5 run for House seat 9

PALMER — The candidates to represent District 9 in the state House of Representatives are about as diverse as the area the district encompasses.

Sometimes referred to as the highway district, the district encompasses Valdez, Delta Junction, and Glennallen and comes as far into the Valley as Farm Loop Road, taking in Sutton, Chickaloon and the Hatcher Pass area.

Three Republicans have signed up to run — incumbent Eric Feige and challengers George Rauscher and Jim Colver. The Aug. 19 primary winner will face Democrat Mabel Wimmer and Alaska Constitution Party candidate Pamela Goode in the Nov. 4 general election. Here are short profiles of each candidate:

Jim Colver

A surveyor by trade, lifelong Alaskan Jim Colver is currently a Mat-Su Borough assemblyman. This is his second stint on that body. In between, he served on the Mat-Su Borough School Board, at times as that group’s president.

If you’ve seen his campaign signs promising more fish, you probably aren’t surprised Colver has a lot to say about wildlife. Colver has pushed for changes to fishing rules to allow more salmon to get from Cook Inlet into Mat-Su streams. He said people he worked with encouraged him to run.

“They said ‘gee, we’ve never had anybody help us before, this is great, you should run for office,’” he said.

Colver also has a lot to say about infrastructure, pointing to his work pushing hard to fix traffic problems like the Seldon Road/Lucille Street intersection the borough is currently working on.

He said he already has legislation in mind to get more money to work on Valley roads.

“Currently the commissioner has discretion with these federal funds to allocate what’s in the desires of the department, set the priorities,” Colver said. “The legislation that I will propose is that these dollars in the state highway program, the state highway system classification let’s call it, will be allocated on a per-capita basis so that we would then start carving out our fair share to address our dangerous roads.”

Colver sees the Knik Arm Bridge linking Anchorage and Mat-Su as a game-changer, opening up a whole host of economic opportunities.

He also spoke about education, saying he favors school choice and giving parents options. Colver also doesn’t favor laying off teachers, police or firefighters, for that matter.

“What I think needs to happen in education is our state and federal government have got to quit handing down these expensive mandates,” he said. “They roll out another new curriculum every few years and waste millions of dollars.”

Eric Feige

Hailing from Chickaloon, West Point graduate and commercial pilot Feige is running for his third term in Juneau.

He said he wants to go back to shepherd through the legislature contracts that will get a natural gas pipeline under construction.

“People are looking to me to help deliver those contracts through the legislature. Does that mean I do that all by myself? No. But at this point people trust my judgment, they have a trust in me and I’m going to be one of the key players in getting those contracts through the legislature,” Feige said.

On the fishing issue, Feige said that he isn’t convinced that legislative fixes will bring more salmon to Valley streams. He thinks natural cycles play a greater role.

“When the sea surface temperatures off (British Columbia) and Northern Alaska is very warm on average, we get great fish returns,” he said. “That cycle runs everywhere between 10 to 30 years in duration.”

Feige gets a lot of heat for, in his words, being a “stick in the mud” on the issue of the Knik Arm Bridge. He said that transportation issues are a big deal in his district, which has 500 miles of state highway.

“If the DOT budget starts getting burdened by a bridge and the state budget starts getting burdened by a bridge because the bridge isn’t generating the projected revenue, then my district has a problem and it’s my job to represent my district not to fall in lock step with a bunch of other legislators,” Feige said.

Pamela Goode

It was a lot of infighting and party corruption that drove Goode to seek a party other than the Republican Party. She found a new home in the Alaska Constitution Party.

“They’re all about the constitution and its underpinning biblical principle and values,” she said.

Liberty is Goode’s driving principle. She said it’s what drove her to settle in Delta Junction in an unincorporated part of the state that lacks a local government.

She said Delta is, “a very special place in Alaska. People actually own their land because you do not pay perpetual property taxes to the government.”

She said her No. 1 issue is that people don’t have access to their legislature. The body meets in Juneau, spending an incredible amount of money to transport everyone there each year.

“I believe that the people of Alaska have already said more than once that they want to have access to their legislators and it needs to be moved,” she said.

Another issue for her is privacy, something Alaska, like few other states, has chosen to enshrine in its constitution. She said invasions of privacy through federal spying programs have gone too far, as has the collection of data through the Common Core Curriculum federal program.

“I’ve been fighting common core in our local school district for over a year,” she said. “It is an unconstitutional program but they keep welcoming it in.”

She also wants the state to implement a sustainable budget.

“In the last two years this legislature has burned up six billion dollars. That’s almost a third of our savings,” she said.

Eventually, she said, the state will have to implement a sales tax or an income tax.

George Rauscher

An Alaska resident for 36 years and director of the Sutton Community Council for eight of those, Rauscher said he’s the candidate in the primary who isn’t getting big donations from special interests.

“My campaign is largely supported by people who actually live in our district who donate money to my campaign and I will be voting the people’s interest, not special interests. I will be representing the people of my district when I get to Juneau,” he said.

He said he wants to combat federal overreach and work for resource development to bring family-wage jobs to his district.

“Infrastructure is probably one of the most important factors to economic development of our state,” he said. “There are a lot of (Road Service Areas) that cannot even afford to rebuild their roads. They are deteriorating at a rapid rate.”

Legislators should work hard to get better salmon returns in Mat-Su, Rauscher said.

“I think it’s probably one of the most important things that we can do for our tourism industry,” he said.

He also is not a fan of changes to school curriculum.

“I hate to use the words ‘Common Core’ but I think that is something that we need to look into,” he

said.

Mabel Wimmer

From the lodge she owns and operates, Wimmer said she believes her candidacy gives voters a choice in the general election, something they don’t always have in the deeply conservative Mat-Su.

“I think that it’s not a good idea for somebody to run uncontested. Also, I think that in our area, which is extremely huge — it’s Whittier, Valdez, Fairbanks, Palmer — we just have a lot of different voices and we’re only being represented by the conservative voice and it’s an opportunity for everybody in our area to have a voice,” she said.

Wimmer’s lodge in Mendeltna is a zero-waste operation, recycling and reusing 90 percent of its waste.

“We have a music festival here,” she said. “Sixty percent of the waste from our music festival was recycled.”

She said that one of the things she would fight for in Juneau is subsistence hunting and fishing rights. Another is marriage equality. Alaska has amended its constitution to restrict marriage to one-man-one-woman. Wimmer wants to change it back.

“As we’re seeing with other states it’s being contested and that’s a lot of costs for the state to have to fight those kinds of battles that are unnecessary,” she said.