The Alaska state House’s ethics committee found Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance likely violated state law by using publicly funded resources to criticize a local newspaper’s coverage of a Charlie Kirk memorial last year.
The committee found probable cause that Vance’s use of publicly funded letterhead and an official social media account to object to the Homer News’ description of Kirk’s views violated a portion of the Legislative Ethics Act barring the use of publicly funded resources for “partisan political activity” or another “nonlegislative purpose.”
The House Subcommittee of the Alaska Legislature’s Select Committee on Legislative Ethics made the determination June 26. The decision was released publicly on Thursday. The Homer Independent Press, an online local news outlet, reported the development late last month.
The committee pointed to four excerpts from Vance’s letter to the newspaper’s Tuscaloosa, Alabama-based owner, Carpenter Media, including portions saying the article “weaponized inflammatory labels and partisan rhetoric,” “read like an obituary drafted by a political adversary” and contained “political talking points.”
“If the paper continues to treat community events as opportunities for partisan spin, the consequence will be financial as well as reputational,” reads another portion of Vance’s letter highlighted by the committee.
The September 2025 letter led a Canadian editor with Carpenter Media to modify the story without the input of its Alaska-based staff. The ethics committee received 18 complaints about the incident, the committee wrote.
Vance did not fully cooperate with the investigation. In response to a request for information in January, Vance submitted a letter and attachments asking the committee to dismiss the complaint but did not provide “additional facts or substantive information,” according to the ethics committee.
The committee “determined corrective action is not warranted beyond adhering to the authorized use of Alaska State Legislature letterhead in the future,” according to the decision.
In a phone interview, Vance said she disagreed with the committee’s finding that the letter constituted partisan activity. The ethics committee was “attempting to dictate how I should speak for my constituency,” she said.
“I believe that that is not their place,” Vance said. “I am not beholden to anyone but my constituents, and my letterhead is an expression of my representation. It is not state-issued, and so I had every right to call out the media for what I believe to be biased reporting.”
Vance also issued a statement on social media July 4, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, calling back to the nation’s founding.
“The freedoms secured by our Founders and protected by generations of Americans since depend on citizens and their representatives being willing to speak the truth as they see it, even when it is unpopular,” she wrote.
Ethics committee member Rep. Kevin McCabe, a Big Lake Republican, issued a dissent from the decision saying the complaints should have been dismissed. He questioned whether the letterhead and social media accounts truly represented legislative resources covered by the Ethics Act.
“More troubling than the specific outcome in this case is the precedent it threatens to set,” McCabe wrote. “By stretching AS 24.60.030(a)(2) to cover issue advocacy on official letterhead and social media, the majority risks converting routine constituent communications and public debate into ethics violations.”
Several journalists left Alaska’s three Carpenter-owned papers, including the Homer News and the Kenai Peninsula Clarion, shortly after the owner changed the article. Some former staff now write for the Homer Independent Press.
The episode closely mirrors — in reverse — a 2017 effort led by Vance to recall three Homer City Council members, saying they had used their office as a “platform for broadcasting political activism,” the Homer Independent Press reported.
Vance rejected the comparison, saying the fact that legislators run with party labels and often join partisan caucuses makes them distinct from the nonpartisan City Council.
“We don't elect party by party for that position, and so they are by nature supposed to remain neutral and just speak for the best of the city,” Vance said.
All three council members retained their seats after a recall election.
