Senate District D incumbent Jesse Bjorkman and challenger Ben Carpenter participated in a candidate forum at the Soldotna Public Library earlier this week to answer questions on a wide range of topics, including state spending, energy production in the Cook Inlet, Alaska education, and more. Sterling Democrat Tina Wegener was also invited to the forum but did not attend.
The two are perhaps most disparate on the topic of state finance, where Carpenter favors a state income tax and more restrictive spending, and Bjorkman relief to the Alaskan economy is more likely to happen through investment in infrastructure like education and the criminal justice system.
“We cannot tax ourselves into prosperity,” said Bjorkman. “What we’ve seen clearly is that until we institute a fix for the dividend, there’s no guarantee that the statute will be followed. Which is why I firmly agree that if the legislature won’t follow the law, we have to change the law. The answer, however, is not taxing Alaskans and people who work in this state in order to pay more money out in the state where some of us work.”
“We have a spending problem in the state,” said Carpenter. “It focuses, or it is generated, around the legislature’s ability to continue spending all sources of revenue that come into it. So, as long as we’ve got money to spend, we keep spending it. We aren’t looking at any further past this year’s budget, so we have to address that by starting with controlling our spending.”
On Cook Inlet gas production, Carpenter believes that the state has overregulated energy companies and placed itself in a bind with production. Bjorkman said that the greatest relief to natural gas struggles lies in the construction of a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope and that energy producers are saying gas availability beneath the Inlet is not what it once was.
What we have done is over the last decade or so, we have regulated ourselves out of competition and additional producers in the continent,” said Carpenter. “We have wanted, as Alaskans, we have wanted to say go produce gas and produce it at the lowest cost for us, which sounds really great until the costs for local business, for private enterprise go up, and the regulatory price is not able to keep up with it. So, we’ve priced ourselves out of producers in the Cook Inlet.”
“We have to develop as much gas as we can,” said Bjorkman. “However, when I talk to my friends at Hilcorp and and others, they’re concerned that there’s not the gas in the ground that’s recoverable. To get enough gas to meet our demand. And when I talk to folks that are in charge of finding that gas, they’re seeing steep declines in the gas pockets that they do find and they’re not sure if we’ll have enough local gas.”
Stay up with the full candidate forum series by following the forum schedule at radiokenai.com.
You can rewatch or listen to the full Bjorkman-Carpenter forum on the Peninsula Clarion Facebook page.
