State Government

Conservative activist Bernadette Wilson announced on the steps of the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau on Tuesday that she’s entering the race for governor.

Wilson, a business owner who has also led conservative policy groups, pitched herself as a political outsider in an interview.

“I think it’s time that we take someone with a business background and entrepreneurial spirit, someone that hasn’t been jaded, you know, within the halls of this building, and we get infrastructure done,” she said. “We’ve got to sit down and have a serious conversation about how we’re going to get education in this state. There’s no reason Alaska shouldn’t be No. 1.”

Wilson says she has deep roots in the state as the great-niece of former Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel and a member of the Naknek Native Village Council. She is the majority owner of the nine-year-old Anchorage garbage company Denali Disposal, according to state records.

Wilson has also been active in conservative politics. She’s a sponsor of the latest ballot initiative seeking to ask voters in 2026 to repeal Alaska’s open primaries and ranked choice voting. Until recently, she was the interim executive director of the Alaska Policy Forum, a conservative think tank. Prior to that, she was the state director for the Alaska arm of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group affiliated with brothers Charles and David Koch. Wilson was the top choice in a straw poll of readers conducted by the conservative site Must Read Alaska.

In her announcement, broadcast on social media by Must Read Alaska, Wilson said her lack of experience in elected office was an asset.

“Current leaders like President Donald Trump and Congressman Nick Begich, previous leaders like Governor Hickel have all gone and done wonderful things for our state and for our country, but they all have one thing in common,” she said. “None of them had a government bureaucrat background when they started. Indeed, even when President Ronald Reagan first ran for governor of California, he had not been in government.”

Wilson also lamented the state’s failure to pay Permanent Fund dividends in line with a formula in state law that lawmakers have essentially ignored since the mid-2010s, when oil prices crashed and the state started relying on an annual draw from the Permanent Fund to pay for state services. The Permanent Fund draw has replaced oil revenue as the top source of the state’s unrestricted cash, which pays for everything from state troopers and schools to roads, bridges and ferries.

As oil prices drop on weakening global demand and growing supply from abroad, the state faces a grim fiscal future. Senators recently approved an austere budget while warning of even tougher times to come. Legislators in the predominantly Democratic bipartisan coalition in the Senate have pushed to expand taxes on out-of-state corporations and oil and gas companies to help close the gap, but they have run into resistance from Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the narrowly divided House.

Asked how she would address the state’s looming budget crunch, Wilson said she would reduce the state workforce.

“We have one of the highest rates of public employees, government employees per capita than any other state,” she said. “It’s time for us to look at the bloat. Is it going to be painful? Absolutely, it is. But we need to take a strong look at that budget and figure out, what are we going to do?

Though she holds a number of traditionally conservative positions on resource extraction and development, Wilson breaks from Gov. Mike Dunleavy on one key issue: She said she would like to see a significant increase in education funding in an effort to improve student performance.

“I am tired of hearing an arbitrary number on education continually get thrown out, whether it’s $1,000, $1,200, $700. I want to support a (basic school funding) increase that’s the number that the education bureaucrats can look at me and say, Bernadette, that’s the number that’s going to make us number one in the country,” she said. “That’s the number that I want to know. That’s the number that we should be supporting.”

Dunleavy has repeatedly said funding alone would not improve the state’s school system. Education advocates have pushed for a more than $1,800 increase in basic funding to restore schools’ buying power to what it was in 2011, though lawmakers and the governor have said the decline in oil prices has made such a move unaffordable. A bipartisan bill that would, among other reforms, boost basic per-student funding by $700 is pending on Dunleavy’s desk, and he told superintendents on Thursday he plans to veto it unless lawmakers pass additional education policy changes.

But Wilson shares some positions with Dunleavy and other conservative Republicans on public education, including support for so-called education savings accounts, a voucher-like system that allows students to use government funds to attend private schools.

That’s an issue in a high-profile constitutional case working its way through Alaska’s court system challenging the use of state homeschool funds on private school tuition. The Alaska Constitution prohibits the use of public funds “for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”

Wilson lives in Anchorage, but she said she kicked off her campaign in Juneau to illustrate her willingness to go “right into the belly of the beast.”

Wilson joins an all-Republican field for the 2026 race alongside Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and former Fairbanks Sen. Click Bishop.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday ordered a freeze on most state hiring, out-of-state travel and new regulations as oil prices tumble. Dunleavy outlined the freeze in an administrative order released Friday afternoon.

Oil production in Alaska is expected to increase in the coming years as new projects like Pikka come online. But, at the same time, the price of a barrel of North Slope crude fell more than $10 in April, and federal forecasters say they expect oil prices to fall further in the coming months. Oil no longer provides a majority of the state’s revenue. But it’s still a significant factor, and an especially volatile one.

