State Government

Last week marked one month since the remnants of Typhoon Halong devastated communities in Western Alaska with high winds and flooding.

The scale of the destruction in the remote, isolated region is still only starting to emerge.

As of Thursday, the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management reported that 471 homes sustained major damage. Another 208 were destroyed. Among the 3,472 homes surveyed across the affected area, only about a quarter made it through the storm undamaged.

The storm killed one person and left two more missing.

The Association of Village Council Presidents, a regional tribal government consortium, reported that more than 50 communities saw impacts from the storm, with more than a dozen reporting serious damage.

The damage, especially in the villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, led residents to evacuate in what the Alaska National Guard called the largest airlift in the state’s history. After rescuing 51 people in the storm’s immediate aftermath, first responders evacuated nearly the entire population of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. More than 500 people are sheltering in hotels, and their long-term future remains in question.

Kipnuk

In Kipnuk, only the school and a handful of houses made it through the record flood in good shape. The vast majority of structures were damaged or destroyed — some 90%, according to the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

James Paul is one of a small group of locals remaining in Kipnuk and working on the immense task of rebuilding. There have been some small wins, he said — for one thing, the local school, still serving as a hub for the relief effort, is also now connected to village electricity. Some street lights are even on.

“They have been making good progress every day,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month.

But there’s a lot left to do. The community’s water system is still offline, and most homes don’t have power.

Meanwhile, Paul said, aid is surging in. Cargo planes drop off heavy equipment and building supplies.

“Every agency and everybody that comes out here, I think has been really helpful,” he said. “They want to help, and I can’t say enough (about) all the help we’re getting.”

A staggering amount of aid has been flowing to the region from governments, nonprofits and the private sector.

But it likely won’t be enough for large numbers of residents to return this winter. Paul said his future is uncertain.

“I’m not sure about that,” he said. “I want to keep working as long as I can stay here.”

But another resident, Benjamin Kugtsun, said he had no plans to leave — at least, as long as they keep making progress.

“As long as we’ve got power from our power plant and some lights that can power up how we’ve been living, we’re not going to leave,” he said. “We’re going to stay here and work on Kipnuk — rebuilding Kipnuk.”

Kwigillingok

In another village devastated by the storm, Kwigillingok Tribal Resilience Coordinator Dustin Evon said there’s just too much damage.

“We feel like it’s not going to be habitable through the winter,” he said.

Locals and aid workers are keeping busy working to restore the homes that can be saved, Evon said, lifting homes back onto their foundations, replacing insulation soaked by the flood, restoring water and power and so on.

But once the sun goes down, he said, Kwig feels like a ghost town.

“It feels empty, and it’s not as lively as it used to be before the storm,” he said.

For now, the focus is on restoring homes in place, but the long-term future for the village is miles away. The tribe’s members voted in the weeks after the storm to officially relocate about 20 to 25 miles northeast to higher ground, Evon said.

“A lot have said that if a complete rebuild happens in Kwig, many don’t feel safe coming back,” Evon said.

But financing that relocation, which could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, will be a challenge.

Bryan Fisher, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management, said finding funding for relocation will take time. At a town hall meeting in Anchorage this week, he said that the emergency funding the communities have access to now can be used for rebuilding homes and infrastructure and making them more resilient. The relocation work will have to be addressed with different types of funding later on, he said.

“The programs that we have to respond and recover from Typhoon Halong in this disaster will not relocate the communities. They’re intended to repair and replace damaged infrastructure, homes, personal property, subsistence, gear and equipment from the storm,” he said. ” However, we will be working with all of the agencies and the councils to talk about what we can do to support your desire — if you have it — to relocate in the longer term.”

Fisher said he hoped the currently available aid funding would at least buy communities time.

Napakiak

The village of Napakiak was already working on relocation to a nearby bluff when Halong hit — what the local tribe calls a “managed retreat” from the eroding banks of the Kuskokwim River. And Walter Nelson, who coordinates that effort, said the vast majority of homes in Napakiak were flooded during Halong. Approximately a dozen residents have yet to return to their homes, he said.

