Seventeen candidates are running to be Alaska’s next governor. Alaskans are already heading to the polls for early voting in the Aug. 18 nonpartisan, pick-one primary, which will narrow the field to four.
It can be tough to pick a favorite in a crowded field, so as the primary nears, Alaska Public Media is conducting interviews with some of the top candidates in the race. We've reached out to every campaign that raised $50,000 or more as of the mid-July deadline to report fundraising, and nearly all have responded.
Today, we’ll hear from Republican candidate Click Bishop, who served 12 years in the Legislature after serving as labor commissioner under Govs. Sarah Palin and Sean Parnell.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
So you have lived in Alaska for 66 years, and you've lived all over the state. This is a state that has struggled with outmigration. So I'm curious, have you ever considered leaving? And then what has ultimately kept you here?
Oh, it never entered my mind to leave. When I do leave for business, or, you can ask my wife, for vacation, after about seven days, I'm looking north. I just gotta get back to God's country.
What is it about Alaska that keeps you wanting to look north, wanting to come home?
Oh, I think my mother had the best description: "You were born 100 years too late. You'd have been happier coming over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898." I love Jack London, Robert Service. I'm an Alaska history nut, if you will. I was called a library rat before I even knew what that was. Living in communities around the state, especially Southeast Alaska, Wrangell used to have a nice little library, and my friends and I would be out playing, and I'd say, "I got to go." "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to the library." And I'd get another book on Alaska and read it.
And so I don't know, I guess I might be old-fashioned. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm a romantic. I have so much respect for our history, but yet it's so young, you know what I mean? To have grown up in this state, and a lot of people that came in before the territory, I had the pleasure of meeting some old timers that came in not during the Klondike rush, but in the teens and 20s after that, and were kind of my childhood idols in the mining industry, in the business. And I've always appreciated my wife's history. Her people are from the Yukon and Koyukuk River area, and just listening to that history passed down word of mouth from generation to generation. So it's fascinating. It's just a great place.
Yeah. And you have talked about yourself as an Alaskan first and a Republican second. When we talked a few months ago, you told me that you couldn't carry the late Sen. Ted Stevens' lunchbox, but you align yourself with his philosophy: to hell with politics, just do what's right for Alaska.
Can you explain how that philosophy guided you as labor commissioner, as a state senator, and how you would apply it as governor?
Sure. It's no mystery. I'm a 51-year member of the Operating Engineers. I'm a labor guy. But when you go to work, you’re hired out as commissioner of labor, you're the commissioner of labor for everybody, and I call balls and strikes. Some days one side's not happy with you, then the other day the other side's not happy with you. So you're going pretty much right down the middle of the map, if you will.
And … one of my gifts is hiring everybody smarter than me around me. I listen to my staff, but ultimately the decision lies with the commissioner, right? Or in this case, when we get elected, it’d be with the governor. And I'll continue to bring those kinds of people into the administration and continue to make those decisions, what's best for the greater good of all Alaskans. And so that's how I roll.
I've been there: commissioner and in the Senate, what, 20 years. And there's times where some of your best friends won't call you for seven months, then you'll make another decision and they say, "Man, gutsiest move I ever saw. So proud to support you." So that's like, what did Harry Truman say? If you want a dog in D.C., I mean, if you want a friend in D.C., bring a dog, right? So I'll have Ruby there. She'll be with me.
Oh, fun. Yeah, you've spent a lot of time in rural Alaska. Can you talk about your time in rural Alaska and how it's shaped your approach to governing?
Oh, sure, I can do that. It was interesting. I'm 69 now, I'm older than the last time we chatted. I was on this street corner yesterday morning here in Anchorage, and it was about 6 a.m. And there was a person coming down the street, and he stopped and chatted with me. And I asked him, "What are you doing?" He said, "Well, I'm living on the street." I said, "OK." But he was squared away, he wasn't inebriated or anything, and we had a good chat. And so I asked him, I said, "Well, where are you from?" He said, "I'm from Emmonak." And I said, "Oh, I built a runway down in Emo." And he said, "You've been to Emo?" And I said, "Yeah, I worked on a runway down there in 1977." I helped with building the runways at Emmonak, Kotlik and Alakanuk.
And his face, he just smiled from ear to ear. You couldn't wipe the smile off his face with a mop. So then we started chatting about Axel Johnson and this one and that one, and it was just like we had a great conversation. So I've got connections from the mouth of the Yukon all the way up to the Canadian border. And of course, my wife's got relatives up and down the Koyukuk and the Yukon.
