You know, America’s greatest generation had its rendezvous with destiny and Alaska’s greatest generation had a rendezvous with destiny. The challenge for this generation is to keep that promise. And that’s what campaigns are all about: maintaining the principles of those who came before us with the programs that are going to serve as legacies for our children. And the issues that the people have raised today are going to be issues that we’ve talked about in Juneau, the issues that we have talked about across the state. They are issues that people talk about at their dinner tables all the time.

The people in this room certainly represent some of the leadership in this state, but every Alaskan family struggles with these issues all the time. You know, the Alaskan economy is a resource development economy. There are four horsemen riding down on this economy right now, four horsemen that we should be aware of all the time. We’ve got declining oil production, we’re going to see lower oil prices, we’re going to see higher interest rates, and we’re going to see less federal largess, and we need to get ready for the day. You know, Andrew talked about the need for a fiscal plan. He mentioned a list of Republican leaders who were there as a part of the fiscal policy caucus. I would like to mention that my entire Democratic caucus was there the entire time.

And Sarah talked about the need for us to move beyond partisanship, and I look forward to a legislature where that is able to happen. Because the majority leadership, during the entire ten years that I served in the legislature, has not always allowed that to happen. That is particularly true of the Senate. In the House we’ve been able to forge good relations and actually get things accomplished.

So the question is, what are we going to do when these four horsemen ride down on us? What are we going to do about a fiscal plan? Well, I have to tell you, we have one. Quietly, it’s been enacted. We passed an oil tax. It’s a very bad oil tax, but we passed an oil tax that’s going to allow us to increase our revenue. The public passed a cruise ship head tax. That’s a lot of extra revenue to the state and we can get more revenue if we start to put our surplus into high yield investments instead of low yield investments. That’s a horrible waste that is costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year when we put our money in two or three percent return when we could be getting eight or nine percent return out of it.

With the constitutional budget reserve and the budget surplus we have revenue. We need fiscal discipline. We need to have somebody who knows how to make sure that the budget can be balanced, who doesn’t spend on wasteful projects, to make sure that the right investments take place.

What are the right investments for Alaska? Well, you identified them as important and I don’t know if we’ll get to implement them in 2006 as Lieutenant Governor or in 2010 maybe as governor, but these are issues that we’ve been talking about for a long time.

The need for low cost energy is the most pressing problem across the state. And everyone wants to talk about a gasline. Well, we need to start talking about the gas bills people are paying. They’re too high! I talked to somebody from Shaktoolik the other day who’s paying a dollar a kilowatt hour. You’re not making a living if you’re out chopping wood to try to keep your house warm. You’re not making business plans; you are just trying to survive.

We can do low cost energy in Alaska. There are three time horizons we need to look at with energy. Number one is the immediate. That’s power cost equalization and it’s also the tax breaks that subsidized urban, rail belt gas coming out of Cook Inlet and it’s time the state recognizes that every single person that turns on a light switch in Alaska has their power subsidized. It is not only rural Alaska. So besides fully funding power cost equalization, continuing the tax breaks to Cook Inlet gas, what do we do?

Well, we need to produce local energy. Alaska is gifted with energy. We’re not going to see gas from the natural gas pipeline for a dozen years. I wish it would come sooner, but it’s not going to. But in a dozen years, more villages are going to go away. More households are going to be hurt. More families are going to be put in impossible positions. To have to choose between heating and eating. So what can we do?

There are 80-90 communities in this state that can take wind power. There are 160 that could use biomass. We’ve got more coastline than the rest of the country put together, which equals tidal and wave energy to me. We’ve got geothermal energy out here that’s the envy of Iceland even. Iceland, which is 95% fueled by geothermal energy. I’ve been to facilities in Kodiak that are turning fish waste into diesel and if we think the problems are bad now, wait till we go to low sulfur diesel. It’s going to aggravate everything, so let’s have an aggressive plan for making sure that we invest in low cost energy.

Some of those low cost energies– I see my friend Mike Pawlowski over there– we can do things like securitize our sequestration and he’ll explain to you what that means. Basically you can get credits for not polluting and we can sell those credits all up front initially to capitalize on some of these innovations. We can’t wait. It’s a question of priorities.

This state has embarked on a Knik Crossing; it has embarked on a Gravina Island Bridge. Those are priorities that the legislature wanted, but a dramatic impact on this economy can come from low cost energy. If we embark on a project making sure that every village is as self-sufficient as possible, we will have done great things with the families and the communities of this state.

We talk about education. You know, I have been a subscriber to the philosophy that education is about the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket. That’s what the poet Yeats said. And we need to ask ourselves, before we put more money into the equation, what is it we want our educational system to achieve? We want to achieve self-reliant individuals. We want strong, healthy communities. We want people who can think critically. We want people who can empathize, who can feel what other citizens and other residents of the state feel. We want people who have intellectual curiosity to explore the world around them and take joy from learning. That’s what our educational system should deliver and that’s an educational system that should begin with pre-kindergarten.

We’re one of only ten states in the union that doesn’t do pre-kindergarten. Shame on us! (Applause) Shame on us for not investing in our children and the cost of doing that is less than the cost of the lawyers and advisors we spend every year on gas pipeline development. What’s the best resource we have? We need to do a K-12 that goes beyond No Child Left Behind and exit exams. We need to have extra-curricular and co-curricular, sports and music and art. We’ve got to develop what I call IQ education, smart education: Individual Quality education. All these standardized tests and I’ve never met a standardized kid.

And vocational training. Why is it that we’re going to export our resources and import our jobs? That’s backwards. We should be doing as much as we can to ensure that when we develop Alaska’s resources that Alaska’s workers and Alaska’s families benefit. And we can do that.

We need a university system that can also capture the best and brightest in this state, that does more than just providing the teachers and the nurses and the scientists and the doctors and the lawyers and the researchers and just people who want their brains to expand. The university system can be the key to the state’s future and we need to use it.

There’s talk about the urban-rural divide and ask yourselves, just close your eyes for a second, just close your eyes and think about what it means to be an Alaskan. I will bet you that wrapped up into that image is rural Alaska. That’s who we are. We don’t all know subsistence. We don’t all live in villages, but the heart and soul of this state is in rural Alaska, and urban Alaska needs to respect it and treat it with the appropriate level of dignity and we don’t. (Applause)

Rural Alaska has suffered from the loss of the Longevity Bonus. It has suffered from the elimination of municipal assistance and revenue sharing. It has suffered from the high cost of energy. It has suffered from the elimination of the Department of Community and Regional Affairs. And it has been moving backwards because this present administration refuses to recognize tribes. So when people talk about recreating the Department of Community and Regional Affairs I think we should at least question if it should be the Department of Community, Regional, and Tribal Affairs. (Applause)

I say that Alaska’s greatest generation had their rendezvous with destiny, and the challenge for this generation is to figure out what we are going to do to keep this state’s promise. You know, there’s a bumper sticker that says, “I wish I were half that man that my dog thinks I am.” But if we can be the Alaskans we think of ourselves as being, individual, self-reliant, compassionate, we’ll be ok.

Because, there’s another great Alaskan who I said goodbye to this year, Norman Vaughan. And Norman said, “Dream big and dare to fail.” And that’s Alaska.

Tags: economy, education, energy, gasline, health care, renewable resources, rural, taxes