For a second time, candidates for borough mayor got together to take questions and share their vision for the future of the Peninsula on Wednesday. The Kenai and Soldotna Chambers of Commerce hosted Charlie Pierce, Linda Hutchings and Dale Bagley in Kenai.
You won’t find huge and glaring differences in the three candidates stances on most issues. All three are long-time peninsula residents, all three point to private business experience as their biggest qualifier for the office and all three generally agree the borough is basically doing pretty well. Even on the ballot propositions, you’ll find at most, varying degrees of indifference, particularly with Proposition 1, the cannabis question.
Both Pierce and Bagley are committed to carrying out the wishes of the voters, either in administering oversight of the industry or seeing that it be discontinued in the Borough.
As a resident of the city of Soldotna, Hutchings can’t vote on that issue, but she does want people to think about the consequences of their own vote.
“Here’s my question: do you want it legalized and controlled or do you want the criminal element to be in charge?”
All three candidates support the ballot proposition asking for bonds to upgrade the borough building in Soldotna and all three support raising the sales tax cap in the borough from from $500 to $1,000. Pierce may be the most stridently anti-tax candidate, but in a time of budget deficits, bumping up sales tax is something he can live with.
“I think the responsible thing to do is to look at spending and try to avoid all forms of taxation, but if there’s a tax that’s out there that I can wrap my hands around and support, it would be this one," Pierce said.
Funding for organizations outside the Borough, specifically the Kenai Peninsula Economic Development District, Kenai Peninsula Tourism and Marketing Council, the Small Business Development Center and Kenai Peninsula College, gets questioned each budget cycle. Dale Bagley has wrestled with this as an Assembly member and, like the other candidates, he says that to the extent those organizations provide a benefit, they’re worthy of at least some borough dollars.
“There’s been a lot of issues on that; people have been at Assembly meetings slamming that we’ve been funding non-profits. We’re not funding non-profits. It’s an investment in our future. We’re funding tourism, we’re funding economic development, we’re funding small businesses and we’re funding the college. Those are important things to fund. We’re doing it in a conservative manner that’s a lot better than having borough employees do this.”
For more from each candidate, listen to their full interviews on the Kenai Conversation.