Election Day is Nov. 5. This week, KYUK is airing interviews with candidates who will be on the ballot for seats in the Alaska State House and in Congress.
There are four candidates on the ballot to represent the lower Kuskokwim, House District 38, in the Alaska State House. They are incumbent Rep. Conrad “CJ” McCormick (D-Bethel), Nellie Jimmie (D-Toksook Bay), and Willy Keppel (VA-Quinhagak). Victoria Sosa (D-Bethel) will appear on the ballot, but has dropped out of the race.
Willy Keppel, a Veterans of Alaska Party candidate from Quinhagak, has run to represent the lower Kuskokwim in the past, as well as to represent the broader region in the State Senate.
Keppel sat down with KYUK’s Sage Smiley to talk about why he wants to represent the lower Kuskokwim, and what he sees as some of the most pressing issues facing the district in the coming years.
Read a transcript of the conversation below. It’s been lightly edited for clarity and flow and may contain transcription errors.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thank you so much for joining KYUK this morning. Willy Keppel, first question, why are you running to represent House District 38.
Willy Keppel: Well, good morning Western Alaska. I'm running for a lot of different reasons. I've been fighting for the same reasons, for some of the same reasons, for close to 30 years, and that's to make sure we don't have a Donlin Mine, to make sure that we get our physical house in order and start spending within our limits, that we actually have new revenues coming in. I'm against all taxes, and I'm there to see to it that we have fair representation when it comes to taxation, not like Lyman Hoffman says it's his job just to go pick one because they spent all the money, and then we're stuck with some really recessive tax that we don't want. That's just a couple of the reasons.
KYUK: Thank you. What makes you the best candidate, then, to represent the Kuskokwim Delta in the Alaska State House?
Keppel: Well, I've been paying taxes in Bethel longer than CJ McCormick has been alive, and then I added 10 more years out here in Quinhagak on top of that. So he's way too young. He shouldn't even be on the ballot in a real election, when we get rid of this ranked choice voting, he would have been eliminated. It would have just been Nellie Jimmie, which I thought was a very pleasant young lady, but she was just totally out of her league. She can't go to Juneau and need to study every question that's asked during the debate. I mean, that's not how you have a strong voice. I've been doing political coverage for four years on KEDI and I stay up to date on what happens. I lived in Bethel. I served on city councils, different committees, commissions through the years, went to all the meetings, whether I was on anything or not for decades down there, and just bird-dogging the issues to try to keep the people on top of what was happening and not just at the bottom end of who's paying for everything while the nonprofit corporations sucked in all the gravy and put the expenses on the people. That's pretty much who I am.
KYUK: So along those lines, then, what is the biggest issue facing House District 38, the Kuskokwim Delta over the next two years, so over the term that you'd be serving if elected?
Keppel: The biggest issue right now is the simple fact that they don't have the revenue to even pay for all the bills that they have passed. Even if Juneau didn't open up the doors this coming January, and we just rubber-stamped last year's budget, it would be over $150 million more. Those are just the built-in costs from contracts, inflation, everything else that the state has in place already, you're raising your cost $150 million more. We spent $15 billion last year, and we don't have the funds to cover it. That's why they steal the [Permanent Fund Dividend], and that's why on the debates you did not hear CJ McCormick or Nellie Jimmie tell you that every time all these things they want to do out here, they want to put more stuff out here in one of the villages here, one of the villages there, they don't tell you that the only place that the revenue is still there is what's left of the [Permanent Fund Dividend], which last year was – should have been $2.4 billion being distributed amongst all of the shareholders in Alaska, but was barely over $850 million. In other words, over a billion dollars they spent out of your [Permanent Fund Dividenda], and now they're down to 25% of what's left. I've been telling people this for years, I’ve run against Tiffany [Zulkosky], run against Lyman [Hoffman], and now against – well, CJ’s out, technically, he didn't win anything, so it's open race right now, as close as I can tell for this house seat. But I've been telling people for years this is where we're headed. We're headed into zero [Permanent Fund Dividends], and to state taxes of one sort or another, because people can't do the simple thing, like what we did in 2001 when we had Sen. Hoffman and seven other legislators down there during the second session of special sessions, three special sessions in a row, and they have the physical policy group working together. And their whole mission for 30 days down there was to figure out they had three tasks. They had to put the [Permanent Fund Dividend] into the Constitution. They had to, constitutionalize a spending cap, and they needed to put together a comprehensive physical policy. And actually, for 30 days, they had great conversations, both sides of the aisle, eight legislators, plus alternatives, sitting in there, they came up with the plan that even Lyman Hoffman, all of them, sat down and says, ‘Yep, all three of these things need to happen at once if we're going to move forward in life and get the state spending under control, keep be able to keep the [Permanent Fund Dividends] and help the