{"id":2000,"date":"2016-10-14T21:00:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-15T04:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/ketchikan-residents-ask-walker-about-amhs-taxes-and-pensions\/"},"modified":"2016-10-14T21:00:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-15T04:00:28","slug":"ketchikan-residents-ask-walker-about-amhs-taxes-and-pensions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/ketchikan-residents-ask-walker-about-amhs-taxes-and-pensions\/","title":{"rendered":"Ketchikan residents ask Walker about AMHS, taxes and pensions"},"content":{"rendered":"

KETCHIKAN<\/strong> \u2014 Ketchikan residents, getting their first meeting with Gov. Bill Walker since February, asked the governor about issues ranging from the Alaska Marine Highway System to an internet sales tax.<\/p>\n

Walker visited the First City on Thursday. He held a noon community forum, met with local leaders and sat down for an interview with Ketchikan media.<\/p>\n

At the forum, the independent governor, now two years into his first term, took a half-hour of questions after 20 minutes of remarks mostly about the state\u2019s budget crisis.<\/p>\n

Along with the ferry system, residents posed questions an internet sales tax, the state\u2019s pension funds and a few other topics.<\/p>\n

Chelsea Goucher, the president of Southeast Conference, which with the state has undertaken a project to reform the ferry system, asked Walker how the nonprofit could convince lawmakers to support their eventual plan.<\/p>\n

Reforms will eventually need to be approved by lawmakers and Walker himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy biggest fear is that we\u2019re going to do all of this work and then nothing is going to come of it,\u201d Goucher said.<\/p>\n

Walker responded that Southeast Conference should focus on how it presents the argument.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see the Alaska Marine Highway System as part of the solution (to the state budget crisis), not part of the problem,\u201d the governor said. \u201cIf it\u2019s presented as part of the solution, I think that really is key.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walker, a former mayor of Valdez, has been a strong supporter of the ferry system. If Southeast Conference proposes to change the system, he said he\u2019s \u201cwilling to push hard for the legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure it will be not just revenue neutral, but revenue positive as far as some of the concepts \u2014 at least what I\u2019ve been hearing so far, I\u2019ve been very, very pleased,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n

Judith McQuerry, who earlier this month was elected to the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly, asked Walker whether he supported an internet sales tax.<\/p>\n

In recent years, local brick-and-mortar businesses have maligned the boom of internet retailers, saying they make it much more difficult to do business and don\u2019t contribute to towns like Ketchikan.<\/p>\n

Local governments have begun to take notice, and both the Ketchikan City Council and the Assembly have talked about the possibility of a tax on internet purchases.<\/p>\n

However, internet sales tax can only be collected on a statewide level, and McQuerry asked Walker about his thoughts on the idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe initially did not prefer a sales tax because a lot of local governments have sales tax and we didn\u2019t want to interfere by stacking a state sales tax on a local sales tax,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n

He said there are changes needed at the federal level. While he said he supports \u201cbuy local\u201d movements and keeping money within a community, he didn\u2019t commit to supporting an internet sales tax.<\/p>\n

Bob Sivertsen asked Walker about his plans to sell state bonds to pay down Alaska\u2019s pension debt in the Teacher Retirement System and the Public Employee Retirement System.<\/p>\n

Together, the two funds include approximately $7 billion in unfunded debt. Walker\u2019s administration is moving forward with plans to sell between $2.3 billion and $3.3 billion in state bonds to pay down the unfunded debt, according to the Alaska Journal of Commerce.<\/p>\n

The state would pay interest rates on both debts, and Walker argued on Thursday that he\u2019s doing the equivalent of refinancing a mortgage.<\/p>\n

\u201cInterest rates are very, very low right now. We believe we can cut the interest rate in half on that obligation \u2014 take it from 8 percent hopefully down below 4 percent,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n

Credit rating agencies have warned that the move could further damage the state\u2019s rating, and critics of the plan argue Walker is making a gamble.<\/p>\n

\u201cPotentially, the base-case scenario is it would be a $2 billion savings,\u201d Walker said. \u201cAny time you can save $2 billion in the fiscal situation we\u2019re in is a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the forum, Walker revisited a 2014 comment he made to the Ketchikan Daily News about taking action in the Tongass National Forest without federal permission.<\/p>\n

As a candidate for office, Walker said the state needed a \u201clion\u201d in the office who would take risks on the state\u2019s behalf, including developing the Tongass and, farther north, building the road to King Cove without federal permission.<\/p>\n

King Cove is still without a road and the Forest Service continues with an amendment to the Tongass Land Management Plan that has made pro-development and pro-timber forces howl because of a lack of timber sales and access to land.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Walker stood by his 2014 position, referring to a conversation he had with former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, but didn\u2019t offer any solutions for King Cove or the Tongass.<\/p>\n

\u201cI certainly am not above doing something that\u2019s maybe a bit aggressive, but we need to make a statement, we need to get someone\u2019s attention about what\u2019s happening up here,\u201d Walker said. \u201c(Jindal\u2019s) comment to me was to do that, to be more aggressive on state\u2019s rights, you need to have two things: One is a crisis, which he had \u2014 he had an oil spill in the Gulf Coast \u2014 and the media. If the media is there, it gets the story out about why is this governor doing what he\u2019s doing? Why is he not going through the normal process?\u201d<\/p>\n

Walker said he believed Alaska had the crisis, because of its huge budget deficits, but not the attention of national media.<\/p>\n

The governor didn\u2019t mention plans for action, but only said that \u201cmany, many meetings\u201d with Sally Jewel, the secretary of the Department of the Interior, had made little progress on her opposition to the road to King Cove because its path is within a national wildlife refuge.<\/p>\n

\u2022 This article first appeared in the Ketchikan Daily News and is republished here with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KETCHIKAN \u2014 Ketchikan residents, getting their first meeting with Gov. Bill Walker since February, asked the governor about issues ranging from the Alaska Marine Highway System to an internet sales tax. Walker visited the First City on Thursday. He held a noon community forum, met with local leaders and sat down for an interview with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":2001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}