the Arctic infrastructure question.

“Instead of ports, we have landing sites. The types of ships that matter are ice-capable cable layers.”

He closed with a pointed observation about the shape of Alaska’s existing infrastructure. The state’s transportation system, he argued, is designed to take things from outside the state and move them in, largely through Anchorage, which he noted is the first or second largest air cargo terminal in the world by wide-body movements, with roughly 138 cargo planes landing daily. It is not designed to move Alaska’s own goods out. Reorienting a port system from looking in to projecting out, Carmel cautioned, is a question of cargo base. Where are the exports going to come from? What is the business case? Venture capital takes those risks. Shipping companies do not.

One detail worth noting. Carmel told an anecdote from his Maersk days about a feeder ship that transited the Northern Sea Route once, out of curiosity, with essentially no cargo and one container of frozen fish. The damage to the vessel was so severe, he said, that the company vowed never again. It was the kind of operational detail that policy conversation often lacks.

The Capital Is There

Randy Ruaro, executive director of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), framed his remarks around the state’s investment posture.

Ruaro’s clearest operational point concerned Ketchikan. Under AIDEA’s partnership with the JAG Marine Group, employment at the Ketchikan shipyard has grown from 15 to approximately 200 in four to five months. The near-term development plan, detailed in a recently drafted white paper, would add a new and larger floating drydock capable of servicing the Coast Guard’s Polar Class and Arctic Class icebreakers, its National Security Cutters, and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, including the USS Ted Stevens. Because the Coast Guard already operates Base Ketchikan, the combined homeport-and-shipyard configuration, Ruaro argued, represents one of the most rapid paths to bringing icebreaker maintenance capacity back to Alaska. AIDEA is working with Senator Sullivan on a third drydock.

Ruaro also engaged directly with the technology thread Dans and Carmel had each raised. AIDEA, he confirmed, is in joint development with the European Union on a Polar Connect cable that would run up the Dalton Highway corridor and tie into transpolar fiber. The authority’s planning-level benchmarks for data centers, which were on slides, put net revenue per U.S. data center at roughly $10 to $40 million per year, scaling with power capacity at $2 to $5 million net per megawatt per year. A 10-megawatt facility, by that rule, generates $20 to $50 million in net annual revenue. AIDEA’s tri-continental fiber strategy would run Phase 1 subsea cable from Japan and South Korea through Adak and Kodiak to Oregon, Phase 2 terrestrial fiber from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay along the Parks and Dalton Highways, and Phase 3 transpolar from Prudhoe Bay to Norway, avoiding the Red Sea corridor that a 2024 sequence of cable cuts demonstrated is both concentrated and vulnerable.

His characterization of the policy environment was more pointed than the analytical framing used by the other two speakers. Ruaro argued that restricting Alaska development responsibly, under what he described as “the strictest environmental standards in the world,” pushes energy production to coal plants in China and India, and that the resulting emissions eventually settle on the Arctic as black soot. He framed that dynamic as self-defeating for the opposition. The argument is his and AIDEA’s, not the forum’s.

Where the Speakers Diverged

The evening’s most useful tension sat between Dans and Carmel. Both are federal officials. Both are operators. Both cited data. But the decision rule each offered for Alaska’s Arctic maritime posture was meaningfully different.

Dans’s rule was essentially strategic. Seize the inflection point. Build multiple ports. Reopen Adak. Establish presence on Attu. Accept that some initiatives will fail, because the only way to move at the pace the moment requires is to tolerate failure. His frame was closer to national security and sovereign wealth logic than to commercial shipping logic.

Carmel’s rule was commercial. Identify the cargo base. Do the cost-per-unit math. Recognize that modern container shipping is structurally indifferent to Arctic routes because the per-container economics do not support them. The Coast Guard and the Navy, he noted, do not pay freight. Commercial shippers do.

The two positions are not fully reconcilable, and the forum did not try to reconcile them. A fair reading is that Dans’s case is stronger for non-commercial infrastructure, such as research stations, security cutters, icebreaker fleets, and subsea cables, where the decision rule really is strategic. Carmel’s case is stronger for any project whose business case depends on through-traffic by blue-water commercial shippers, where the cost-per-unit discipline is dispositive. The two speakers arguably agreed on one thing without quite saying so. The first piece of Arctic infrastructure that will actually matter for commercial flows is probably fiber, not a dock.