people get out of poverty, especially in rural Alaska, where where the poverty level is so high, stealing the [Permanent Fund Dividend] doesn't help anything. It just makes people a whole lot more stressed. So we need to come back together and start concentrating on what's going on here right now. We had Bryce Edgmon the other day at the [Alaska Federation of Natives Annual Convention], I thought this is pretty interesting, because the governor's already said we're going to be starting $1 billion deficits in 2026, well, this is a year early, but here's Bryce Edgmon, because right now, the price of oil this morning was $71.8 a barrel, and the legislature needs $80 a barrel just to break even. In other words, we're losing $10. And so here you go, a couple weeks ago, Bryce Edgmon at [the Alaska Federation of Natives Annual Convention] in his speech there, he says the legislature is going to start with the deficit spend. And that tells you right there, they don't have the money for all the Base Student Allocation spending they want to do. They don't have the money for anything else they want to do, because they haven't figured out how to get things under control through the years. They duck, they dodge, and they make up things as they go. The [Permanent Fund Dividend] is still statutory. It should never even be touched by them. It should still be a full [Permanent Fund Dividend]. But yet they don't. They appropriate the [Permanent Fund Dividend], and they have everybody out here thinking that you're getting the [Permanent Fund Dividend], when in reality, that 25% [Permanent Fund Dividend] you got on the third of October was nothing more than imaginary appropriation from the Legislature. Your [Permanent Fund Dividend] is not touched by the Legislature. It's straight through. It's a straight pass through, basically. And so we have too many problems to be worrying about a lot of these other little, trivial things a lot of people are trying to make big hay about, when, in actuality, that's one side of the aisle trying to get your attention off of the real problem space in western Alaska.
KYUK: You mentioned the [Base Student Allocation]. What do you think are the biggest educational needs in the district, and how would you solve those?
Keppel: The biggest educational needs is – already the money is there, and the [Base Student Allocation] provides money for every student that attends. Our problem is that I was just listening and reading this morning: Anchorage, their attendance rates in the schools in Anchorage runs between 40% and 55% in every school in Anchorage, that's the average. Fairbanks is between 50% and 60% occupancy. In other words, even in Fairbanks at the highest, 60%, they're missing 40% of their students. That 40% is their Base Student Allocation money they're missing. And so the real question is, ‘How do we get our kids back into the classrooms?’ You know what, I mentioned at the debate, Bethel starts normally around 100 students the freshman year and graduates 50 out of their high school. I mean, last year, that was about, I think 49 graduates. I can't remember exactly, but it was about that. But 50% and when your Base Student Allocation, when you add in all the bells and whistles from the federal government that go on top of the state, the state portion comes down to $44,000 a student for Lower Kuskokwim School District. And so you multiply $44,000 times 50 students. That's just one classroom in Bethel. There's $2 million missing right there from Bethel. You don't have to take money from the [Permanent Fund Dividend] to make up for all that money that they need to keep their buildings open out here, what you need to do is you need to have an attitude adjustment amongst the parents to get their kids back into the classrooms. Because we all know a teacher cannot teach a single thing to an empty desk if there's no student in it, the teacher is just talking to the wind. And so we already have the ways and means to fully fund education. It's called fill in the desks in the classrooms.
KYUK: So moving to a different topic, what would you change about the current management of fish and game in the state?
Keppel: Well, I don't have a problem with fish and game in the state. Our problem is you have two entirely different approaches to management. One's the federal government, and the other is the state government. One favors one side of the aisle. The other favors everybody equal. State favors everybody equally. The state was never the one that wanted to shut the fishing down in the Kuskokwim, that was [Gene "Buzzy" Peltola Jr.] when he was running U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Bethel. That was Buzzy. And Buzzy is the one that shut everything down. And I used to call into Talkline back in those years, but we used to go, ‘Hey, you're sending everybody down here, or to the mouth of the river,’ is what the Feds were forcing everybody from way up river to travel all the way down there and fish unlimited hours catch what they needed, but they were forcing people to travel a couple hundred miles on water, and a lot of them didn't have boats and motors to be able to do it, never mind gas money. And so it has always been the feds trying to intervene. There's a lawsuit over the Kuskokwim right now, which state will win, but that's a navigable river, and the state has control of it. The feds are trying to muscle their way in. The feds came down here from Bethel trying to take over the bottom 12 miles of the Kanektok River here in Quinhagak, they were told to go home and stay the hell out of our neighborhood. We're part of Togiak. We don't want nothing to do with them, I flat told the federal managers that were here ‘You already messed up the Kuskokwim, you already messed up the Yukon. Why would we want you here? Go home.’ I'm all about state management.