“I’m 65 years old. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “I’ve talked to our eldest elder. He’s never seen anything like this, the aftermath of Halong.”

Still, Nelson said he’s grateful the damage in Napakiak was not as severe as it was in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. For now, crews are working to dry out flooded homes, replace insulation and restore heat, he said.

Nelson said the flood underscores just how urgent relocation is — and not just for his village.

“We can’t predict Mother Nature, and we can’t challenge her,” he said.

Tuntutuliak

Around 30 miles southwest, in Tuntutuliak, the most severe damage came in the low-lying part of town along the banks of Qinaq River. Twenty-six people evacuated, at least a dozen homes were knocked from their foundations, and large sections of boardwalk in the roadless community were ripped away by the storm surge. Elder Henry Lupie said that nearly all of the community’s traditional steam baths were flooded or displaced.

“We need steam house(s). We don’t have bath and showers readily available in homes,” Lupie said.

Lupie said most of the oil-fired heaters in the community have been repaired or replaced. He said the volunteer and agency-led efforts to tear out and replace wet insulation have made multiple homes livable through the winter.

Floodwaters destroyed numerous freezers full of subsistence foods, forcing residents to shift to winter harvests — ice fishing for lush and setting black fish traps, Lupie said. He said his son was among the first residents to harvest a moose under an emergency hunt opened by the state in early November, and that others are waiting for thicker ice to do the same.

“We’re just now cutting it up and passing it to the ones down in the lower village … and the ones from Kwigillingok, evacuees,” Lupie said.

Quinhagak

Further south, the Kuskokwim Bay community of Quinhagak dodged the worst effects of the storm.

“We are fortunate that our community was not devastated and acknowledge that the communities across the bay have a lot more needs than we do,” Mayor Jerilyn Kelly wrote by email.

Nevertheless, Quinhagak saw erosion of as much as 60 feet along miles of beach. The storm surge brought the shoreline closer to the community’s already threatened sewage lagoon. It also destroyed unexcavated portions of a nearby archaeological site, the largest known precontact Yup’ik site in Alaska.

Kelly said that 10 homes were damaged by the storm, and that multiple fish camps, drying racks, smokehouses, and boats were washed away by floodwaters. She said the community’s water intake line is still damaged and will need to be replaced after break-up.

Nightmute

Far to the northwest, at least 19 people evacuated after floodwaters inundated homes in the Nelson Island community of Nightmute, roughly 10 miles up the Toksook River, according to the National Guard. The flooding made the riverside community appear as if it were in the middle of the ocean, said Tribal Administrator Clement George.

A month later, rebuilding work is still underway, he said.

“We’re rebuilding houses, boardwalks are mostly rebuilt, repaired … I think there’s three homes to be demolished,” George said.

George said a contractor has finished constructing a temporary landfill on higher ground after the storm pushed water into the community’s landfill and sewage lagoon.

George said it’s the worst disaster he’s ever experienced. The nearby community of Toksook Bay saw the highest wind gust ever measured on Nelson Island, at 100 miles per hour. George said the level of erosion around Nightmute stands out.

“Some of the tundra is folded and the small creeks, they’re bigger than before,” George said.

At the nearby coastal subsistence camp of Umkumiut, dozens of structures were all but wiped out. The site holds deep cultural importance for many on Nelson Island, and according to George, provides as much as 75% of Nightmute’s subsistence needs.

For more than a decade, the Kuspuk School District asked Alaska’s education department for the money to fix a rotting elementary school. The school, in the small and predominantly Indigenous community of Aniak in western Alaska, was in deep need of repairs. The nearby Kuskokwim River had flooded the 88-year-old building several times. The walls were moldy. Sewage was leaking into a space below the school’s kitchen.

