Ewing files for lieutenant governor

WASILLA — If you were thinking you wouldn’t see any local faces in the bigger statewide political races this year, think again.

Mark Ewing, who sits on the borough assembly and is a veteran of the borough’s planning commission and the Wasilla City Council, has filed to run for lieutenant governor.

According to Alaska Public Offices Commission reports and his Web-

site, a Valley resident has also filed to run for governor — Gerald Heikes, of Palmer.

Ewing is essentially running on the same platform as gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker. And the platform has one big plank — an all-Alaska natural gas pipeline following essentially the same route as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, from the North Slope to Valdez.

“He’s a genius,” Ewing said of Walker, adding that he hopes as a candidate he will be able to lend his support. “To not have a lieutenant governor that supports your vision, it’s not the way to go.”

Asked if the governor and lieutenant governor races are essentially one-issue elections centering entirely on the gas line, Ewing said he thought there were two issues — the gas line and jobs. But jobs come from the gas line and the product it carries, he said.

The two issues are hard to separate.

Natural gas, he said, could also be a boon to villages. He supports an idea U.S. Representative Don Young has floated to put a gas liquification plant where the pipeline would cross the Yukon River.

Liquified gas could then be hauled to the villages in that part of Alaska, weaning their populations off of expensive diesel fuel and creating more jobs to deliver the gas and build and maintain systems to do it.

Though both the governor’s race and the lieutenant governor’s race have already attracted a number of well-known Alaska politicians, the field of candidates will not have solidified until after the filing deadline passes on June 1.