I ran my unions — in later years I switched from construction in the field to statewide coordinator, and then eventually wound up the statewide administrator for the Operating Engineers Training Trust apprenticeship program. So I spent a lot of time on outreach and recruitment doing some outside-the-box training programs in rural Alaska. These civil projects come along once every 25 years in a village, and some contractors are better than others at local hire. But I worked real closely with Brice Incorporated, they did a lot of rural work, and we started doing some outside-the-box thinking on training the local workforce in a village for that project, right? And it's advantageous for them to employ as many locals as they can, because that means they can bring in a smaller camp. Housing is always an issue for contractors, or teachers, nurses, name your discipline, if you don't live there.
And so we started that model in Venetie, and then we did it in Arctic Village, and then started working with Cruz Construction and doing it down on the Lower Yukon, and that became a thing. That was a model, outside-the-box thinking on workforce development. And so, man, I just know a lot of people. We were just in Fort Yukon, what, a week ago I believe, and presented the Lady Eagles in Fort Yukon, their coach, Joshua Cadzow. They are a three-peat on the girls 1A championship, and my wife and I have supplied the rings for the ladies. And we were just up there last week, up there all day, and it's just such a blessing to be around old friends. I'm really in my comfort zone in rural Alaska.
I want to talk a little bit about energy. When you entered the race in May of last year, we talked, and you said affordable energy was your number one, number two and number three priority. And I'm curious how you'd apply that if elected — what you'd do on day one, what you'd do in your first few months, and what you would hope to have accomplished in your first year or two years to lower Alaskans' cost of energy.
Sure, thank you for the question. In my opinion, the single most important and biggest issue in front of the next governor is this Railbelt energy issue, Cook Inlet gas. If you had been in my office four years ago, five years ago, I had a 4-by-8 whiteboard in the office with a short-term, mid-term, long-term energy plan for the state. And on top of that, and you alluded to it in your opening, at the top of that whiteboard is a column that had 10 years of outmigration, right? And that was the wrong demographics leaving the state. So anecdotally we hear that. So I want to do an analytical, have research and analysis at the Department of Labor do an analytical dive on why people are leaving, because we hear we're leaving because of the price of energy, education funding, etc.
So, back to energy. Short term, we've got to finish the Dixon Diversion. We've got to finish the redundancy from Anchorage to Healy, so now we've got a true redundancy on our intertie, so we can lose one leg and still be able to ship power north and south, be able to economically dispatch the cheapest power north to south. And it all starts with the short-term goal of finishing the Dixon Diversion to put another 30,000 homes on hydro, and that intertie.
In the mid-term — in the short term, excuse me — now, I've been gone about two years, and I don't think the data has changed much, but we've got about a trillion cubic feet of gas in the (Cook) Inlet between two deposits out there that's economically recoverable. And that's an important thing for listeners to remember. You can talk about probable gas reserves in Cook Inlet, but the bankable ones, that you can take to the bank and put at the burner tip, are the economically recoverable reserves. And that will get you out to about 2036, notwithstanding any future discoveries in the short term.
So the long term — I just want to jump into the long term. On day one, I'm going to ask (the Alaska Energy Authority) to reactivate the (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) licensing process for the Susitna project. That's a 600-megawatt dam. And I got asked this very question in Juneau the other night, and they said, "Where are you at on renewable energy?" And I said, "I love it. I want to build the biggest battery on the Railbelt." And that's the dam, right? It's clean energy. This administration recognizes hydro as a renewable. They'll even help with grant funding up into about 2034 presently, on the construction of that. But when you have that spinning reserve in place, now you can expand your solar, you can expand your wind, because you have that spinning reserve at the ready instantly if the wind drops or you're in your winter months on your solar.
So that's the single biggest issue, is energy on this Railbelt, notwithstanding a myriad of smaller things that we need to do as an administration to get the state back to firing on all cylinders. I could talk about that for an hour, but energy is the number one biggest thing in front of us. And when you lower — and I want to cut the Railbelt rates in half — when you do that, that drops the PCE rates in rural Alaska, because they're benchmarked against the Railbelt rates. We're paying $1.21 a kilowatt hour in our cabin there in Manley Hot Springs.
But I want to bring — notwithstanding what happens in this special session with the gas line, this gas line is important. It's important for Alaska. I'd like to utilize as much of those hydrocarbons in a gas sale to pump up the Permanent Fund. But it's a job creator. I just had this conversation last night at dinner, by chance, with an individual. You've got your short-term jobs, right, your construction jobs. But then, to me,. the jobs that I was always really focused on as commissioner, when I worked on a gas line project for Gov. Palin under AGIA, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, the jobs that I really wanted to focus on were, yes, the short-term construction jobs are important. To me, it's those legacy jobs that are left after construction, running the day-to-day operation of that gas line. And there's about 1,000 of them, right? And those are great six-figure jobs.