In 2018, the department finally approved the school district’s $18.6 million funding request to build a new elementary school wing onto Aniak’s middle and high school building, which was owned by the state.

But on Page 4 of the funding contract for the project, Alaska’s education department included a catch.

“The State would only build the new school if the local school board agreed to own it when completed,” former superintendent James Anderson said in an email to KYUK Public Media, NPR and ProPublica.

In the end, Anderson agreed. He worried that if he didn’t, it would jeopardize kids’ health and safety. But he said he also worried about the financial and legal implications of the agreement for the school district, where nearly 30% of families live in poverty. If the state owned the building, it would be responsible for repairs and liability. Anderson worried that if the district took ownership of the school, it might be on the hook.

According to a review of deeds and project funding agreements, Alaska’s education department has transferred ownership of 54 buildings to rural public school districts since 2003. That’s nearly four times as many compared with the two decades prior. That same year, a new clause appeared in the funding agreements that districts sign with the state: In return for the money to make repairs to run-down schools or to build new ones, school districts would have to agree to own the buildings.

Alaska education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis said in an email that the department didn’t have documentation about why the contract language changed. He wrote that “the main clauses of the project agreement are boilerplate language” and were last reviewed by Alaska’s Department of Law in 2019.

Seven current or former superintendents representing rural school districts with student populations that are predominantly Alaska Native said it’s unclear whether a change of ownership also changes a school district’s responsibility to maintain its facilities. The districts can’t use tax revenue to pay for education because the communities they serve are unincorporated. As a result, the state is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance in many rural school districts, but it often takes years to secure that money. Because the funds are hard to come by, superintendents have also said they feel pressure to sign the contracts.

“We’re all sort of trying to find the best, most optimal use of very lean resources,” said Hannibal Anderson, superintendent of the Lower Kuskokwim School District, Alaska’s largest rural district, covering an area nearly the size of West Virginia. “There’s very little room for negotiation.”

Last summer, after nearly two decades, two more Kuspuk district schools, upriver from Aniak, received funding from the state to remedy severe structural problems and serious health and safety risks that the district has reported to the state’s education department for years. In both cases, the money wasn’t enough to fix everything, but superintendent Madeline Aguillard said it was better than nothing, so she signed contracts that also required the district to own those schools.

“What choice did I have?” she asked.

Over the last year, KYUK, NPR and ProPublica have documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. Water lines and sewer systems are backing up. Roofs are leaking and foundations are crumbling. Until this summer, at least one school was in danger of collapse. The state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings. Some of the worst conditions exist at state-owned schools.

Losing Sleep Over Liability

Unlike most other U.S. states, where schools are owned locally, Alaska’s education department owns nearly half of the 128 rural schools open in the state today. In most cases, school districts own the remainder.

In an interview, education department staff said shifting ownership from the state to districts cuts red tape and gives districts more local control over how the building is maintained and used.

“We’re very much a hands-off landlord, as it were,” said Lori Weed, the education department’s school finance manager. “So the hope was that districts would take title to sites so that they could have the control, because we’ve been so hands off.”

There are several overlapping Alaska laws governing school ownership. Collectively, they allow school districts to take over supervision of school construction or maintenance projects and to initiate a transfer of ownership. None of those laws require schools to accept ownership; one says a school board “may” take that action.

However, in some cases, the education department’s contracts say that school boards “shall” take over ownership in order to receive funding.

Howard Trickey, an attorney who has spent most of his career representing public schools in Alaska, said the state could be misinterpreting the law. “‘May’ means you don’t have to do something,” he said. “So to interpret that statute to say it’s mandatory is overreaching.”

The contract for Aniak’s elementary school project says the district “agrees to comply” with several conditions and “shall request title interest of the new facility.” According to the education department, districts are permitted to request the removal of this provision, and it doesn’t require the transfer in order for a district to receive project funding.

Aguillard said she’s still trying to negotiate with the state. Records show Alaska’s education department still owns the facilities used for education in Aniak.