Ruaro’s remarks operate in a different register from both. AIDEA is a state economic development bank with a fiduciary responsibility and a policy mandate, and Ruaro treated most of his examples as investment propositions rather than as framing debates. His practical signal to the room was that AIDEA has both the balance sheet and the posture to move on projects that pencil, and that the authority intends to be, as he put it, “super aggressive” compared with its recent history.

What Lies Ahead

The evening closed with an unusual exchange. An audience member asked Dans how the United States should think about reopening Arctic research cooperation with Russia after the war in Ukraine, and when that dialogue could credibly begin. Dans said it had already begun. He confirmed that he expects to travel to Moscow within roughly the next month to discuss reestablishing research-sphere cooperation, in the same spirit that U.S.-Soviet scientific collaboration continued through the darkest moments of the Cold War. He noted that the United States shares the longest maritime boundary in the world with Russia, and that a durable Arctic posture requires person-to-person relationships that are made when people are young.

He asked the room how many people spoke Russian. One hand went up. He asked how many had visited Russia. By his count, perhaps ten to fifteen percent. He left that number hanging.

What the three speakers made clear, more by implication than by declaration, is that Alaska’s Arctic policy window is narrower than it looks. The inflection point Dans described is real. The commercial constraints Carmel described are also real. AIDEA’s capacity to invest, which Ruaro described, is real too. The decisions Washington and Juneau make in the next eighteen months about where to put ports, where to homeport icebreakers, where to land cables, and how to rebuild shipyard capacity will lock in the geography of Alaska’s maritime economy for decades.

Toward the end of the night, as the formal program wound down and Steve Norwood started setting up to play, Randy Ruaro was still at the front of the room talking with Tim from JAG about the Ketchikan drydock. The Ketchikan shipyard was the piece of the evening that was already under construction.

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Reference Materials

• Forum presentation slides (Randy Ruaro / AIDEA): “Investing in Alaskans: Local Economic Impact. Ice, Iron, and Infrastructure,” April 13, 2026
• Forum speaker presentation (Tom Dans / U.S. Arctic Research Commission)
• Forum recording: available upon request from Commonwealth North
• U.S. Arctic Research Commission: arctic.gov
• U.S. Maritime Administration: maritime.dot.gov
• AIDEA: aidea.org

 

This summary is a recap of the information presented. It is not an official record, transcript, or position statement. The content reflects only the views and statements made by the individual presenters and participants at the time of the forum. It should not be interpreted as representing the official views, opinions, policies, or positions of Commonwealth North, its leadership, board members, staff, or affiliates.

 

The Hidden Cost of Alaska’s Oil Tax Dependence: Fiscal Volatility Threatens Economic Growth

Research shows petroleum taxation creates economic instability that stifles business investment, even as direct impacts appear minimal. 

ANCHORAGE (2/12/26) — Alaska policymakers have long grappled with a deceptively simple question: How should the state raise revenue to close its persistent budget deficit? New research from the Institute of Social and Economic Research suggests the answer is far more complex than the raw numbers suggest, particularly when it comes to taxing the state’s cornerstone petroleum industry.

WATCH THE PRESENTATION or Download PDF of Slides

While petroleum taxes may appear to offer minimal direct economic impact compared to other revenue options, the study reveals a troubling paradox: oil-based revenue creates dangerous fiscal uncertainty that undermines business confidence and economic growth. In 2014/2025, when oil prices collapsed, Alaska experienced fiscal uncertainty in 2016 equivalent to the 95th percentile nationally — translating to an estimated 2 to 3 percent decline in real GDP growth solely due to revenue volatility.

The Volatility Problem

The research, presented in January 2026 as an update to a landmark 2016 ISER study, examined 11 different fiscal policy options, from income and sales taxes to state workforce reductions and petroleum production taxes. Each option was scaled to reduce Alaska’s deficit by $100 million, allowing for direct comparison of their economic effects.

