Episode 508 - Alaska’s political future

Journalist James Brooks discusses life reporting across Alaska—from biking through -40 winters to covering the state’s evolving politics. He explains how declining oil revenue, maintenance backlogs, and understaffed agencies have pushed Alaska toward difficult budget choices. We discuss the push for a Trans-Alaska gas pipeline and proposed tax breaks, the role of mining and tourism, the  ballot fights over ranked-choice voting and campaign finance, and how social media and technology have changed local journalism.

Check out the On Step Alaska website or subscribe on Substack for all things Alaska.

Thanks to the sponsors:
Sagebrush Dry (Alaskan-owned business that sells the best dry bags you can buy.)
Alpine Fit (Premium outdoor layering from another Alaskan-owned business.)
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers

Episode 508:

Guest: James Brooks (Alaska Beacon)

On Step Alaska: All right, James, thanks for being on the podcast.

Brooks: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.

On Step Alaska: So you've been covering Alaska for how many years now? You've written for the Juneau Empire, Anchorage Daily News. You're writing for the Alaska Beacon now.

Brooks: Right, yeah. I got up here January 15th, 2008. That's when I moved from the Florida Keys to Fairbanks to start at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. So it was the first day of 40-below weather that winter. And I got off the plane — it was midnight and ice fog. And I was like, well, I guess this is just what Alaska's like. So, and now I've been here ever since.

On Step Alaska: How many times during your tenure here were you thinking that maybe this isn't right for you? Sometimes that first winter you can get through it because you're kind of excited about it, but people talk about the winter compiling — I definitely feel it. This is my 20th or 30th winter, and I was like, man, I'm really kind of tired of this. It's just kind of weighing down. So were there times where you thought you maybe weren't cut out for it here?

Brooks: You know, I haven't had that for Alaska as a whole. I have had it for different spots in Alaska where I was ready to move on. After three years in Fairbanks, I bike-commuted year-round. I loved biking in winter — I felt like the closest thing you could get to being in space, because it's 40 below, you're geared up, completely covered head to toe, and there's nobody else out there. It just feels like being on the moon. My shift went from like 4 p.m. to midnight, so I was getting off at midnight when it's the coldest, and biking in that was a heck of an adventure. It's actually really memorable — it was easier to do that than bike in Kodiak or Juneau when it's raining and blowing sideways, because it's a lot tougher to gear up for that.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, what was your hand-warmer setup?

Brooks: So I have a set of musher mitts that the mushers use, from Apocalypse Design there in Fairbanks, and those things are bombproof — good for like a hundred below. I slipped those on over a set of glove liners, and sometimes another set of gloves. With two or three layers of gloves, that works for me.

On Step Alaska: I was envisioning some sort of energy creation from the pedaling — a handlebar warmer, the grip warmer — generating that heat.

Brooks: Yeah, those gloves, that's the old-fashioned way, that's what's worked forever, and it works for the Iditarod mushers, so I'm sure — well, and the simplest ways are the ones that won't break in that cold. I had one night when the pedal of the bike actually broke — the metal shaft connecting the pedal to the hub broke, because it was just brittle in the cold, and I was straining it going up the hill. And then Kodiak and Juneau, it's wet and you can't get dry — the heat's so much faster when things are wet. That's definitely what I'm most familiar with in Southeast — it's a different level of misery for sure.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, when it's 35 and blowing rain, that's I think the toughest.

So over this time, you've seen Alaska politics kind of change, shift, stay the same. What has been kind of a general observation in the journalistic covering of Alaska?