Trickey also believes that such ownership changes could create huge risks for rural school districts in Alaska.

“Suppose a facility was in such disrepair and had such life safety issues as inadequate electrical system, and the school catches on fire and burns down and children are injured,” Trickey said. “If the state owned it, the state would be liable for those injuries.”

A staff member with the education department said there hasn’t been a recent case where someone got hurt. “I would argue that if something happens, it’s going to become a legal battle,” said Heather Heineken, the department’s director of finance and support services, who previously was finance director for a district in Alaska’s Interior.

Rod Morrison, superintendent of the Southeast Island School District, said he loses sleep over liability in his schools, which suffer from leaking roofs, black mold and, at one school, a nonfunctional fire suppression system. The state transferred ownership of that school, in Thorne Bay, to the district in 1998.

In August, Morrison asked the state to allow him to use $300,000 left over from a state-funded project at another school in his district to address the fire suppression system. In September, Michael Butikofer, facilities manager for Alaska’s education department, denied the request, saying it may not be legal. He encouraged Morrison to submit a new application for the funds to fix the suppression system instead.

“When they denied the transfer of the funds or refused to fix my fire suppression system, then I requested the state to take liability of that facility,” Morrison said. “Then of course they said no, they’re not going to take liability for that.”

In a response letter, Butikofer told Morrison that the “ultimate responsibility for day-to-day safety and facility operations lies with the district.”

The district has made 17 funding requests to the state since 2009 for the money to replace the system. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in Juneau this spring, Morrison presented lawmakers with a giant light bulb, blackened by a short in the electrical wiring in the school’s gymnasium ceiling. Morrison said it’s not a matter of if, but when, a fire might consume the building.

Decades of Contamination

Alaska inherited dozens of schools from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the three decades after it gained statehood in 1959. During those decades, state officials complained about being burdened with schools that were already in bad shape.

Those schools also came with other liability risks. Some buildings stand on land previously used by the military, where highly toxic and volatile chemicals have been found. And leaking fuel tanks have contaminated the property at dozens of rural schools, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

That was the case with a BIA school in the Bering Sea community of Toksook Bay, which the state acquired in 1990. There, a corroded pipe leaked 5,000 gallons of fuel into the crawl space of a maintenance building associated with the elementary school. The city of Toksook Bay sued both the school district and the state, arguing that the leak contaminated the city’s water system, damaged land and caused illness. The state Legislature approved over a million dollars in settlement funds for the city.

In response, the Legislature passed a law in 1997 that limited the state and rural school districts’ liability for chemical spills on their land. However, the law does not absolve the state or districts from paying for cleanups, which can cost millions.

Bill O’Connell, who manages contaminated site cleanup for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said paying for cleanups is harder in rural districts. In municipal school districts, local taxes can help cover the cost. But rural districts rely on the state for nearly all of their funding.

“The money that the school districts get is just to educate the students,” O’Connell said. “There’s no consideration of contaminated site cleanup. It’s really just kind of an unmet need.”

He pointed to an old building in Aniak that served the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War as particularly concerning. He said the legacy of highly toxic contaminants started before the building was used for education. The state-owned building, once used by the school district for vocational training, has been demolished, but its foundation stands about 200 yards from the school where kids still take classes everyday. O’Connell said cleanup at the site was officially completed this year, but there are still contaminants below the surface and it is unlikely any new construction will ever be allowed there.

In 1997, the same year the liability law passed in Alaska, a group of parents sued the state over conditions inside rural public schools where their kids spent their days. When the case was settled in 2011, the judge’s consent decree called on the state to pay for five new schools. At the time, the state owned four of those buildings. The state paid to build the schools but required each of the districts to accept a transfer of ownership.

Ken Truitt, an attorney who represented the education department in 2003, when the ownership requirement appeared in construction and maintenance funding agreements, said he does not recall being consulted on the contracts or the addition of that language.