Dunleavy’s office declined an interview request Monday. In a statement, Dunleavy said falling prices meant the state had no choice but to institute the freezes.

“This is the right thing to do,” Dunleavy said. “Alaskans expect us to manage their resources wisely. With oil prices dropping and our savings accounts unable to carry us through even one year of full state operations, we have no choice but to act now. ”

Rep. DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, said the freezes were a fast-acting mechanism to address the drop in state revenues.

“He’s just looking to make some cuts wherever he can, and that’s probably the quickest and fastest way he can do it,” she said.

But some lawmakers say they’re concerned about the impact of the hiring, travel and regulation freeze on the operations of state government. Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, said he largely agreed with Dunleavy’s decision to impose the freezes, but he said he was wary of the consequences.

“I think some of those things are probably in order if you look at the oil price and where we’re at in the budget,” he said. “I would certainly like to see the implications. I think, probably, the hiring freeze should probably be on a case-by-case basis.”

Some agencies, especially those dealing with public safety, are exempt from the freeze. The Division of Public Assistance, which administers aid programs like Medicaid and SNAP, is also exempt. The exempt positions include Alaska State Troopers, correctional and probation officers, airport police and fire officials, and “employees that provide patient, resident, or food services at 24-hour institutions.”

The out-of-state travel freeze applies regardless of funding source, meaning state employees can’t travel outside Alaska even if a third party pays for it. In-state travel is restricted to essential business.

State agencies can apply for waivers of the hiring and travel freezes.

The freezes come after a number of high-profile trips by the governor to Washington, D.C. and Asia. Dunleavy was listed as a featured speaker at the conservative Hudson Institute and an investment conference in Maryland on Monday.

“The freeze is aimed at limiting non-essential travel. The Governor will continue to travel when needed to directly support Alaska’s core interests,” Dunleavy spokesperson Jeff Turner said in an email. “Additionally, waivers can be requested by a state agency for travel related to protecting the safety of the public or meet essential State needs.”

House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, said he finds it hard to square the cost-control measures with the fact that Dunleavy’s first-draft budget came with a $1.5 billion deficit.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.

Edgmon said he hoped the freeze would not prevent administration officials from working with legislators in the final days of the legislative session. Dunleavy has already warned administration staff to stay away from the Capitol in the session’s closing days ahead of May 21.

Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, said lawmakers were able to come up with a balanced budget without a hiring freeze, and he said he’s worried about the impact of a freeze on state services.

“There’s a lot of vacancies in the state, and those positions are funded,” he said.

Roughly one in six state jobs were vacant at the beginning of this year. Stedman said he was especially concerned about the Alaska Marine Highway System, where about half the jobs were vacant at the beginning of the year.

“You can’t run the Marine Highway without licensed staff, a licensed crew, and you don’t get licensed crew unless you hire them,” he said.

The head of the largest union for state employees, Alaska State Employees Association Executive Director Heidi Drygas, said she worried that the hiring freeze could burn out an already stressed state workforce.

“I worry they are more of a face-saving measure than actually saving state funds,” she said. “I say that because it could actually cost more. Right now we are paying state employees huge amounts of overtime because the work has to be done.”

Drygas said it’s long past time for lawmakers and the governor to come together on a long-term plan for the state’s fiscal future.

Dunleavy sent a letter to the heads of the state House and Senate inviting them to join a “joint team” to come up with a fiscal plan.

In that letter, Dunleavy said he “cannot support standalone tax measures.” The House and Senate recently approved a tax bill that aims to bring in more tax revenue from out-of-state corporations. The bill is awaiting the governor’s signature or veto.

Alaska would be on the same time zone as Seattle for four months of the year, if a bill passed Monday by the Alaska Senate becomes law.

The Senate voted 18-2 to pass Senate Bill 26, which would eliminate daylight saving time in Alaska and ask the federal government to put Alaska on Pacific Standard Time.

“Senate Bill 26 is a compromise that addresses long-standing frustrations with Alaska’s timekeeping system,” said Sen. Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River and the bill’s sponsor. “This bill would permanently exempt Alaska from daylight saving time, keeping us on standard time year-round.”

If fully implemented, the bill would leave Alaska in the same time zone as Seattle from November through early March.

The rest of the year, it would be one hour behind that city, as Washington state observes daylight saving time. If Congress passes a bill allowing permanent daylight saving time, Alaska would return to being one hour behind Seattle permanently.