Brooks: Yeah, I think over the period, the differences have gotten bigger — folks are more at odds with each other. I think some of that has to do with the fact there's a lot less money available. When I got up here in 2008, oil prices were sky-high, there was a lot of money flowing into the state. That was the year of — I can't remember if it was 2008 or 2009 — the special bonus year, the $3,000. So the legislature and state government function a lot better when there's money to spend. Money was coming into the state in a big way up until 2015, when oil prices crashed. Every year since then has really been a struggle to balance the budget. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 fixed it for a year. This year, it was the American attack on Iran that fixed the budget for at least one year. But I think we're starting to see the limits of even wartime spikes — if you look at the amount of this year's permanent fund dividend, it's not super big, even with a war driving up oil prices. So I've told all the governor candidates I've talked to this year that you're signing up for what's going to be the worst job in the state, because there's going to be no way to win.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, when we talk about revenue, a lot of people don't understand — they look at cruise ships, for example, and think we're going to have 18,000 people off the ships today, so just get more ships, more tourism. But without a state income tax and without a state sales tax, we don't get much revenue from that. That's great locally, incredibly important for the local economy, but as far as money the state can use for services and for functioning, that doesn't go there. So it's kind of a losing proposition to try to bring up getting rid of the perm fund or any sort of new tax.

Are we at critical mass here? And what are the conversations happening about what we're going to do to address this?

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I thought this year was going to be a come-to-Jesus year, but then the Iran war kind of pushed things off another year. So I figured this year was going to be a year that legislators have to spend from savings in a big way to balance the budget, and next year is going to be when the decisions have to be made. The Iran war brings in enough money to the state that it gets pushed off a year — next year, maybe the year after, you could use savings to balance the budget. But beyond that, the state's going to have to come up with something — either big new taxes or huge budget cuts, probably enough that you'd see a bunch of lawsuits saying the state is failing to meet its constitutional obligations. We've already seen one of those for education percolating through the system, but we'd probably see even more in a couple years.

There's kind of a nationwide narrative that most states and the federal government overspend dramatically and there's an incredible amount of corruption — if you look at a California or somewhere, there's an amount of corruption and the state needs to get its finances in order. It doesn't seem that Alaska is big enough to have that level of corruption. It seems like we're at bare bones. The last 10 years, the belt has been tightening and tightening, and there really isn't waste in the way people think about the Lower 48.

On Step Alaska: So if you're an Alaska resident and you think, well, the state just needs to spend less or be better with the money — is that a conversation that can be had now, or do most people agree we've cut as much as we can and need to look at other alternatives?

Brooks: I think the argument right now is that we've actually cut too much. We have more than a billion, closing in on two billion dollars, in deferred maintenance at schools, public buildings, and facilities across the state that hasn't been done — these buildings are going to start falling down. You're seeing that with Mount Edgecumbe boarding school in Sitka, where they have rats running around, rotten mattresses, buildings literally rotting around the students — and in rural schools where roofs are leaking and not getting repaired. We're going to see even more of that because there's such a big backlog of unfunded maintenance projects.

You're also seeing that in the number of vacant positions in state agencies — that's something you don't see immediately, but it has big effects. Right now the legislature is debating a tax break for the proposed Trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline, and the Department of Revenue is so understaffed they can't get legislators the information about the effects of different modifications to that tax break — so that's contributing to the slowness in considering it.

That's some of the effects we're seeing — things cut so far and so understaffed that we're seeing all kinds of problems. That's going to be an issue for the next legislature, the next governor — they're in a position where things have probably been cut too far. If people want to make big cuts, you probably could, but not big enough to balance the budget on its own. We're looking at maybe a $500 million deficit if oil prices go back to where they were before the war. At that point, that's bigger than the budget for the state's entire prison system — you could release every prisoner, close every prison, and it still wouldn't be enough. You could close down the entire University of Alaska, all campuses, still wouldn't be enough. Even if you eliminated the permanent fund dividend entirely, that saves maybe $750 million this year — balances the budget for a year, but doesn't fix the long-term problems.

On Step Alaska: The natural gas pipeline is something that's been getting a lot of attention. What impact — you said we don't know for sure — but what are some of the theories about if this were built and came online, when would we potentially start feeling the positive impact? And you mentioned the tax break — obviously there has to be an incentive for the company to build it. If it's not worth the investment, they're not going to do it. But how do you incentivize them without it being too much of a break for Alaskans? So can you give me a little 101 version of the gas pipeline?

