Parnell: ‘Action’ speaks to voters

WASILLA — Sean Parnell summed up in three words what he feels separates him from the pack of candidates seeking to oust him as governor.

“Action. Not words,” Parnell said during a meeting Thursday with the Frontiersman’s editorial board.

The governor said that unlike the crowded field seeking the state’s top seat he’s actually doing work to solve the state’s problems.

The governor stood on his record, saying he feels that his work in helping ease the tax burden on the cruise ship industry and bolster advertising for the state will create jobs.

He also is proud of the college scholarship program he pushed through the Legislature earlier this year. Parnell said he thinks the program is more than just a scholarship. He described the scholarship as performance-based, saying it’s tied to what classes students take in high school and the grades they achieve there.

He believes it will help reduce the state’s high school dropout rate and even spur high schools to improve so students can take the classes needed to compete for scholarships. It may even help with parental involvement.

“Would I have spent an extra half hour on my kid’s math if I thought there were a scholarship?” he asked, saying he likely would have.

Then there’s his record on military affairs. Parnell said he set up the Alaska Military Force Advocacy and Structure Team to try to get more military missions in Alaska. The group’s work has already paid off, he said, in helping prepare the Tanana River for a railroad bridge to be built over it to access a training facility.

Parnell was asked about predictions that foreclosures on Alaska homes will explode sometime this year, an issue of great importance in the Valley, which has seen much more than its fair share of new home construction in recent years.

The governor said one thing his administration has done is set up a deferred maintenance program, which could indirectly help by creating jobs so people won’t have to lose their homes. Deferred maintenance projects employ in-state workers more reliably than large capital projects, which often have to import labor from Outside.

“That’s our mom-and-pop kind of work,” he said, adding that the capital budget passed this year is also healthy and contains a number of projects to put Alaskans to work.

Asked if the state could do anything to stop the kind of lending that led to the housing market collapse, Parnell said he wasn’t sure.

“We had a huge housing crash in ’86. The lending practices for the local banks at that point in time changed dramatically,” he said.

But whether bad practices in Alaska contributed at all to the current collapse, he couldn’t say.

“I have not heard of that as a problem in our local banks,” he said.

The Frontiersman also asked about the recent controversy that has surrounded former state Rep. Nancy Dahlstrom’s appointment to a job as an adviser to the governor for military and veteran affairs. The accusation was that the job was created during Dahlstrom’s time in the Legislature and she was offered the job too soon after she left.

“When people claim that the (Alaska) Constitution has been violated they haven’t read it,” he said. “I knew from my experience that other governors had hired legislators for their expertise.”

Parnell said he consulted with the state’s Department of Law to see how to proceed within the bounds of the law and was told the way he went about it was just fine. Dahlstrom had no chance to vote on appropriations to fund the job and thus a conflict of interest didn’t exist.

“You can ask no more of a governor,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.