KYUK: So this is another thing that you touched on in your introduction. But what is your stance on Donlin Gold, and why?
Keppel: I've always fought Donlin Gold, because, number one, it never came to the people. It was a closed-door deal. And the corporation went in there with, at the time I believe it was Barrick Gold, if I remember right, could have been others in there too, I don't know. And they made their agreements come out and announced, ‘Hey, we're going to have the world's biggest open pit mine up here.’ And that was how it was done. With the people, there was nothing about ‘Hey, do you think maybe we should have a vote and have a real conversation and then maybe have an area-wide vote?’ Nope, never happened. And my problem with it is – I'm not against mining everywhere, that's totally, that would be wrong. I'm just opposed as to when a mine has potential to totally destroy a subsistence way of life, because this mine, Donlin Mine, is seven miles uphill from the Kusko[kwim] and if that tailings dam breaks, which over time it will, there will be a [tectonic] shift from earthquake somewhere along the line that's going to shake that earthen dam apart and it's and every all that poison is going to end up in the Kuskokwim River. And how long it takes to recover after that is anybody's guess. But the long and the short is it's the wrong place for a mine. There's lots of places for mines to happen. There's huge open expanses of Alaska that have nobody living around them, have no fish going there, and we need the resources, or otherwise you wouldn't have the cell phones or the radios you're listening to right now.
KYUK: What should the state do that it's not currently doing to address high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and throughout the state?
Keppel: The state has tried about everything known to man, and I'll say it again, [Tundra Women’s Coalition] has done a heck of a job. The state built that building for [Tundra Women’s Coalition] over there, that's a huge building. We've thrown resources into the state troopers. We've thrown more money into village police officers, health and social services. We've tried about anything and everything. The thing is, most of our violence happens in the villages, and the villages know who has a home brew bucket going. And so a lot of this is not what can the state do, not what can law enforcement do, it's what can the villages do to police themselves and put an end to half the problems that we have out here, because alcohol is a problem for every race and every nationality around the world. It's not just strictly Natives. It's the white community, it's the Black community, it's every community, especially if the poverty level is high, the alcohol level abuse is high. That's where the problem starts. So I really don't know. I think Tundra Women’s [Coalition] is doing the very best they can do. The troopers are doing the best they can do. And, you know, I just don't know what else can be done.
KYUK: How should the state change how it interacts with tribal governments?
Keppel: It's not the state's problem how they interact with tribal governments because so far, you don't have any tribal government. You have 350 tribes out there that haven't figured out how to coordinate as one. And so what they do, what the state does is they treat every entity exactly the same. Call and make an appointment. There's nothing stopping, if you have just, let's just take Quinhagak, where I live. I told them down here the other day, ‘Well, you want, you want tribal to tribal. Well, pick your the person you want to go speak for, you make an appointment and set it up, send them to the governor's office to talk with the Chief of Staff. That's government to government. That's how the government's going to operate.’ But as long as you have total confusion amongst what's going on, it's not the state's problem to set up another government, because I'm here to tell you, legislators will never share power with anyone. That's why you can't vote on the [Permanent Fund Dividend[. It's why you can't vote on term limits. They're not going to give up their power. And so to create the idea of even creating another government to compete with their power is, I think, pretty far-fetched idea, and it's going to take a lot of work. It's something that [Alaska Federation of Natives] should be working on, because they're the ones that have the closest relationship with 350 tribes that I can think of. I can't think of anybody in a better position than [Alaska Federation of Natives], but they're pretty dysfunctional at the moment themselves. They split their own tribes apart because they've decided some don't want any mineral resource development. They driven the North Slope off. They've driven part of the Tongass corporations off. For a while Calista was at odds. I don't know where they're standing right now, but I think there's a whole lot of things. But to think that you're going to send somebody to Juneau to try and force another form of government on a legislator, I think is pretty far-fetched, and I don't see that happening.
KYUK: How should the state address the needs of communities that need to partially or fully relocate because of climate change?
Keppel: Well, all I can tell you is there's a lot of different things they could be doing out there right now that haven't been done. I've been advocating ever since I ran with Tiffany Zulkosky. If I had won that year, we would have had shot rock right down there in Napakiak, and the school wouldn't be washing away. You take a look at the shot rock walls in Bethel. You look at the piling and everything else. Bethel has been stable ever since Red Sam finished the shot rock, and that's what saved our tank farms down there. And that's been, what, 20 years ago, since we rebuilt – did everything, put in [Federal Aviation Administration] housing, rebuilt the airport tower, and all that stuff is huge, we had a big, big build that year, and that saved a lot of things. You look at Nome right now, Nome is going to turn into a deep water port, and Nome sits right on the beach too. But what's Nome have? Nome has shot rock to protect everything. So what do we really need to be doing? I think what we need to be doing is going proactive instead of reactive. All the time. We always wait til’ everything is an emergency, and then we have to fund some money. What we need to be doing is fixing the problem as we see them happening right now. Quinhagak could stand shot rock. Kwethluk could stand shot rock on their banks up there. Napakiak could stand it. Kipnuk could stand it. Tuntutuliak could stand some. I mean, there's things we need to be putting money into, and we're not doing it. We're not proactive. That's our problem.