Brooks: Yeah, so right now the pipeline has all its permits. They could start construction, assuming they got financing — loans, investors, that kind of thing. Nothing's keeping them from going ahead right now. The trick is, in order to make that project pencil out, in order to get investors, you've got to sell the gas at the bottom of the pipeline for a price people are willing to buy — and "people" in this case is Japan, South Korea, Thailand, etc., countries in Asia that need natural gas. There's a lot of natural gas projects around the world, so what Alaska needs to do is lower the price at the bottom of the pipeline to the point it's competitive to sell overseas.

What the legislature is trying to do is lower the state's petroleum property tax — that reduces the cost of gas at the bottom of the tap. The tax break legislators are looking at right now is about 50 cents per thousand cubic feet of gas. That lowers it to about $7 per thousand cubic feet delivered to Japan, which is competitive with what they're paying from New Guinea, the Middle East, etc. So the idea is if you make gas cheaper coming from Alaska to Asia, that makes it more profitable for the company operating the pipeline, more profitable for anybody to invest and actually build the thing. So legislators are trying to attract investors who will put money down to build it — that's the whole purpose of this extra session.

On Step Alaska: Right? The regular session ended, Dunleavy brought them back specifically to address this.

Brooks: Right, exactly. And the trick is, what's the right size of this tax break? I've heard from a lot of readers who say this is a giveaway and we shouldn't be doing it — that's one way to look at it. But legislators are trying to figure this out because a lot of them have been burned on prior gas pipeline projects. How many times have we talked about a trans-Alaska gas pipeline over the last 50 years? At this point, the state has put over a billion dollars into all these other failed projects. They don't want another failed project, so they're trying to get as much certainty as possible before approving this tax break.

On Step Alaska: I was talking with Click Bishop and he was talking about — right off the bat, with the oil pipeline, they thought, let's do this too while we're building it. But it didn't happen. Also see a lot of that with Pebble — that's a whole different thing, but people are still investing in the potential of it one day being a mine, and it's crazy the amount of people who think there's enough potential for that. Is that something being discussed at all, or is it on the back burner?

Brooks: No, Pebble is pretty much dead at this point. They have a court case right now in federal court that would just revive it to a point where you could think about reviving it — but Pebble's dead right now. There are a couple other gold mines advancing, though — Donlin in southwest Alaska is moving along pretty well, that's one to watch. And there are a few others across the state, some in Southeast as well.

On Step Alaska: How has that conversation evolved since you've been here? Alaska is very dependent on resource use, but tourism is massive, and people don't want to come up here and see clear-cuts. The fishing industry is massively impacted if you have a mine upriver. So how has that conversation evolved, stayed the same, over the last 20 years?

Brooks: Yeah, it's pretty much stayed the same. Mining doesn't pay very much in the way of taxes — it's pretty low in terms of taxation. It's still a big economic driver, employs a good number of people, but compared to fishing, compared to healthcare, not as many — wages tend to be higher, but there also tends to be a lot of out-of-state workers in mining. It's gone up and down but stayed pretty constant.

On Step Alaska: Out-of-state workers, and then out-of-country organizations — foreign corporations doing the mining — how does that impact the revenue Alaska would get from these projects?

Brooks: Honestly, it doesn't. Alaska doesn't have a state income tax, so any wages just get paid, and the state doesn't collect any money from that, at least at the state treasury level. Also, there's not much economic impact from an out-of-state worker, because they collect their paychecks and spend them out of state — it's not like they're spending in local stores, and those stores aren't employing local people to cater to them. Across the state, across all employers, 23% of everybody working in Alaska actually lives in another state or country — almost one in four workers doesn't actually live here.

On Step Alaska: That's one of the main talking points, and in my eyes, foreign mining companies — it's almost offensive, because it's not even an American company doing this. If we're trading habitat, ecology, fish, whatever tradeoffs come with that, it'd be nice if it were an American company. But as you said, it doesn't really impact us financially much because we don't have a state income tax.

Brooks: Yep. And the mining taxes are so low anyway that it's pretty much a non-factor.

