Valley has hopeful for Senate Seat C

By ANDREW WELLNER Frontiersman.com

MAT-SU — For the first time in a while, the Valley has put up a candidate for Senate Seat C, which runs from Fairbanks to Valdez to Palmer.

There are five people in the race. Republican David Eastman hails from the Palmer-Fishhook area. Republicans Click Bishop and Ralph Seekins, and Democrat Anne Sudkamp, are Fairbanks residents. A fifth candidate, Bill Ward, is from Delta Junction.

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Click Bishop

Until relatively recently, Bishop was head of the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Prior to that he was administrator of the Alaska Operating Engineers/Employers Training Trust for 15 years.

That’s the same organization that recently built a state-of-the-art training facility off of Palmer-Fishhook Road to train people to run heavy equipment.

He’s been active in training and labor groups throughout the state. In 2008, he won the Thomas Cashen Award for lifetime training from the Alaska AFL-CIO.

David Eastman

A former military policeman for the Army at Fort Richardson who left the service last year at the rank of captain, Eastman was on the short list of names Gov. Sean Parnell had to choose from to replace the late Rep. Carl Gatto.

He’s been active in politics since 2007, he said, and was Joe Miller’s campaign manager through the primary, after which he became a fellow at the John Jay Institute working on political philosophy and constitutional ideas.

He said he’s running for the state Senate because he’d like to see reform.

“I’d like to see parents given more options for choosing the best education for their children,” Eastman said. “I would like to see a balanced budget amendment in our state constitution.”

Ralph Seekins

Owner of Seekins Ford-Lincoln in Fairbanks since 1977, Ralph Seekins served as a Senator from 2003 to 2006.

He has four kids and a “lifelong love of horses,” according to his Facebook page. That love of horses he expresses through owning and running a Fairbanks-area ranch to breed and show quarter horses.

He’s also active in Republican politics, serving as a national committeeman for Alaska since 2008.

Anne Sudkamp

Sudkamp says her platform includes three main planks — energy, infrastructure and people.

On energy: “I would favor dropping oil taxes if we had agreements in writing with the oil companies or we had enough analysis to show that would indeed help to grow the state of Alaska,” she said. “People are leaving the state of Alaska because they can’t afford the energy costs here.”

On infrastructure: “When I talk about infrastructure I talk about both cyber infrastructure and brick and mortar,” she said. “What would really bring us far, far forward is if we had a much better cyber infrastructure throughout the state of Alaska.”

On people: “I consider them our greatest resource and we need the education, the training and the support for the people to grow our state,” she said.

She worked for University of Alaska Anchorage — running a now-defunct publication to familiarize businesses with opportunities in the Russian Far East — and University of Alaska Fairbanks as a research administrator.