Merrick said her bill is supported by the state’s tourism trade association, as well as financial institutions, “because it keeps us within three or four hours of the stock market and financial center in New York.”

Daylight saving time has been a regular topic of conversation in the Alaska Legislature.

The Alaska Senate voted to request the elimination of daylight saving time in 2015, but the House failed to pass the bill.

No DST bill was introduced in 2017 or 2018, but since then, a daylight saving time bill has been introduced in either the House or Senate every year since 2019.

The bill goes in a different direction from Alaska’s neighbor, Yukon, which moved to permanent daylight time in 2020, leaving the territory geographically adjacent but two hours away, chronologically, from November through early March.

For a century, Alaska stretched over four time zones. That changed in 1983, when the state’s time zones were consolidated to two, with Yakutat being the only community that kept its previous time zone. The result means that in most parts of Alaska, the clock has little to do with the position of the sun in the sky.

Sen. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, proposed a competing bill that would move Alaska to permanent Alaska Standard Time, but that idea stalled out in committee.

“I do believe that permanent standard time makes more sense for daylight. It’s more in sync for where we’re at. However, because we’re at such a high latitude, it matters a lot less,” he said, explaining that the amount of daylight changes rapidly throughout the year.

Kawasaki ended up voting for the bill.

“My main issue with time is that you have to reset your clocks twice, and that’s a big pain in the ass,” he said.

Sens. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, and Robert Myers, R-North Pole, shared his concerns about solar time but voted against the bill.

“I’ve opposed changing it numerous times over the years,” Stedman said.

“It just doesn’t work relative to sun time,” he said.

Myers said the bill has the potential to aggravate that problem.

“I am not a fan of the time zone change portion of that bill,” he said. “Most of Alaska … is already an hour off of where we should be solar time, and there are some studies out there dealing with both health and energy use that say we should stay close to solar time.”

“I really would love to see the federal government repeal daylight saving time across the board,” he said.

In April, President Donald Trump said he was open to the idea and urged Congress to pass a bill making daylight saving time permanent, thus eliminating the annual clock change.

That makes this the right time to pass SB 26, Merrick said.

“Having the federal administration on board greatly increases our chances of successfully  eliminating daylight saving time,” she said. “I know sometimes change is hard, but SB 26 will keep us from having to change our clocks, at least.”

The filing period to run for an elected position in Southeast Alaska’s proposed Xunaa Borough closes on Friday. 

But, a pending appeal of a state commission’s approval of the new borough could halt the special election scheduled this July, when residents will be asked whether to create Alaska’s 20th borough. If approved, it would be the first new borough created in Alaska since Petersburg in 2013.

The state’s local boundary commission approved the City of Hoonah’s request to form a borough late last year. This isn’t the first time the City of Hoonah has tried to create a borough. It’s a plan that has seen a handful of different versions over the last three decades.

The proposal involves the City of Hoonah dissolving its city government to add more than 10,000 square miles of nearby unincorporated land and water — including Glacier Bay, Chichagof Island, and more — to form one unified, regional government.

Hoonah city officials say that forming a borough would give residents more say in the future development of the region. A new borough would also be allowed to collect a 1% seasonal sales tax during the summer cruise season and would likely mean more state funding for the Hoonah School District.

But, not everyone is on board with the plan — a recently filed appeal and motion to stay could halt the election.

The communities of Tenakee Springs, Pelican, Gustavus and Elfin Cove first filed formal requests for the commission to reconsider its decision to approve the borough last year.

They cited “substantial procedural errors” and argued that their exclusion would deny them a say in regional decision-making, among other concerns.

The commission’s approval last year also came despite a recommendation by staff to deny the petition, also citing substantive concerns with the plan.

Commission members took up the request to reconsider earlier this year but maintained their original decision. Then, in April, the communities filed an appeal and a motion to stay – that would pause any actions related to the election while the appeal is still pending. 

The judge has not yet ruled on whether to grant or deny the stay while the appeal is pending. A spokesperson for the state’s division of elections said they could not comment on how that might impact the current election timeline.

As it stands, the special election ballot will ask voters whether the borough should be formed and if there should be a 1% seasonal sales tax. It will also ask voters to elect a seven-member borough assembly, including a mayor, and a five-member school board.

The election will be conducted entirely by mail. Ballots will be sent to registered voters on or before June 23 and must be postmarked or returned by July 15. 

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game does not have the right to carry out a controversial plan to kill bears this spring, at least for now, a state judge has ruled.

Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin found that the department’s predator control program, aimed at boosting a caribou population that has declined dramatically since the 1990s, remains unconstitutional, despite an Alaska Board of Game emergency authorization for the bear-killing to resume.