On Step Alaska: Have there been conversations about an income tax? If there were one, we could capture at least some of that, tax on the wages. Or is that a non-starter, especially in an election year?

Brooks: Not much. There's been some, but it hasn't gotten anywhere significant — we haven't seen an income tax even pass out of a single committee. There have been legislators who've proposed them generally, but not much movement on it. What do you think — oh, go ahead, no, go ahead, finish that — I was going to say, we've seen some sales tax movement and discussion, but sales tax tends to penalize poor people more than rich people, so you generally see opposition based on that. A sales tax occasionally moves from committee to committee, but we haven't seen one come to a vote of the full Senate or full House.

On Step Alaska: And Anchorage does not have a sales tax, correct?

Brooks: Correct.

On Step Alaska: But Homer, somewhere on the peninsula, I thought had a 7.5% sales tax or something. So that's local — if you put even a 0.5% statewide tax on top of that, those people would be taxed 8%. You go to Anchorage and it's 0.5%, come down here and it depends on if it's summer — we have a higher tax than in winter. So there's ways to try to capture that locally, but again there's nothing statewide. That'd be a huge burden on places that are already taxed.

Brooks: Right. Sales taxes have traditionally in Alaska been municipal — that's how cities and boroughs make money, that and local property taxes. So a statewide sales tax hurts your cities and boroughs.

On Step Alaska: At the expense of the state.

And then the perm fund — either the dividend or what to do with the fund itself. I know one of the philosophies is if we get the perm fund to a number that would let us afford everything, we wouldn't have to cut — keep the dividend, keep everything else, but just grin and bear it for now until we hit that magic number of $100 billion or whatever it is. Is that realistic? Are people thinking yes, we can do that? Is that something being campaigned on? Or is the perm fund like 80-some billion right now, so it's not just a matter of let's make more money in the stock market, let's increase the fund by $20 billion — that seems pretty crazy as an actual solution. But is that something people are talking about?

Brooks: I mean, it's one of those things that'd be nice to have. I think if they could do it, it would have been done already, because that's really the easiest solution to the state's finances — the annual transfer from the permanent fund to the state treasury is the number one source of revenue for dividends and services right now. It's bigger than oil, bigger than every other tax combined. Even in a year like this one, with a bunch more money coming from the Iran war, it's still more than 50%. My general rule of thumb is 60-30-10 — 60% comes from the permanent fund, 30% from oil, 10% from everything else. That's just a rule of thumb, the actual percentages change year to year. But that's why the permanent fund is so important — most of our services get paid for with the investments of that fund.

Even if you got it up to $100 billion, that's maybe $5 billion a year for the state treasury, and that's not enough to meet the demand for services, school repairs, dividends. You'd have to get it really up high — like $150 billion — if you wanted the permanent fund to pay for everything.

On Step Alaska: As far as getting information out there, obviously since 2008 we've seen the rise of social media. Are you seeing, as a journalist, that fewer people are being educated on these issues journalistically, and more of it is Facebook-propaganda type stuff? How has that impacted how elected officials target ideas or audiences or voters? Because if you get your information off a little Facebook soundbite or TikTok, you're getting a misrepresentation of very complex issues. So how has the consumption of news changed since you've been up here?

Brooks: Yeah, I've definitely seen more people turn to social media — that's part of national trends. I think you tend to see more people listening to what they want to hear rather than a general perspective of what's going on, because social media algorithms steer you toward what will keep you engaged. So you get a lot more comforting lies or comforting misinformation from social media than anything else, and you can get wrapped up in that blanket — or even get presented with things that get you angry without getting you informed. I think the algorithms behind social media are a big problem right now, because they want you to stay engaged and don't really care if you're informed or not.

On Step Alaska: How has that impacted how you write or how you report?

Brooks: I mean, I've actually used social media less because I found it less helpful over time. I have a Facebook page, but simply so I can reach out to people — I don't use it to share, because Facebook suppresses news content. I used to be active on Twitter, but not anymore, because it now suppresses news content and is overrun with bots and inauthentic accounts, so I don't find it useful anymore. I've really dialed back on social media because I don't find it useful in terms of news anymore.

