House District 17: Anchorage: Downtown Anchorage
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William "Zack" Fields
(Dem)
How do you plan to address the challenges of funding, teacher recruitment and retention, and ensuring educational equity across remote, rural and urban communities in Alaska in order to improve overall educational outcomes?
According to the U.S. Energy Administration in 2023, Alaska generated about 25% of its total electricity from renewable energy sources. What other alternatives do you think would help with our energy issues?
What options would you suggest where Alaska can increase our state revenue?
What could the Alaska legislature do to help restore voters’ trust in the integrity of our elections system?
Do you support or oppose continuation of our current open primary/ ranked choice voting election system. Why?
Campaign Phone
9072012895
We need to fund education to reduce class sizes and ensure schools can provide essential programs including IGNITE, career and technical education, arts, and music. Base Student Allocation (BSA) state funding is the key driver to reduce class sizes and preserve important programs.
To achieve academic excellence, we must fix Alaska's worst-in-the-nation retirement system for teachers and first responders. I support restoring a modern defined benefit system (such as SB 88 in last session) to improve teacher tenure. Extensive data indicate teachers become increasingly effective as they build up experience, so we need to retain teachers in order to improve academic achievement.
Analysis of our electric grid suggests that we could reduce costs for consumers by building more low-cost wind and solar generation. Specifically, a 76% renewable portfolio would be the lowest cost mix for electric generation, and deploying more low-cost electric generation would conserve natural gas for heating.
We also need to restore investments in weatherization, since improving home and business efficiency helps reduce consumers and businesses' largest utility cost, which is heating.
We should pay out smaller PFDs and increase the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the Permanent Fund. This is consistent with the Constitutional purpose of the Fund as established by voter initiative in 1976.
I also support closing the S-Corps loophole for large companies so Hilcorp is taxed equitably vis a vis other oil producers which are already paying state corporate income taxes.
There are modest election reforms we can and should pass, such as the bipartisan bill that the Senate Bipartisan Majority passed last year (which unfortunately died in the House). However, the main thing we can do to increase confidence in election is condemn demagogues who baselessly attack our democracy.
I support open primaries and ranked choice voting because open primaries encourage bipartisan collaboration and deter the kind of toxic partisanship that has crippled our federal legislature.
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