Borough Assembly Member Bill Elam has declared his intention to run for Alaska State House in 2024. Elam, who represents District 5 (Sterling/Funny River) on the assembly will seek to fill the State House seat this fall, which will be vacated by Representative Ben Carpenter who intends to challenge Senator Jesse Bjorkman this fall for the District D Senate seat.
“It had been on my radar for quite a while,” Elam told KSRM. “I think that it’s a great opportunity to be able to serve the Kenai Peninsula just that much farther. Serving in the House, there’s a lot of similarities actually with serving on the Assembly and in some of the local legislative bodies, and being able to take that and represent our community just a little bit further up at the state level. There’s just a lot of opportunities there to be able to make a difference here at home, but then also across the state.”
With the most recent legislative session just getting started on Tuesday, a few issues have already taken a driver’s seat. Namely, education funding and underfunded school districts across the state are in the spotlight, a subject Elam believes he is well qualified to address at the state level.
According to the sitting assembly member, the topic of education will require balanced understanding and decision-making from leadership. “When it comes to education. In particular, you tend to get two extremes. And I don’t think that the answer of the solution is going to be found necessarily in either one of those extremes. We need to be, you know, focusing on reading, writing, arithmetic. But we also need to be able to acknowledge the fact that, you know, we’ve got a billion dollars worth of buildings and those things cost. Money to maintain and own and operate.”
Beyond just his experience with the current hot-button topics, Elam also believes he brings relevant political qualifications and a solid track record to the table, and he even cited one particular recent success he had in Juneau. “So, I’ve been able to take the opportunity that they presented me with, and I’ve been on the delegation team that goes down to Juneau. We’ve been down there several times now, [and were] actually able to get state statute changed through some of our local delegation so that we could decrease the size of our Planning Commission. You know, we were bloated–it was like 16 members or something–and we’re now down more closely aligned with the seats that we have on the assembly, so it’s significantly more effective and efficient.”
Elam has represented District 5 on the borough assembly since 2020.
The deadline for any candidates who would like to run in the 2024 Alaska general election is Saturday, June 1 at 5 p.m.