On Step Alaska: What about online reading and research? It's so much nicer — I can't imagine covering stuff in the old days when you had to go to the library, the microfiche. Now it's much easier to research old articles. So how has the internet been a positive in covering these things journalistically?

Brooks: Yeah, one thing that's really been helpful is automatic transcription. I can record a meeting, plug the audio into a transcriber, and it delivers a transcript of everything said without me having to re-listen and type it out myself. That's been a big help — if there's a particular subject with six or eight legislative meetings, I can have transcripts for each and search across them for a particular topic, and it'll show me each time it was brought up so I can focus on that if I'm reporting on it. Right now I'm writing about how much the state might invest in the gas pipeline project — there's been four months of hearings, dozens of meetings, and I have all these transcripts so I can search through and see each time it was discussed and what people said. That's been a really big help — I think we have a lot more accountability tools than we did a few years ago, but at the same time there's a lot more noise out there, and the signal-to-noise ratio has really changed.

On Step Alaska: Do you type on Google Docs, or how do you work?

Brooks: I do — I find that really helpful to use and share documents, share drafts with my editor and coworkers.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, I talk to my journalism students about the old days, when you'd be typing on a computer, think you're all good, type 500 or a thousand more words, and the computer doesn't save it or it freezes and you lose everything — no coming back to it, no previous drafts. Horrible. But Google Docs now is so nice, being able to share and edit.

Brooks: Yeah, I was just talking with a legislative candidate who was answering our candidate questionnaire and had their computer crash and lost all their answers, because they weren't typing in a document that would save — they were typing directly into the form. Cost him about an hour's worth of work, he was like, give me some more time, I'll fill it out again, but he was so frustrated. Everything is so much more efficient, which is nice, we can get a lot more done, but if you aren't kept up with it you can kind of lose yourself — the inefficiency isn't as productive, it's kind of tough. Like writing down notes and quotes so you remember it better — if you have it transcribed you might not remember it as much, it just kind of goes through and isn't seated, but it's not really worth it to not use the technology. It's kind of a catch-22.

On Step Alaska: I was reading about the Google effect — if you Google an answer, you just find it and your brain doesn't seed it, you don't remember those facts as much because you didn't have to search and find and read and write it down. The more times you interact with information — if you read it, write it down, listen to it, use all your senses, talk it out loud — the more likely you are to retain it. And you've been covering this a long time, so you've got a lot of mental filing-cabinet space filled up with stuff you've been thinking about, talking about, listening to. What else is going on that you've been covering, or that Alaskans should know or pay attention to?

Brooks: Yeah, I actually think the biggest thing, aside from the gas pipeline if it goes forward, is the ranked-choice-voting repeal ballot measure — that'll be up in November. Because it's not just ranked-choice voting, it's also open primaries and dark-money disclosure — if people vote to repeal, all three of those things go away, and we go back to the old system where parties pick the candidates for the primary elections. That's a big change, because the past few years we've been without that, and we've seen more coalitions in the legislature — this year we have a coalition in the House and a coalition in the Senate, the first time that's happened where there's been coalitions in both. I think that goes away if open primaries go away. And the dark-money disclosure that's in there right now has changed a lot of the ways people give money and participate in politics, if they know their name's going to be attached to a donation. So it's labeled "ranked-choice repeal," but that's only one of three big changes that would happen if that measure passes.

On Step Alaska: Do you have an inkling of which way it may go?

Brooks: I think, based on what I'm seeing right now, repeal passes.

On Step Alaska: Is anyone preparing for that, in case it passes — something that can be done after to address the problems that might come with it?

Brooks: No, I haven't seen any — right now it's all focused on the election itself.

On Step Alaska: Optimism for the future? Maybe give it three to five years to figure things out? Pessimism? Where are you at?

