In a 10-1 vote the University of Alaska Board of Regents recently voted to give President Patrick Gamble a $320,000 retention bonus, despite budget cuts.
District 30 House of Representative hopeful Shauna Thornton (D) weighed in on the action.
Thorton: “I think that the timing was a little difficult specially facing budgets cuts I’m pretty sure in looking in on them and speaking to them and you know attending board or regions meeting as a student speaker. I think that those things were in play before hand but i really think that there should have been more discussion on that. There’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes on these types of things that we don’t as people necessarily know and I can honestly say if I’m elected to this position transparency going to be a big issue for me.”
She also expanded on why education is a priority to her.
Thorton: “Have we allocated enough, what can we do better, what things to they need to have. I know that the way the funding is done now is on a yearly basis, we just went through the yes no voice, and the whole premise for the yes/no was we need 5 year to plan, as a company and a corporation its hard to do this back and forth every year thing. Well our educators feel the same way. We need to look forward to funding, we need to take our non renewable resources. We should be investing some of those profits from some of those areas into making our education programs a little more funded at.”
Thornton is running against incumbent Representative Kurt Olson(R) for the District 30 seat in the Alaska House of Representatives. Voters will make that choice in the November 4 general election.