Tim Mearig, a former facilities maintenance director for the education department, said that in the early 2000s, leadership believed “it was of no benefit to the state to hold title, and it was a significant benefit to districts to manage their own property.”

Mearig said a change of ownership was eventually “baked in” to project agreements.

Some ownership and liability questions come down to what the state’s constitution requires. Alaska’s education commissioner, Deena Bishop, said the constitution is intended to give local communities maximum control and that the department is following the law. But Trickey, the longtime attorney for Alaska school districts, said the transfers “don’t relieve the state of that ongoing, continuing constitutional duty.”

“The constitution says the state has a duty to establish and maintain a system of public schools open to the children of the state,” he said. “And that just fundamentally and basically starts with adequate schools.”

This story is a collaboration from NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism, member station KYUK, and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, resigned from the Alaska Senate on Friday to pursue her gubernatorial candidacy, according to a news release from her campaign.

Her resignation follows that of fellow Senate minority caucus member Mike Shower, who represented Wasilla and resigned at the end of last month to focus on his run for lieutenant governor.

Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, confirmed he received Hughes’ resignation letter Friday.

Hughes’ resignation was expected. She told the Alaska Beacon in October she planned to resign in time for her replacement to be in place before the legislative session begins in January.

“My constituents, they’ve been my peeps all these years. I want to make sure that they have representation from the get-go,” she said on Friday afternoon.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy will select her replacement from among a number of nominees to be selected by Republican party officials in her district. Republican Senators must confirm his choice before that person is seated.

Hughes’ replacement must be a Republican and meet the state Constitution’s requirements to hold office.

Hughes said she expects that Rep. Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, will be among the nominees for her seat because Tilton has already filed to run for senator in the district. If Tilton were appointed, the governor would then have to select someone to fill the empty House seat.

Hughes was initially appointed to her seat in 2012 by then-Gov. Sean Parnell, which she credits, in part, to the fact that she was already running.

“I think that when a candidate does that, that shows real interest,” she said.

She said she does not expect her departure to cause significant changes because her district reliably produces “reasonable conservative” lawmakers.

Hughes is one of 12 Republicans and 14 total candidates that seek to be elected governor in 2026. Gov. Mike Dunleavy is termed out and cannot seek reelection.

Hughes said she has fond memories of her time in the Capitol.

“It’s a big change, stepping into the gubernatorial race,” she said. “You know, there are unknowns with that, but I have tremendous peace about this. I really did feel that my chapter was closing in the Senate.”

She represented her district for 12 years.

The state’s latest plan to kill bears in part of Western Alaska to try to boost a flagging caribou population has drawn a new legal challenge.

Environmental groups on Monday filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court that seeks to strike down the Alaska Board of Game’s July approval of a controversial predator control program in the part of the state used by the Mulchatna caribou herd.

The lawsuit, filed by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity, is the latest step in a legal and political battle over state efforts to increase the herd size. It names the board, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the department’s commissioner as defendants.

The lawsuit argues that the revived program approved by the Board of Game suffers from many of the same flaws that were in the previous program. That program had been approved by the board in 2022 but was overturned by court rulings earlier in the year that resulted from a previous lawsuit filed by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

Two state judges found that the program, under which 186 brown bears, five black bears and 20 wolves have been killed since 2023, violated the elements of the Alaska constitution.

Monday’s lawsuit says the new predator control program is largely the same as the old one and it continues to violate the Alaska constitution’s requirement for sustained yield of natural resources. For Alaska, the principle of sustained yield holds that renewable resources should be managed so that they can exist indefinitely.

There are two ways that the sustained yield requirement is violated, according to the lawsuit.

The board, when it approved the predator control plan presented by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, “failed to take a hard look at brown and black bear population data” for the targeted area, thus failing to properly consider impacts to those populations, the lawsuit said.

And the plan has no end point, meaning there is no trigger for suspension of predator control if bear populations drop below a minimum threshold deemed necessary for their sustainability, the lawsuit said.