Brooks: I think the optimism comes from the idea that at some point the legislature and whoever's the next governor will have to make the tough call on this — we're on a trend that's not sustainable. So probably in the next three to five years we're going to hit a point where there's no choice but to make vast cuts to services or impose new taxes — there's just no other options at a certain point. Assuming there's not a continued war in the Middle East and oil prices stay relatively low, we're going to burn through savings first, then maybe burn through the spendable part of the permanent fund — that's $11 billion. If that happens, we're in a real crisis, because we'll lose out on that annual transfer from the permanent fund, which is 60% of state revenue gone. Then you're looking at a huge, huge change sometime in the next decade.

On Step Alaska: You mentioned coalitions that exist right now, which is great. Have you tracked some of these legislators and seen how they may have been moving a little more to the middle — they may have been a Republican and are still a Republican, but have you seen more of this understanding-the-reality, good-faith working-together?

Brooks: To a point. I will say, though, you called coalitions great — there's also a big drawback, in that in order for a coalition to survive it needs to avoid taking up particularly controversial topics that can split it. So if you have a big majority of Republicans or a big majority of Democrats in the House or Senate, those folks can take more drastic action than a coalition will, because a coalition is constrained by its membership — the amount of overlap might be pretty small. So you're not going to see big action from a coalition usually. While a coalition might work together and find compromise, unless everybody's bought in, you can see inaction. Right now the governor is a very conservative Republican with strong opinions on a variety of subjects — he's at odds with both the coalitions in the House and Senate. He's vetoed more than one in four of all the bills the legislature passed this year, so that means no progress on a lot of different topics. If you want progress, if you want lots of action, you'd want a supermajority of either Republicans or Democrats, because they're all in line, they'll all act quickly — might not be an action you agree with, but there'll be action. That's what we saw in the early 2000s when Republicans were all aligned — lots of bills passed, lots of laws, lots of action. Right now we're in a situation where there's not a lot of action, and it's tough to take big action on something like this gas pipeline.

On Step Alaska: What about trawl? Has there been much discussion about banning trawl versus reducing bycatch, that kind of thing? What's been happening?

Brooks: Yeah, lots of talk, but that's not really a state issue — it has to be taken up at the federal level, because there are only two trawl fisheries in state waters, one in Prince William Sound, one in the Aleutians/Bering Sea/Alaska Peninsula area. Neither has very many boats, so the state can only regulate those. Anything more than three miles offshore is federal waters, and that's where most of the trawling comes from. You'd need to see action at the federal North Pacific Fisheries Council for that to happen — Alaska gets to appoint members to that council, so what you could see is the legislature or governor appointing anti-trawl people to get voices on it. But you'd need congressional action for anything particularly substantial — any state action would be slow and incomplete on trawling.

On Step Alaska: So we've talked trawling, gas pipeline, Pebble, taxes, oil — what else is on the radar?

Brooks: Those are the big things right now. Everybody's waiting to see who the next governor is and what the legislature looks like — there's a lot of things that have been deferred because they can't get them through Dunleavy's veto, so they're going to wait and see. Right now there are 17 candidates on the ballot, but we have the August primary — everybody picks one candidate, top four vote-getters advance to November. Right now it looks like it's Tom Begich, Dave Bronson, Bernadette Wilson, and Jonathan Christ Tompkins. We're still a month out, so that top four could change — Click Bishop is right now on the outside looking in, that could change depending on how the campaign goes. Whoever the next governor is will have an awful job — probably a no-win job, but a very influential position.

On Step Alaska: What about nationally? I know you focus on state-level stuff, but anything about national, and how does that maybe impact statewide elections?

Brooks: Yeah, it's odd in a sense — we've got a really crowded governor field and a not-so-crowded U.S. House and Senate race. In the Senate race, it's pretty much down to Mary Peltola and Dan Sullivan — wait, actually, but Mary Peltola and incumbent Dan seem to be pretty close together, we'll see how that plays out, it's too early to tell.

