Alaska House race in South Anchorage presents contrasts, despite common party affiliation

A sign, seen on Sept. 12, 2024, marks South Anchorage’s Oceanview neighborhood. House District 10 encompasses Oceanview and other neighborhoods, along with the Dimond Center. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Two Republican candidates with legislative experience present contrasting visions for representing a South Anchorage district.

Rep. Craig Johnson, a businessman who was first elected to the House in 2006 and currently chairs the powerful House Rules Committee, is being challenged by Chuck Kopp, who served in the House from 2017 to 2020 after retiring from a law enforcement career.

The matchup in House District 10, which encompasses the leafy Oceanview and Klatt neighborhoods, the Dimond Center – Alaska’s largest shopping mall — and other spaces, would not have been possible without the ballot initiative that ushered in ranked choice voting in Alaska. That initiative, in addition to authorizing a ranking system, mandated open primaries. Even though Kopp and Johnson were the only candidates on the primary election ballot, both advanced to the general election.

That contrasts with Kopp’s experience in 2020, when he was defeated in the primary by current Rep. Tom McKay, R-Anchorage. In the general election that followed that primary, voters narrowly approved the ranked-choice initiative.

Four years later, Kopp stands by his decision to be part of what was then a caucus of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

“The best solutions are never the gift of one party. And I say that as a proud Republican,” he said.

“As a legislator elected by the citizens of District 10, I will always be on a team to best serve and represent the district,” he added. “I will not hesitate to put people first over the party.”

Whatever coalition he joins should be consistent with his “Republican values” of low taxes, infrastructure investment, resource development and responsible budgets. “And I want an organization that is not going to go into the ditch over a social agenda,” he said. “I don’t like it when I see the legislative process hijacked.”

To Johnson, Kopp’s party-line crossing approach is a negative.

“You look at who supports him and who supports me — you can see a stark difference. Who influences him, versus the kind of people that want to see me get reelected,” Johnson said. There is a “very clear difference,” he said. “It’s just very difficult to differentiate when you’re sitting with an R by your name.”

Those ties are evident in the primary election results, in which Kopp won 60.5% of the vote, Johnson said, noting the low turnout of 17.8%. “We’ve got a Republican who’s got mostly Democratic support in Chuck, and the Democrats turned out quite heavily and the Republicans didn’t,” he said.

Johnson pointed out that the current Republican-dominated House majority does include rural Democrats. But he does not favor more evenly balanced bipartisan coalitions, such as the nine-Democratic, eight-Republican majority caucus in the state Senate.

“I would not be interested in joining a caucus that put committee chairs in positions to pass or hold up things that I feel I am philosophically opposed to,” he said. “I will not compromise my ideals and morals for power.”

For Kopp, the overarching issue in the election – and for Alaska – is the state’s continued outmigration and shrinking working-age population. That loss is the result of the state’s failure to invest in itself, he said.

“You also have to look at the cost of doing nothing, and the cost of doing nothing has been catastrophic for our state,” he said.

There are, for example, about 70 Alaska state trooper positions currently unfilled, along with about 50 Anchorage police positions. Also affected are basic services like road maintenance, with departments short-staffed, and education, he said. “We have school districts that are starting late because they can’t fill the teacher positions,” said.

The event that crystallized this concern — and his decision to run against Johnson — was the House majority’s refusal to consider the Senate-approved measure, Senate Bill 88, that would have resurrected a defined-benefit pension system for public employees.

Legislation passed in 2005 established a new 401(k)-style defined contribution system for what were then new public employees, but in recent years there have been calls to return to the defined-benefit pension systems like those used in the past.

Kopp favored the Senate’s bill, which he said crafted a reasonable approach that would have been both less costly than past public employee defined-benefits plans and less costly than doing nothing.

“Absolutely, I’m in favor of that defined-benefit plan,” he said. The plan that the Senate bill crafted would have been less expensive than past public-employees’ defined-benefit plans, and a worthwhile investment in the workforce, he said.

Kopp is particularly attuned to the issue because of his law-enforcement experience, which included a stint as police chief in Kenai. As of now, Alaska police officers are working in a very difficult profession without the promise of “anything meaningful waiting for them” at retirement, he said. He also noted that state employees are generally not eligible for Social Security benefits.

Johnson, as Rules chair, blocked the Senate’s defined-benefit bill from reaching the House floor. He is proud of that action and highlights it on his campaign website as one of his key legislative accomplishments.

The Senate’s plan was too expensive, Johnson said.

“For the first 10 years, it’s not a bad system because not many people have retired,” he said, referring to actuarial information that was presented to lawmakers. “But once you get past 10 years and 15, 20, 25, it turns into billions of dollars and we’re going to end up like we were before we got rid of it, where we had a $9 billion in indebtedness and our credit rating was affected. Our ability to bond was affected. So, it could have a huge impact on future generations,” he said.

Johnson opposes any return to a defined-benefit program and does not believe retirement benefits attract workers. In the case of police officers, he pointed to departments in other states that do offer defined-benefit pensions but have trouble attracting applicants, nonetheless.

“Retirement is not how you attract people. You attract people with work environments and the opportunities to advance and job satisfaction. And it’s very difficult to be a policeman right now,” he said.

Rather than return to a defined-benefit system, the state can increase pay and possibly increase the amount it contributes to employee retirement accounts, he said. And Anchorage’s municipal government has the option of creating its own benefit system without placing the burden on the state, he said.

Both Kopp and Johnson favor an increase in the Base Student Allocation, the per-student level of state education funding granted to school districts.

Johnson said he was instrumental in crafting a bill, which ultimately was passed by the Legislature, that would have increased the BSA. After Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill, to the dismay of many educators and students, Johnson was among the legislators who voted against a veto override. Johnson said continuing efforts to increase the BSA over the long term would have simply been vetoed again; instead, lawmakers were at least able to secure a one-time increase of $680 per student.

Kopp said he would have voted to override the veto, which was sustained by one vote.

People in the district are extremely concerned about education funding and worried about state support that has atrophied, he said. “They were alarmed when one of our local elementary schools was on the chopping block,” he said.

Klatt Elementary School, which is in his House district, was one of six schools that the Anchorage School District in 2022 considered for closure for budget problems.

The problems facing education in the district and in Alaska more generally are tied in part to the loss of qualified workers – teachers in this case, Kopp said. “My district really cares about the recruitment and retention of that workforce,” he said.

Both candidates cite public safety as a top concern for their district. That category includes homelessness in Anchorage, which both candidates characterized as a complex problem that defies easy solutions.

Both candidates also cite a need to make energy supplies in Anchorage and the Cook Inlet region more dependable, an issue of growing concern as the flow of natural gas used for electricity and heat has become less secure.

While Kopp supports retention of the ranked choice voting system, Johnson will be supporting the ballot measure to overturn it.

Johnson believes the ranked-choice system encourages some candidates to hold back on campaigning prior to the primary election to save their money for the general election. “You know, I did some of that and it didn’t pan out particularly well,” he said.