“The Board of Game gave the Alaska Department of Fish and Game the authority to aerially shoot any bears of any age across 40,000 square miles until 2028, with no population data or cap on the number of bears killed,” Nicole Schmitt, executive director with the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

She noted that the southeast border of the targeted area is only 3 miles from Lake Clark National Preserve, 30 miles from Katmai National Park and 50 miles from McNeil and Brooks Falls, sites that are world-famous for the large numbers of brown bears that gather there to fish for salmon. Meanwhile, the western border reaches two national wildlife refuges, “which means this program threatens bears who move across vast stretches of public lands,” she said.

Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the program “a disgraceful misuse of public resources and a betrayal of the trust Alaskans place in their wildlife managers.”

“There’s no excuse for the state of Alaska to be gunning down bears from helicopters,” Freeman said in the statement.

The commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game defended the program, though he did not specifically address the claims in the new lawsuit.

“ADF&G is committed to all users of the herd in rebuilding this population, which has been identified as important for providing high levels of human consumption under state statute and regulation,” Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang said in a statement.

Vincent-Lang said “intensive management,” or IM, has shown to be helping the caribou herd. Intensive management is the term Alaska wildlife managers use for predator-control programs.

“There is strong evidence that neither disease nor nutrition are preventing this herd from recovering. Department predator removal efforts in the Mulchatna caribou herd IM program are administered to reduce wolf and bear populations in small, defined areas for short periods of time, to enhance caribou calf survival and to increase herd abundance,” Vincent-Lang said in his statement. “Predation has been isolated as the limiting factor preventing the herd from growing, and predator removal is increasing calf survival—we know that now—and we have seen increased calf survival as a result of our past IM efforts.”

The Mulchatna caribou herd crashed in recent decades, and there is heated debate about the cause.

The herd peaked at about 200,000 animals in 1997, when it provided up to 4,770 caribou for subsistence hunting in the region’s communities, according to the Department of Fish and Game. But the population crashed after then and is now estimated at about 16,000 animals, according to the department. Hunting has been closed in recent years.

State wildlife officials argue that predation by bears and wolves on caribou calves is the reason for the decline. The department has stated a goal of boosting the herd to a size ranging from 30,000 to 80,000 animals, enough to support resumption of hunting.

Backers of the Mulchatna predator control program have included the Alaska Federation of Natives, which passed a resolution in 2023 that supported the program because the organization says it is necessary to ensure food security in that part of the state.

But critics of the program, including some veteran Alaska wildlife biologists, argue that other factors caused the herd’s population crash. Among the cited factors is a change in habitat, driven by long-term warming, that makes the region less supportive of lichen-eating caribou and more favorable to moose and other animals dependent on woody plants. Migratory tundra caribou herds around the Arctic have suffered similar problems, with overall population declines of 65% in the past two to three decades, according to the 2024 Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game have lost past court fights over Mulchatna predator control.

Aside from having judges rule that the earlier program was unconstitutional, one of the judges found in May that the department acted in bad faith by continuing to conduct aerial shooting this spring even after the program was declared legally void.

The number of Democrats running for governor of Alaska grew to two on Monday as Anchorage state Sen. Matt Claman entered the race. Claman, an attorney, has represented West Anchorage in the Legislature for more than a decade and said in an interview his experience working across the aisle prepares him well for the top job in state government.

“I think that Alaska needs a person with my background and experience and balanced approach to doing what’s best for Alaska,” he said.

Claman is a member of the 14-person Senate majority caucus that includes nine Democrats and five Republicans. He’s chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and in 2024 led the effort to pass a wide-ranging crime bill that, among other things, allows drug dealers to be charged with second-degree murder and allows prosecutors to avoid forcing sexual assault survivors to testify to a grand jury.

The bill included proposals backed by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who publicly praised it and signed it into law later that year.