And I'd just like the public to know that TAPS, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, has employed five generations of my family, and those are great jobs. My youngest granddaughter's working on pipeline construction. She does that in the winter, and she works heavy civil, heavy and highway civil construction, in the summer. So yeah, we're a resource state. We need to responsibly develop our resources and bring those resources along with public input all along the way.
Yeah, there's a lot there that I want to talk about, and I want to start with what you talked about with Cook Inlet. You said there's a trillion cubic feet of economically recoverable gas. Meanwhile, the utilities are saying they can't get firm contracts past the early 2030s at the absolute latest.
So I guess, what would change under a Bishop administration that would make it profitable, or make that gas actually be recovered by, if it's Hilcorp or another operator, or, I don't know, even the state? How do you wind up getting that gas out of Cook Inlet that's not happening right now?
Oh, it's coming out, but it's not coming out fast enough, right? Because Hilcorp doesn't own any of these two leases I'm talking about.
Oh, interesting. Can you tell me more about that?
Oh, man, I'm going off of memory. I think one of them is — I might come back to that, I have to have my recall memory kicking in gear here. But there are two leases. But I'll tell you how I get there. It is with the ideas that I have, and I'm not really wanting to divulge them at this point, because I've already started contacting, putting a gas team together. I'm going to run my ideas past them, but these are people that have spent 30 years or longer in the inlet.
I met with a group of retired oil and gas producers, retired engineers and geologists some two months ago, and one of them in particular I have worked with when I worked for Gov. Palin. So I know where the resident experts are in the state, and I want to convene, and we're going to convene a meeting with them after this primary is over and convene with them.
And one of the great things I learned working in the Palin and Parnell administrations was the caliber of people that I met working on the gas team. And my piece of the gas team was, I was the labor component, right? I put the workforce development protocol, training plan, in place for the state so we could execute a training plan statewide. But I met the legal, the commercial, the engineering team, etc., etc., and I'm still friends with all these people, right? And I have been in incipient discussions with them, so I want to bring them back together. That is their area of expertise to talk about how we can help encourage getting to production out of those two reservoirs as quickly as possible.
You don't need — I think, I'm going off of memory, peak-peak gas demand for the year, I think, is about 250 million cubic feet annually. Right? In the summertime, you don't need that gas all at once. How do we pull that out so it's in CINGSA or another storage unit, so it's at the ready? Like what was it, two years ago, three years ago, when it got super cold here in Southcentral and we were looking down the gun barrel of going into rolling brownouts, but thankfully Fairbanks was able to ship thermal power from our two coal plants south to get us through that cold snap down here.
So, bringing the experts together. I've already started bringing the team back together, and more to come on that. So that's probably for another interview after the primary.
All right. Well, so on the Alaska LNG project then — as we talk right now here on Aug. 4, there's sort of a stalemate between the Legislature and Gov. Mike Dunleavy, with the bipartisan Senate majority, some of your former colleagues, insisting that a tax cut for the gas pipeline be paired with a tax increase on some private oil and gas companies like Hilcorp.
I'm curious, as governor, if this issue falls to you, how you would approach this problem. Like, for instance, would you have signed the Senate's version of the tax bill with that tax expansion that covers Hilcorp?
I would probably start with a clean sheet of paper after talking with the industry, Glenfarne, Legislature, and start off with a clean sheet of music.
I mean, having been through two of these gas line negotiations, one as a commissioner and one as a state senator, on SB 138, it's a process. And the Legislature, at the end of the day, you got to get 21 and 11 votes.
It's integral to bring legislation in on Day One, that the governor introduces legislation on Day One. But to get to Day One, I've always been a front-end kind of a guy. Do your homework with the principals to get something ready to introduce for prime time, right? And notwithstanding knowing it is going to get tweaked along the way through the process. It's always better to have the conversation before you introduce the legislation, just to have everybody lock arms, and even though we're going to disagree, and I call it, like, it’s a tentative agreement, but you know what, everybody's going in eyes wide open with the initial legislation. And it's not just dropped on the Senate president's desk and it's read across, and vice versa with the speaker of the House. There's going to be, I'll have the presiding officers pick a group from the House and the Senate, industry, our staff, boom, to get a piece of legislation ready to go.
I want to move on to some other issues. Education is top of mind for a lot of voters across the state. There have been schools closing, programs being cut, a shrinking student population. So you've said that schools need more predictable funding, but that accountability also has to be part of the conversation.
Sure.
That's also a line I've heard from Gov. Mike Dunleavy a lot, and I'm curious to know, what would be similar and what would be different about your approach to education if you're elected?
Right. Well, remember what I told you, I think a month ago — I'm able to walk in most people's orbits and have respect, even though we don't disagree. And there again, it's working with people prior to introducing legislation.