On the surface, petroleum taxes appear the most benign. The study found that a $100 million increase in oil taxation would result in approximately 44 job losses in the short term and about 40 in the long term — figures comparable to other revenue-raising options. Personal income would decline by roughly $7 million per $100 million raised, with economic output contracting by $46 million over five years.

But these static impacts mask a larger problem: fiscal unpredictability. Brett Watson, the study’s lead researcher, emphasized during the presentation that Alaska’s heavy reliance on petroleum revenue creates an unstable business climate that deters the very investments needed for economic growth.

“Across all states, the relationship suggests that a one standard deviation increase in uncertainty leads to a 1.8 percent decline in real GDP growth,” the research found.

National data underscore just how hazardous Alaska’s revenue mix is by comparison. Data compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts tracking year-over-year percent changes in major tax revenue sources across all 50 states over the 15-year period ending in fiscal year 2022 illustrates the dramatic differences in stability between revenue types. Severance taxes — the category that dominates Alaska’s general fund — are by far the most volatile, swinging wildly through both expansions and downturns. Corporate income taxes are the second most volatile, though with a somewhat narrower bandwidth. Personal income taxes fall in the middle, while sales taxes emerge as the most stable of the major revenue sources. 

Watson described the pattern plainly during the presentation: “States that have severance taxes tend to see the most volatility in that revenue. States that have corporate income taxes see somewhat less volatility, but there’s volatility in that corporate income tax. Property taxes tend to be the least volatile… while sales taxes are the most stable of these different sources of revenue.” Excluding Permanent Fund earnings, Alaska’s revenue is the most volatile in the country — and, Watson noted, “it’s not even close.” The next most volatile state is North Dakota, which also finances a substantial share of its budget through severance taxes.

“Uncertainty in Alaska’s fiscal environment could be tangibly costly for the economy,” the researchers noted, pointing to evidence that uncertainty broadly leads to lower business investment. One study found that even a 30-day budget delay increases borrowing costs by 10 basis points on state bonds — a direct financial penalty for fiscal instability.

Moreover, the ISER study found that Alaska’s fiscal environment became markedly more uncertain after the 2014/2015 oil price decline. Real per capita unrestricted general fund spending declined 2.8 percent annually from 2017 to 2026, following an average growth of 8.9 percent from 2007 to 2015. This dramatic swing created a cascade of uncertainty throughout the state economy.

During the question-and-answer session, Tyson Gallagher, Governor Mike Dunleavy’s chief of staff, offered a stark illustration of how fiscal uncertainty undermines economic development efforts — even when Alaska enjoys significant tax advantages.

The administration has been working to attract data centers to invest in Alaska, pitching the state’s abundant energy resources, cool climate for server cooling, and lack of state taxes. But, the pitches fall flat.

“We were pitching all the great things about Alaska, and talking about California having to pay taxes,” Gallagher recounted. The prospective investor acknowledged Alaska’s advantages but delivered a sobering response: “Maybe you’re right. But we know what their taxes are going to be, so we can prepare for that. Yours, you have none, which is awesome. But we don’t know what they’re going to be next year, and we don’t want the volatility.”

The company chose California despite its higher tax burden because it offered something Alaska couldn’t: predictability. For a major infrastructure investment like a data center — which requires hundreds of millions of dollars in upfront capital and commitments spanning decades — knowing the rules of the game matters more than the current tax rate.

“Reducing volatility increases stability,” Gallagher said. “It’s good for the business sector, it’s good for anybody that’s looking to invest money.”

The example underscores a central tradeoff of Alaska’s fiscal situation: the state’s reluctance to establish a stable revenue structure may be costing it more economic opportunities than any tax regime would. Companies can plan around taxes; they struggle to plan around uncertainty.

The Alaska Disconnect

Beyond the immediate costs of fiscal uncertainty, Alaska faces a deeper structural problem that economists have dubbed “the Alaska disconnect” — a fundamental mismatch between the state’s revenue sources and its economic activity.

Unlike most states, where tax revenue rises and falls with the local economy through sales taxes, income taxes, or property taxes, Alaska’s government funding comes primarily from two sources that operate independently of the state’s economic health: petroleum taxes and royalties, and the Permanent Fund’s investment earnings.

