The top-polling Republican in the Alaska governor's race has a history of being sued for not paying bills.
That's according to court records and recent reporting on Bernadette Wilson by the Anchorage Daily News.
Wilson is a conservative activist and former talk radio host who owns Denali Disposal, an Anchorage-based garbage-collection business. She was the first candidate to enter the governor's race and took the most votes among Republicans in the August primary.
Since then, Anchorage Daily News reporter Iris Samuels says, questions have lingered about Wilson's troubled financial history, starting with problems paying a mortgage and, later, her company's bills.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Iris Samuels: The interesting thing is, typically when you don't pay a bill and someone calls you out on it, you may be compelled to explain yourself, and you may say, "Oh, actually, I did try to pay this bill, but I encountered a problem, or I couldn't pay this bill. I promise I'll pay it soon." And with a couple of these lawsuits, including that first one filed in 2019, she just didn't respond. So we don't really have any insight into why she wasn't paying her bills or what her defense is.
And then again, she was sued in 2022 by another company that alleged that her company bought petroleum products from this business, but she never paid for those petroleum products. And the lawsuit actually names Denali Disposal, but it also names Bernadette Wilson personally. And eventually, again, there was no response, and again, there was a default judgment. And in that case, Bernadette Wilson's (Permanent Fund) dividend was garnished in order to pay for that.
Casey Grove: And I guess we haven't heard an explanation of why she wasn't able to pay bills?
IS: Yeah, the challenge with Bernadette Wilson is that she has not agreed to any interview with the Anchorage Daily News since, really, since I began covering this campaign in earnest. And so it's challenging to know exactly where she's coming from.
I think, in general, some people are late on payments, I think we've all probably experienced that to some degree. But what we see here is a pretty extensive pattern. You know, it's one thing if you're late on a payment once or twice, but if you've been sued by multiple different separate companies, what that really tells us is that potentially there's some kind of pattern here that is pretty salient information for someone running for governor.
CG: But she has made some public statements that at least sort of alluded to this issue in her past. And what did she actually say?
IS: Yeah, there have been a bunch of candidate forums in the past few weeks where all of the different candidates in the governor's race have showed up, and one thing that Bernadette Wilson has repeatedly referenced is her business experience.
She says, you know, she's the only candidate who's never held public office, and she sees that as an advantage. And as part of that, she touts the fact that she is a businesswoman. She says that she has the experience of having signed both sides of a paycheck. She says that she knows what it's like to hit rock bottom, and that's, I think we can see that in this court record of maybe that's what she's alluding to, but she hasn't said that explicitly.
CG: And one of her fellow Republicans in the race, one of the four candidates for governor in this ranked choice world that we live in, is former Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson. He did comment on, apparently, her financial difficulties. What did he say?
IS: Yeah, I mean, he said basically it's important for a person running for office to have their financial house in order before seeking to put the state's financial house in order.
And I think that it's actually interesting to talk more generally about what candidates are and aren't saying in this governor's race under ranked choice voting. The system that we have in place, there is a price to pay for attacking other candidates. In other states, you don't have to look far to see races in which it's all negative and it's all candidates trying to paint the other side as bad in all ways.
And what we're seeing in the (Alaska) governor's race is there's a pretty strong disincentive to saying negative things about the other candidates in the race. So we're not seeing a lot of public commentary, negative commentary, from one campaign on another. So that's in part why Dave Bronson's comment stood out.
CG: So fair to say that you reached out to the Democrat in the race, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, and the third Republican we haven't mentioned yet, Treg Taylor, and they didn't respond, or they didn't want to comment?
IS: Exactly, yeah.
CG: I do want to mention, there is a gentleman in Wasilla that has a campaign, has raised money, and has run ads against Bernadette Wilson. What's going on there?
IS: Yeah, there have been a couple different independent expenditure groups since, really, before the the primary, and these are groups that are not affiliated with any candidate, but they can spend money to sway the election in a direction that they see fit.
And so, there have been a couple groups that have been running ads or putting websites up with the intention of drawing voters' attention to some of the concerns that they have about Bernadette Wilson. And one of these people did in fact say that one of the concerns he had was with her business record, and not just what the public record shows, but the fact that she hasn't explained it and provided an explanation. And again, there may be a reasonable explanation out there, but if there is, no one's seen it.