So, you know, it's more of, it’s like a philosophical discussion on education. You need predictable funding. That is number one, that's paramount, and for not only teachers but support staff. Because the teachers are great, don't get me wrong, my wife's a retired teacher, but it's that support staff behind those teachers as well, to help the teachers. And I'm a big proponent of smaller class sizes. The data shows the smaller the class sizes, the higher the test scores.
But why are schools closing? Well, we talked about it right in the beginning a little bit: outmigration. We're not having any more kids, right? And you've got the demographic that has the children, and the schools are closing because enrollment's down.
But I do know one thing for certain, and it hasn't changed in 20 years — it's changed two percentage points — and that is we have to increase our CTE funding, career and tech ed for you younger people, and voc-ed for my generation 20 years ago. I just met a guy, an old acquaintance, that showed me this data. 20 years ago, I worked with him on workforce development issues. And 20 years ago, 25% of the high school seniors that graduate need to go on to university. Seventy-five percent need to go into the trades, or a two-year AA degree through your university college system, right?
That has to be done, priority number one this session, this next session. We've got to increase that BSA funding in career tech ed. We are woefully underfunded in those areas. And to put a finer point on it: when I was commissioner of labor in 2006 and '07, back in those days the flavor of the day from the Department of Education and from lawmakers, it was nothing about test scores. It was all about graduation rates. I think the state graduation rate at that time was 63%. And the adult basic education side, your GED side of the house, that's run through the Department of Labor, and I used to hand-sign every diploma, and that was about 1,500 a year, right?
So what we did is, I worked with the commissioner of education, Bering Strait School District, because they had an outstanding CTE director out there. And over the course of about four years, we took their, I believe it was 57% graduation rate, and took it over 83% in a four-year time period, right? And not every kid's going to college. I just gave you the data, right? So my wife readjusted that data and did her own research, and it's changed two percentage points. It's now 27% of high school seniors need to go to college. So career and tech ed is, all education is important, but we need to fund the area where 75% of the students are yearning for the most training.
So increasing funding for education and CTE and reducing class sizes, all that costs money, right? And the next governor could face a continued structural deficit. And I'm curious, where do you get the money? How do you approach fixing that structural deficit?
You need 21 and 11 votes to get that done. And I'm saying the same thing in this interview as I've been saying since the first candidate forum in October of last year. Go grab the revenue sources book, and go into the taxation revenue side of the book, and there's a line called the Public School Trust Fund. It's (0.5%) on mineral rents and royalties, funds the public education fund, right off our oil and gas, etc., mining, timber sales. And there's about $940 million there — there was two years ago in that fund — and that spins off a dividend to the general fund for education.
I want to up that multiplier. And what that number is yet, I don't know. Because I know I have support from lawmakers at least in the Senate to do that. I haven't talked to a lot of House members yet about it. But that's just shifting a percentage of those royalties into that public education trust fund. That's how you raise it without raising taxes on individual Alaskans.
Interesting.
And eventually, I mean, I would like to see it up to $2 billion in that trust fund, and then you do your 5% percent-of-market-value draw off of that, and that'll spin off about $50 million a year, in accordance with — you know, you've got your base funding, but that will more than pay for that CTE funding increase.
(At this point in the interview, a campaign staffer says Bishop has time for one more question.)
So in a four-way race for the general election, you're going to need some second-choice votes. And I'm curious — I'm going to combine two questions here — why should someone whose first choice is a conservative Republican or progressive Democrat support you as a second choice? And as we head toward the primary, why should voters pick you as their first choice, their first and only choice, on the primary ballot?
Sure. My stock and trade is bringing the best and the brightest on our team. Right? I've always done that. That's why I've gotten along in my life as far as I have.
I got asked that question almost verbatim the way you asked it, and I said, show me, give me a couple of examples of where my last 20 years in Juneau, or more specifically, 12 years in the Senate, that you aren't totally happy with something I've done. You know what I mean? As a lawmaker, I don't introduce bills just to be introducing them. I only introduce what I think I can get across the line. And I bring leadership qualities that I think are second to none. I'm able to hire the best of the best. I've got people now, if I win, that are in private sector businesses that will come back to go into state service just to help with this administration. And I think that speaks volumes.
And I've had people tell me, "Click, I don't agree with everything that you do, but you know what, I could vote for you, just because you're willing to listen to all people, and not just auger in and say no right out of the gate." And it's about treating people with respect.
And I'd just like to say that I've got an outstanding running mate in Greta Schuerch. She brings a whole dynamic skill set with her that will help us in the resource side of the house, specifically in the mining side of the house. And I want to do everything I can to increase mining in the state. Responsible mining. It's our resource, and we need to access it.