“Our current sources of revenue in petroleum and the permanent fund Percent of Market Value aren’t explicitly tied to state economic activity,” Watson explained during his presentation. This creates a troubling dynamic: as Alaska’s economy grows or shrinks, state revenue doesn’t necessarily follow the same trajectory.

The petroleum industry, while still crucial, represents a shrinking share of Alaska’s private sector economic activity. As the state’s economy has diversified — with growth in tourism, healthcare, professional services, and other sectors — oil production has declined and represents a smaller portion of overall economic output.

“As our economy grows, as our economy shrinks, because petroleum is representing a smaller and smaller share of our state’s private sector economic activity, the fluctuations in oil prices are increasingly divorced from what the rest of our economy is doing,” Watson said.

The consequences can be perverse. If Alaska’s economy is growing — perhaps the tourism industry is booming, population is increasing, and new businesses are opening — but oil prices happen to be falling, state revenue declines. The government has less money to spend precisely when a growing economy might demand more services: more roads to maintain, more children to educate, more infrastructure to support new development.

“Wouldn’t it be a lovely problem for the Anchorage School District to have to see student population’s rising,” Watson noted. “But if oil prices are falling, that means less revenue potentially that the state has available to it for things like education, healthcare, infrastructure.”

The Permanent Fund’s investment earnings, while providing crucial revenue diversification, don’t solve this fundamental problem. The fund’s returns depend on global financial markets, not Alaska’s economy. A recession in Alaska doesn’t reduce the fund’s market value, and an Alaska boom doesn’t necessarily increase it.

“Despite the fact that the POMV has provided a new and diverse source of revenue, growth in that revenue is not explicitly coupled to the broader economic activity in the state,” Watson explained.

This disconnect creates planning challenges for both government and the private sector. State services become unreliable not because of Alaska’s economic performance, but because of forces largely beyond anyone’s control — global oil markets and stock market returns. Meanwhile, businesses struggle to anticipate whether the state will have resources to maintain infrastructure, fund education, or support economic development.

Most broad-based taxes — whether sales, income, or property taxes — would automatically create a tighter link between Alaska’s economy and state revenue. When the economy grows, tax revenue grows. When it contracts, revenue falls, but so does the need for services. This natural coupling doesn’t eliminate fiscal challenges, but it creates a more rational relationship between the state’s capacity to raise revenue and its citizens’ capacity to pay.

The Options on the Table

The ISER team evaluated three categories of fiscal tools:

State spending changes: These would have the largest economic impact. Reducing the state workforce by 1,300 positions would cost 974 jobs per $100 million in savings when accounting for ripple effects through the economy. A broad $100 million spending cut would eliminate 1,076 jobs. A “clean” capital budget cut — one that doesn’t affect federal matching funds — would cost 697 jobs.

Household taxes: A middle ground, with impacts ranging from 290 to 375 jobs per $100 million raised. These include reducing the Permanent Fund Dividend (375 jobs lost), implementing a broad sales tax with fewer exemptions (313 jobs), a narrower sales tax (290 jobs), a flat income tax (309 jobs), a progressive income tax (291 jobs), and a statewide property tax (365 jobs).

Business taxes: The smallest short-term impacts, but with potentially severe long-term consequences. Increasing oil industry taxes would cost just 44 jobs per $100 million in the short run, while broader corporate tax increases would cost 141 jobs.

Who Would Pay?

One of the study’s most significant findings concerns who bears the burden of different fiscal options. Alaskans would shoulder between 68% and 86% of the cost, depending on the policy chosen, with the remainder falling on non-residents, visitors, and the federal government.

Sales taxes with more exclusions shift the smallest burden to Alaskans — just 73% —its because they capture both visitor and non-resident worker spending. For a sales tax that raised $100 million in revenue, the wealthiest ten percent of households would pay about $255 to $317 per person and the poorest about $22 to $50 per person, depending on whether it was the 3% tax including food and shelter or the 4% tax excluding food and shelter. Those dollar amounts represent about 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the per-capita disposable income of the wealthiest households, but 0.4 percent to 1 percent of the poorest. Excluding resident-common purchases does however further decrease resident burden. 