In the House race, there's three strong candidates — incumbent Nick Begich, the Republican; Independent Bill Hill; and Democrat Matt Schultz. Those three are the strongest, and then a bunch of smaller, less-known candidates — one of them will make the cutoff, probably the Libertarian, but it's too early to tell. We'll see who pulls out from that — I wouldn't be shocked to see, after the primary, either Bill Hill or Matt Schultz withdraw and throw their support behind the other to concentrate against Nick Begich. But all the polling I'm seeing indicates that even though nationally Democrats seem to be riding high, Nick Begich seems to be doing pretty well — still too early to tell, but he's been really productive in terms of the number of bills he's passed through Congress. He may actually get the record for the most ever by a freshman legislator in the history of the U.S. House, which would be a heck of an accomplishment. None of the bills are particularly huge or impactful, but they've all met the needs or requests of different people across the state — tribes here in Southeast seeking land allotments, that kind of thing. That'll be interesting to watch as well.

On Step Alaska: Has he been fairly bipartisan, or how is it?

Brooks: No, no — but he's been effective in using the Republican majority in the House in a way a lot of his colleagues haven't been. He's also been helped by Republican U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan — so if Begich can get a bill through the House, chances are the Senate will be able to pick it up and run with it too.

On Step Alaska: Anything else going to be on the ballot this fall you're looking at?

Brooks: Yeah, we've got the ranked-choice repeal measure in November. We've also got a measure about non-citizens being banned from voting in Alaska — that's already law, it's duplicative of existing law, but there's a big national pro-Trump billionaire trying to pass similar ballot measures in every state, so he's done it here — it's the owner of Uline, the office supply company, a big donor to Trump and Republican causes nationally, and he's paying for this ballot measure here. You can expect to see that in November.

The big one in August is a campaign finance ballot measure that would limit the amount individuals and groups are allowed to give to candidates in the state. Alaska hasn't had a limit on donations since 2021, when a federal appeals court struck down Alaska's limits — so people have been able to donate unlimited amounts directly to candidates. This measure would reimpose some limits and adjust them for inflation going forward, to get around that court ruling and address the problems the judges found. I think, based on history, that'll pass by like 30 to 40 percentage points — Alaskans seem to be in favor of that idea. I haven't seen a lot of campaigning or polling on it, but based on historical experience, I think it'll pass handily and we'll see new limits after this election cycle. People will still be able to donate unlimited amounts to third-party groups that run campaigns independently of a candidate — that's a federal issue through Citizens United, the state can't really address that yet. But at least for state elections and donations directly to candidates, the state could end up limiting that.

On Step Alaska: So after you get your work done — article written, piece posted — what do you do to decompress? Go for a walk, ride the bike? What do you do?

Brooks: Jeff, I have three kids under three. I don't decompress.

On Step Alaska: Yeah. That's — yeah, that's true. At this point, work is relaxing compared to that.

Yeah, we have a super sweet, almost-two-year-old — but she's not always sweet, she's crying at midnight for no reason, or 1 a.m. for no reason. It's pretty wild.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah.

On Step Alaska: She won't let you — you won't let her pick up 18 rocks and put them in her pockets?

Brooks: No, no, she definitely likes that — which is great. She puts salmonberries in the pockets too.

On Step Alaska: Oh yeah, yeah.

We've been going out each evening to see which berries are ripe now. She's indiscriminate — she sees that a salmonberry that's yellow can be good, orange can be good, red can be good, and so she'll look at a strawberry that's green and think, oh, this is fine, it's a strawberry, and pop in green strawberries like they're nothing.

Brooks: It's incredible that she doesn't pick up, hey, this is a bad thing, I need to wait till they're red.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, I don't know, almost-two-year-olds, that's the way it is.

Well, thanks for being on here — I really appreciate the insight, good to talk to you.

Brooks: Yeah, thanks for thinking of it, Jeff, and thanks for having me.

On Step Alaska: Thanks for listening. Please like and share if you found today's conversation useful. You can go deeper with my writing on Substack — that's where I expand on these ideas from the show, share essays, reporting, and things I'm thinking about in real time.