At the September 17 joint chamber luncheon, six of seven Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly candidates for the Kenai, Sterling and Homer seats addressed the issue of the borough funding non-departmental organizations.
Starting with District 5, the Sterling and Funny River Road seat candidates:
LaDawn Druce…
Druce: “I do support defending of the non departments, KPTMC, Carts and EED I have always supported those and believe they should continue.”
Stan Welles…
Welles: “Preliminary questions would include: is it a class two borough function, second: is there a need for the service that justifies increasing assessments to taxpayers; can the service be provided more cost effectively by the private sector.”
Marty Anderson did not attend.
The single candidate for District 8, Homer seat, Kelly Cooper…
Cooper: “We’ve showed a pattern of funding those in the past and currently but I don’t think it should be an automatic guarantee that they’ll be funded, I’d like to see a measurable matrix where we know what kind of benefits we’re getting from those services.”
And District 2, Kenai seat, candidates starting with Jake Thompson…
Thompson: “But one thing that really bothers me about it, it was never put up to vote, taxpayers never got the opportunity to say we really like this organization, go ahead and take our tax money and use it for them.”
Blaine Gilman…
Gilman: “I believe in limited government and it’s very difficult sitting on the assembly to make a determination of which non-profits are deserving and which aren’t.”
And finally Grayling Bassett…
Bassett: “I mean if people have a problem with them maybe there’s questions about how they work that we should discuss but I’m not opposed to them.”