Claman said he’d been “actively involved” in 21 pieces of legislation related to public safety. That’ll be one area of emphasis in his campaign, he said.

“I think we’ll be very focused on improving public safety, quality education, strengthening the economy and being fiscally responsible in how we manage state government,” he said.

Claman said he supports an “affordable” Permanent Fund dividend. He said the state’s recent budget turmoil — which pushed dividends down to their lowest inflation-adjusted amount in history — will require the next governor to carefully prioritize his or her budget.

“I think we should pay an affordable dividend, but I also think we need to invest in our public schools and invest in public safety to protect our neighborhoods,” Claman said.

He’s the second Democrat to officially enter the race, following former Anchorage state Sen. Tom Begich. Begich has said he plans to step aside if former Congresswoman Mary Peltola, the last Democrat to win a statewide election, enters the race. It’s unclear if she will.

Claman declined to say what differentiates him from Begich — and also declined to make a similar commitment to exit the race if Peltola enters.

“Mary Peltola is not in the race today, and I’m entering because I believe I’m the best candidate for governor,” he said. “I’m looking forward to a very positive and engaged campaign.”

Claman said he does not plan to resign his Senate seat to run for governor.

Claman is the 14th candidate to formally enter the race. The top four vote-getters in the August 2026 primary, regardless of party, will advance to the ranked choice general election.

Candidates have until June 1 to enter the race. For now, the rest of the field includes, in alphabetical order:

• Democratic former Anchorage state Sen. Tom Begich
• Republican former Fairbanks state Sen. Click Bishop
• Republican former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson
• Republican former Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum
• Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom
• Republican Mat-Su Borough Mayor Edna DeVries
• Republican podiatrist Matt Heilala
• Republican Palmer state Sen. Shelley Hughes
• Republican author Henry Kroll
• Republican former teacher and Angoon resident James Parkin
• Republican former Attorney General Treg Taylor
• Republican former Mat-Su planning commissioner Bruce Walden
• Republican activist and business owner Bernadette Wilson

State elections officials have begun reviewing signatures gathered by people opposed to Alaska’s system of open primary elections and ranked-choice general elections to determine whether a repeal ballot measure will appear before voters in 2026.

Alaskans enacted the state’s existing elections system via a ballot measure in 2020, and a repeal measure last year failed by only 737 votes out of 320,985 cast.

Proponents of the repeal vowed at that time to renew their effort and began gathering signatures in February to force another vote.

Based on state law and the number of people who voted in the 2024 statewide election, repeal supporters needed to collect signatures from at least 34,099 registered voters, including a certain minimum number in at least 30 of the 40 state House districts.

This week, supporters of the repeal measure said they were submitting more than 48,000 signatures to the Alaska Division of Elections for review.

If the repeal petition is deemed to have enough signatures, it would go before voters in either the 2026 primary or the 2026 general election, depending upon the length of next year’s state legislative session.

If voters approve the measure in 2026, all three components of the 2020 ballot measure would be repealed.

That would have three main results. Financial donors to political campaigns would be able to conceal their identity by contributing to a political nonprofit, which could donate money to causes on their behalf.

The 2020 law, currently in effect, requires campaigns to disclose the “true source” of their money.

The second effect would be the repeal of the state’s open primary system, in which all candidates, regardless of political party, run in the same race. Under the current law, the top four vote-getters in a given race advance to the general election.

If that is repealed, political parties would be able to determine the rules for deciding which of their candidates advance to the November general election.

The third change is to general election. Instead of voters being allowed to rank all candidates in order of preference, voters would be able to choose only one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes would win.

One other ballot measure, which would reimpose a limit on financial donations to political candidates, has already been certified and is slated for the 2026 ballot.

Two other ballot measures remain in the signature-gathering process. One would decriminalize several psychedelic substances, and the other would reinforce the state’s existing prohibition on noncitizen voting.

Backers of those measures must gather sufficient signatures before the start of the January legislative session in order to force a vote in 2026.