Through the program, which began in the spring of 2023 after the board first authorized it in 2022, the department has killed 175 brown bears, five black bears and 19 wolves.

Rankin’s order, released late Wednesday, was in response to a request by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance for a restraining order barring the department from carrying out this year’s predator control. The department had planned to start culling bears this weekend.

A restraining order is not needed because the program is already legally invalid, under a ruling issued by Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi on March 14, Rankin said.

Neither the Department of Fish and Game’s March 21 petition for an emergency nor the Board of Game’s March 27 approval of the emergency changed the fact that there is an existing court ruling that the predator control program violates the constitution, Rankin said.

The state has not satisfied the requirements in Guidi’s order for adequate public notice and analysis of the predator control program’s impact on the bear population, Rankin said. Because of that, “the Court specifically finds that the requirements of the Order have not been met and are still binding on the State,” she said.

Critics of the state’s program argue that bears are not to blame for the Mulchatna Caribou Herd’s decline. They point to numerous other factors, including a changing habitat in which tundra vegetation favorable to caribou has been replaced by woody plants favorable to moose.

They also argue that the predator control program poses a threat to bear populations, including those that roam through Katmai National Park and Preserve.

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued the state in 2023 to block the program, and that lawsuit resulted in Guidi’s March ruling.

On Thursday, the alliance counted Rankin’s ruling as a victory, even though it did not result in a restraining order blocking the state’s plans to start roving bears on Sunday.

“The Superior court ruled that the existing predator control program was unlawful, which means that the State poached almost 200 bears over the past few years, including dozens of cubs, from planes and helicopters,” Nicole Schmitt, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “Instead of remedying those legalities, the State and the Board tried to skirt the public process again. We’re grateful the Court saw this process for what it was: an attempt to run-around a Court order without meaningful engagement from the public.”

In their petition to the Board of Game for emergency authorization, state officials argued that they were under a time crunch to remove bears from the caribou herd’s range.

The bear culling has to be conducted during the spring and early summer, the time when caribou are giving birth to calves on which the bears might prey, department officials argued in their petition and at the March Board of Game meeting.

But Rankin, in a hearing Tuesday, expressed skepticism about the justification for the emergency finding.

She peppered Kimberly Del Frate, an assistant attorney general for the state, with questions about how the emergency action would not be seen as an end run around Guidi’s ruling.

“I know it’s a hard fact, but you need to just admit it: The emergency was created because you lost with Judge Guidi. You wouldn’t have needed to do it if you didn’t have this decision,” Rankin told Del Frate.

Department of Fish and Game officials did not provide information Thursday on their plans now for predator control in the Mulchatna area. The department was still evaluating Rankin’s decision, a spokesperson said.

Joe Geldhof, one of the attorneys representing the organization, said he fears that state officials will carry out their predatory control program in defiance of the ruling.

He and fellow attorney Joel Bennett, a former Board of Game member, see parallels with the Trump administration’s defiance of court rulings.

To try to bolster the case against the bear-killing program – and potentially give Rankin legal grounds to issue a restraining order against the Department of Fish and Game — Geldhof and Bennett on Wednesday filed an amended complaint that adds the Board of Game’s emergency authorization to the list of state actions that they want to overturn.

In the state of Alaska’s published travel report for top administration officials, the Department of Law disclosed spending $650 to send Attorney General Treg Taylor to a two-day conference in Colorado last year.

Not mentioned in that report, however: at least $20,000 that a corporate-funded group spent on a trip for Taylor and his wife, Jodi, to the Normandy region of France last summer.

Attendees stayed at a five-star hotel favored by Hollywood stars and polo players and dined at Le Côté Royal, where patrons can spend 38 euros on braised pork cheeks, according to a schedule obtained by a watchdog group.

Roughly half of the country’s attorneys general participated, according to the Associated Press. Their schedule called for four hours of business meetings and more than two days of ceremonies and sightseeing, including guided tours of World War II battlegrounds and a centuries-old abbey.

Taylor ultimately did report that trip in an unpublished financial disclosure he filed in March that’s only released from state regulators upon request.

The disclosure also reported a 2023 trip to South Africa, where attorneys general were scheduled to take an “educational tour” of wine estates and a daylong trip to a game reserve that offers viewing of lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and buffalo. Participants were accompanied by corporate officials from firms like Uber, TikTok and Albertsons, the parent company of the Safeway grocery store chain, according to reporting by CNN.

Taylor’s participation underscores watchdogs’ growing concerns about the group that paid for the trips, the Attorney General Alliance, or AGA, which has raised millions of dollars from corporations — including some that have had legal disputes with states.