Reducing the PFD by $159 per person (across 628,000 recipients) and diverting the revenue to the state government would raise $100 million. But only the poorest households would actually lose the full amount. Most households would get a portion of the lost income back in reduced federal income taxes, but poorest households have low income tax liability. The higher the household’s per-capita income, the more the federal taxes would be reduced and the PFD loss offset. Per-person disposable income of the richest ten percent of households would fall on average $103. The dollar losses for the poorest households amount to 2.8 percent of their per-person disposable income—compared with 0.06 percent for the wealthiest households.

By contrast, a progressive income tax would cost high earners 0.5% of their income while barely touching those at the bottom. A federal income tax surcharge that raised $100 million would cost the wealthiest households about $787 per person.

Alternative Paths Forward

The research suggests that more stable revenue sources, while potentially having larger direct economic impacts, could ultimately prove less damaging by providing fiscal predictability. Options like property taxes or broad-based sales taxes generate more consistent revenue streams that allow businesses to plan confidently for the future.

Intriguingly, the study found that combining revenue-raising measures with strategic spending could create budget-neutral policies that actually stimulate economic growth. The researchers modeled coupling a less distortionary revenue source, such as property taxes, with expansionary fiscal policy like capital project investment. This approach could provide both fiscal stability and economic stimulus — addressing two challenges simultaneously.

Potential Combinations

The study also explored variations and combinations that might soften the blow:

Seasonal sales taxes could reduce the impact on Alaska families by 2 to 5 percentage points compared to flat-rate sales taxes. For a broad-based sales tax, Alaska families would see their disposable income fall by 76 cents per dollar raised, compared to 74 cents with a seasonal variation.

Income tax with PFD credit would allow Alaskans to apply their dividend against tax liability, reducing federal taxes on PFD income while maintaining taxes on non-residents.

Employment-based corporate tax incentives could direct tax relief to labor-intensive industries, potentially mitigating job losses.

Combined approaches — such as coupling a property tax with capital spending increases — could even produce net employment gains in the medium term by using less economically distortionary revenue sources to fund growth-oriented investments.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Perhaps most troubling, the researchers warn that maintaining the status quo carries its own risks. Fiscal uncertainty acts as a deterrent to investment, and Alaska’s unique disconnect — where government revenue comes primarily from petroleum and investment earnings rather than economic activity within the state — creates structural problems.

Lower-than-expected oil prices could force sudden, reactive policy changes. The state’s bond rating and borrowing costs remain vulnerable. And each year of inaction means another year when infrastructure ages, services erode, and economic opportunities slip away.

“Fiscal uncertainty is a deterrent to investment,” Watson emphasized. “We estimate 2-3% of state GDP since 2016” has been lost to budget paralysis.

No Easy Answers

The researchers were careful to emphasize that their analysis does not endorse any particular fiscal policy. “No particular policy is without tradeoffs,” the study concluded. “This work provides an opportunity to consider tax and spending options with differing levels of economic distortion and growth implications for Alaska’s economy.”

But the central message is clear: Alaska’s continued dependence on petroleum revenue carries a hidden cost that extends beyond simple job losses or GDP declines. By tethering the state’s fiscal health to wildly fluctuating oil prices, policymakers create an environment of chronic uncertainty that undermines the business confidence essential for economic growth.

As Alaska faces another round of budget debates, the ISER research provides a crucial reminder: the most economically efficient revenue source isn’t necessarily the one with the smallest immediate impact. In an economy built on planning and investment, stability itself has profound economic value — even if it doesn’t show up in standard impact calculations.

For a state wrestling with its fiscal future, that may be the most important finding of all.

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Note: This summary is a recap of the information presented. It is not an official record, transcript, or position statement. The content reflects only the views and statements made by the individual presenters and participants at the time of the forum. It should not be interpreted as representing the official views, opinions, policies, or positions of Commonwealth North, its leadership, board members, staff, or affiliates.

This analysis is based on research conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Alaska Anchorage, presented in January 2026. The study was commissioned by the Alaska Governor’s Office but reflects the independent conclusions of the research team. The findings represent economic impacts only and do not constitute policy recommendations. The full ISER study, including detailed methodology, data sources, and an interactive tool for modeling policy combinations, is available at iseralaska.org.