KYUK: So this is a multi-part question: if you were elected, how would you caucus in the House, how would you communicate and or collaborate with other legislators? And what's your opinion of the Bush Caucus?
Keppel: (laughs) That’s about six questions. Well, number one, I think it's going to be pretty even split if I get elected. I may end up with one of the most powerful positions down there because I'm going to be a Veterans Party, I'm not Democrat, I'm conservative. I can work both sides of the aisle, as long as somebody has an idea that's going to help us in rural Alaska. That's where my loyalty is at: rural Alaska. It's not railbelt Alaska. I don't care whether Anchorage has problems, they have more than enough legislators to deal with their problems. What we don't have out here is we don't have people standing up for the poor people, and we have people like Bryce [Edgmon] and Lyman [Hoffman] and Tiffany [Zulkosky] and Zach Fansler and now [CJ] McCormick that always vote to steal the [Permanent Fund Dividends], which do nothing but drive the villages deeper in debt. And like Nellie Jimmie found out when she suggested taking the [Permanent Fund Dividend] but still advocating to put water, sewer in [to villages]. You do that, when you take that [Permanent Fund Dividend], you are lowering the household income from all these villages with no water and sewer pipes out there, which is the first thing the feds look at when they're coming to say, ‘All right, here we have Kipnuk, no running water, no sewer. How much do you have? What's your average income in your household? Is it enough to pay for your water sewer bill? Is it enough to pay for the upkeeps? Can the village maintain this without state funding?’ and that's the first thing that the feds and the state look at to qualify for the grants. Well, what Nellie didn't realize, she goes, ‘Yeah, we're going to take this money and give it to the schools, [Base Student Allocation], to the union, so on,’ Well, what she did was she guaranteed that all these villages with no running water were going to stay with no running water, because the only way Quinhagak got running water was because we were getting good, strong [Permanent Fund Dividends] at the time, and the inflation wasn't huge. It took them 20 years to finish this whole project down here, but it was the [Permanent Fund Dividends] that got them over the finish line on being able to afford to have running water and sewer. Now, with the [Permanent Fund Dividends] being stolen, your guarantee, and anyone that steals these [Permanent Fund Dividends] is guaranteeing our villages stay third world, honey bucket villages forever and ever. That's a fact.
KYUK: As we wrap up this interview, is there anything else you want to add about your run for the legislature?
Keppel: Well, I've been doing it an awful long time, and I guarantee I'll never vote to put males in women's sports or in the bathrooms or in their shower rooms. Women have fought long and hard for their rights, and I will fight long and hard, see to it women keep their rights. They won't be encroached on by any male. And that, I think, is an important thing. It's part of the policy that's in the platform that just passed a state Democrat committee this year down there in Juneau, when they have their annual meeting. They want this [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], they want to open up all sports. They want transgenders here, transgenders there. I don't care what you are in life, stay in your own lane, and we’ll get along fine. We always have out here, we always will. But that's one thing you need to know. I will fight for the people with no money. My loyalties are to the people that have no money, because I'm one of you. I'm not taking funding from anybody. One hundred dollars is what I'm putting into this race this year. CJ McCormick has got five pages [of donors], and I'll post them today, of all his donors that are from the other side of the mountain, union-tied, the vast, huge, vast majority of them all from the far side, all want your [Permanent Fund Dividends], all wanting you to pay the huge cost of government, instead of the government finding a way to live within their means. So I need your vote, and I really appreciate you even listening to the whole conversation here today. I thank you for having me on and with that, I'll say, ‘Good day, western Alaska.’
KYUK: Thank you very much for your time today.
Keppel: Yes, ma'am.
Find interviews with other candidates running to represent the lower Kuskokwim in the state House, and running to represent Alaska in Congress under the “Elections 2024” tab here.
In Bethel, voters can vote early through absentee in-person voting until Election Day, at the Orutsararmiut Native Council building from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Anyone who has received a mail-in ballot must have it postmarked on or before Nov. 5. Mail-in ballots also need to have a voter signature, a witness signature, and a voter identifier like a drivers’ license number or the last four digits of a social security number.