Taylor recently assumed the alliance’s chairmanship, his department announced earlier this year, and he is holding a cybersecurity-focused meeting for the group in Alaska in August.

The alliance, created in 2019, has come under increasing criticism, including from the former head of the century-old National Association of Attorneys General, who said in his retirement letter that the alliance, a competing group, is “overwhelmingly dependent on corporate and lobbyist money” and creates pathways for attorneys general to have their travel paid by entities they are “investigating or suing.”

“The simple fact is they are a lobbyist access group with some programming to cover for it,” said Tom Jones, head of the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative group that’s used public records requests to expose some of the alliance’s corporate links and sponsored trips.

Taylor’s office describes the alliance as a nonpartisan forum where attorneys general “work in cooperation to share ideas, educate on emerging issues, build relationships and foster enforcement through meetings, panels, working groups, and social activities.”

In an interview at his downtown Anchorage office, Taylor said he took vacation time for his trips to South Africa and France, on which he flew business class.

And he vehemently defended AGA’s value. In addition to trips, he said, it also provides trainings for state attorneys on subjects like organized retail crime, online gaming and artificial intelligence.

Taylor said that AGA-sponsored trips contain substantive panels and discussions — such as, in South Africa, sessions on intellectual property rights and cybersecurity.

And he added that the relationships he’s developed with experts and corporate officials on trips have helped him and other attorneys general resolve problems without the need for “long, nasty and expensive” litigation.

But he also rejected the idea that those relationships make it more difficult for attorneys general to hold corporations accountable: He noted that states have sued and litigated against major sponsors of AGA like Amazon and Pfizer.

“The only benefit they have is that I do know who they are. And they do know who I am, and they can reach out,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop us from doing our jobs as AGs, as we’ve proven over and over again.”

Taylor is a former top attorney for a large, Indigenous-owned oil and gas contracting business, and he began his tenure in state government in 2018 as deputy attorney general in charge of the civil division at the Alaska Department of Law.

Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed him attorney general in 2021.

The AGA was created in 2019 by a group of Western attorneys general and has grown to include more than 40 states and territories, according to its website.

Alaska pays some $10,000 in yearly membership fees. But Taylor acknowledged that a “very, very low percentage” of the AGA’s budget comes from those dues and that the rest comes from sponsors.

CNN reported that the group collected nearly $27 million in sponsorships between 2019 and 2023 — and allows companies, depending upon the size of their contributions, to suggest “speakers, panelists, working groups, white papers and events.”

Jones, from the conservative advocacy group, said one problem with the corporate participation in the trips to foreign countries is that “the other side of that conversation” is not happening there.

People who would advocate for tougher legal scrutiny of corporations, he said, “don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars a year to pay into associations to buy time in Normandy with the attorneys general.”

Taylor said he understands criticism that traveling internationally for AGA programming isn’t necessary in the Zoom era, which, he added, “is why I take personal time for those trips.”

He also said that he paid for his six children and one of their spouses to accompany him on the trip to Normandy, which they followed with a weeklong stay at an Airbnb on southern France’s Mediterranean coast to explore the Pyrenees, “since I’m already there.”

Amid a spate of negative press coverage and public records requests about the alliance, though, Taylor acknowledged that the group has room for improvement and will consider potential changes.

“AGA is a worthless organization if AGs can’t take advantage of the things that they offer,” he said. “And if they can’t take advantage of the things that they offer because of the types of trips that are occurring, then we need to change those types of trips.”

Detailed documentation of Taylor’s alliance-paid trips — including travel confirmations and receipts for plane tickets — is not public because expenses covered by a third party do not need to be recorded, said Alan Birnbaum, a state attorney and public records specialist who handled a Northern Journal request to the Department of Law.

[Read the Department of Law’s response to Northern Journal’s records request]

Birnbaum cited a state administrative manual that says that if travel is “immaterial” to an agency travel budget, related transactions don’t need to be “recorded as an expenditure and a revenue.”

At Taylor’s direction, Birnbaum later released some general itineraries for the trips, though more detailed documentation was still withheld.

Taylor said he did not know whether he’d deleted the requested records, but, he added: “I cull my email all the time.” He also said that state law aims to define what he described as “the limits of a public record.”

“Any time we start to diminish what a public record is, that’s something that I worry about, because that is a slippery slope: ‘Well, you did it in this case. Why, now, won’t you release the memo that you wrote the governor on this issue? Do you have something to hide?’” Taylor said. “That’s just one of those roads that I’ve just made a policy decision, we’re not going to go around.”

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.