Gregg Brelsford bills himself as the education candidate for governor. The 75-year-old is an independent running against a stacked, mostly-Republican field of candidates vying to become Alaska’s next head of state. He believes Gov. Mike Dunleavy has sold out Alaska's schoolchildren when it comes to education funding. Teacher retention issues are also bringing high costs for districts, Brelsford says, fueled in part by an ailing state retirement system.
Brelsford says he’s the only candidate making the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) a fundamental part of his platform. He says it’s alarming that the state has made little progress on cold cases, and that if elected he would create a special assistant to the governor to address the issue.
Brelsford is a Harvard-educated attorney and lives in Anchorage. But he says he formed strong ties to rural Alaska early on in his career, working with Alaska Native corporations and tribal nonprofits, including as CEO of the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. He went on to manage municipal and borough governments in Bristol Bay, and most recently worked as an Anchorage prosecutor.
Brelsford recently visited Bethel to kick off a campaign that he says is informed by his connection to rural communities. He spoke with KYUK’s Evan Erickson about his candidacy.
This interview has been significantly shortened for length and edited for clarity.
Brelsford: The main aspect of my gubernatorial campaign that comes from my background in tribal and village and rural Alaska is my focus on education. This governor is in the end of his second term, so he's in the eighth year of eight years of [his] tenure as governor. In the first seven years, he raised the per student annual funding, which is the base student allocation, he raised it $30 in seven years. That's not a typo, $30 in seven years. That's an average of $4 a year per student for seven years. What that $4 will buy? I'm showing you a loaf of bread that I bought at Swanson's this morning for $10.65, so that's $4 that the governor allocated every year for seven years. Not one, not two, not five, but seven years, $4 a year. It would buy one half of this loaf.
Funding for 130,000 K-12 students throughout the state over seven years, that's about a million students who've been deprived and had a diminished and deprived education for not one, not two, not five, but seven years. That's not an accident, that's not negligence, that's cold, calculated and cruel, intended, and that's a crime. Now I'm using the word crime metaphorically, but it's that serious to do that to a million students over seven years. You can see how pivotal the governor's position is. For eight years, he's obstructed and abandoned and betrayed and sold out our K-12 schoolchildren. We need a governor who will fight for the kids, not fight against them. Going forward, we've got to turn that around.
KYUK (Evan Erickson): What specific steps would you take immediately to change that trend of impeding public education funding?
Brelsford: I would like to work in a partnership with the legislature to make those kinds of adjustments. And so that would be resolving the funding on an annual basis, much earlier in the year, so that the school districts know where they stand before the end of the school year, which is not the case. Now they're catching up, revising their budgets and revising the termination notices that they have to send a teacher because of certain deadlines. And then, once they know they have money, they can resend those termination notices or not, depending on how much money they have. But it's extraordinarily disruptive to the administration and the management of the schools to have all the senior leaders not know how much money they have. And then last year, there was money, and then the governor vetoed it, so they had to revise their budgets. Then there was money. Then it was vetoed.
There's 54 school districts here, and every one of them was ping-ponging back and forth trying to keep up with the damage the governor was trying to do. So yeah, I want to try and work out an arrangement so that schools know earlier in the school year, or before the end of the school year, how much money they have to work with.
KYUK: What role do you believe the governor should play on climate change, and do you have any plans regarding that?
Brelsford: Yeah. I mean, it’s stating the obvious. It's irrebuttable that we are seeing more and more extreme weather throughout the state. It's wildfires, it's floods, it's [ex-]typhoon Halong. And then there was a typhoon before that a few years, you know, the strong winds pushed the Bering Sea waves up into the villages and dislocated the houses and things like that. That's a case of the governor and the governor's leadership not looking out past the end of their nose. The trajectory has been building for years now. It's not a secret the state got surprised. It could have been much, much worse, and thank God it wasn't. And I give the governor credit then for jumping in and doing good emergency management at that time, but there was no forewarning. There was no proactive monitoring at that time in that case.
We're not going to stop the Bering Sea. We're not going to stop extreme weather, but we can monitor it. We can be more proactive about monitoring and preparing for it. For example, staging emergency intervention resources ahead of time, but also looking out 10 and 20 years from now, and how do we design our communities and locate our communities, but design them for the kind of extreme weather that's clearly coming now. That's what the last administration failed to do. They didn't look out three, five, 10 years in advance and start to anticipate these things. I would make sure that the State of Alaska does that as governor [...] I would create a DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]-like agency in the state government specifically to look at, to monitor and predict and forecast these kinds of extreme weather events. But not only in terms of the events, the weather, but in terms of the preparation and the anticipation five and 10 years in advance, in terms of where the villages may need to be relocated.
We're talking now about rebuilding and relocating villages from [ex-]typhoon Halong, well, there's going to be more. We don't need to wait for the next one to hit to start thinking proactively about what to do. And so I would do a DARPA-like agency, which, you know, is the army agency that looks out five and 10 years at strategic warfare and war strategy and war equipment material in terms of what the army needs, 10 to 20 years. Now that's a model we could use here in Alaska and focus it specifically on extreme weather events. And I would create a state agency to do that.
KYUK: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
If we're going to have a state going forward over the years, in the complexity of the 21st Century, we need to educate our young people to the highest level we can to prepare them and prepare the state for their leadership in 10 to 20 years. The only way to do that is to fully fund the education system now, not like what's happened for the last eight years [...] When the governor's veto was overridden last August, so ultimately, another $600 per student was put into the BSA, the reason that happened is because of ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting brought in people who were common sense and reasonable and problem-solving oriented, who cared about schoolchildren, and so they organized and overcame the governor's veto.
So what we need going in order to have the [...] high quality education system we need for our state to thrive and grow in the future, we need to fully fund education. In order to do that, we need a governor who's going to support it, and we need legislatures who are going to support it, and generally it didn't happen before ranked choice voting. Before that, the minority group, which in terms of education, is generally Republicans, they were able to obstruct and freeze and veto education funding with just a minority group. Whereas once ranked choice voting came in, it started to change. We started to get money and override the governor's veto. So going forward, if people care about educating our kids and developing our state into a thriving, successful state in the future, people need to look at who these candidates are for governor, including me, and vote for those who support education like I do, and legislators who support it, so that we have the critical mass we need going forward next year to keep full funding for education a reality.
