Thursday 5/15/25 | FNSB's Barbara Haney | Bernadette Wilson

Welcome to Whoa, buddy. Put that thing back in its holster. We haven't gone anywhere. I don't understand. Check out themichaeldukesshow.com for information on how to get access to the podcast. Welcome to the party pal. The Michael Duke Show. The Greed. entitlement. astounding to me. What more could you want from a low-budget radio program? This is a dumpster fire. I'm just BS. It's time to get a new perspective. I'll just watch it. And we've got Just the Cure opener.

and prepare for Hot cup of free. The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. live around the world on the internet at michaeldukeshow.com and across the state of Alaska. This is your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Hello, my friends, and good morning to you this beautiful Thursday. I've been up half the night. I had a problem. I had an issue this morning. Boy, howdy. We got back on the air here about a half hour ago. We had some problems.

And here we are. So if I abruptly go off the air, I apologize. I think I got it all fixed. We'll see. I am not a geek squad guy, but maybe I play one on TV. So if something goes off, I apologize. I know the stations down on the peninsula have been off for a few hours this morning. We finally got everything back up. But this is the joy of being a radio station owner. That's what it is. That's what it is. I paid for this privilege. That's how it works.

So anyway, I appreciate you guys coming on board. If I sound a little punchy or if something goes wrong, it's not my fault, man. It's not my fault. All right. I just want to, that's my highlight for today to begin with. Alright, we are ready to jump into this and get things ready to roll. Today is a busy day.

We didn't know who I was going to have on yesterday at the end of the show, and then, bam, we filled it right up. Today, we're joined in hour one by FNSB Assemblywoman, Fairbanks North Starboro Assemblywoman, Barbara Haney. We're going to talk with her about status of things going on in the borough, the special meeting tomorrow night, and more. And then we'll get that all taken care of in Hour 1. And then, in Hour 2... We're going to be joined by Bernadette Wilson. Bernadette Wilson.

And she's coming in as the latest. candidate for governor. So she's going to be joining us in hour two this morning. And we're going to get the full rundown of everything that's going on. So it's going to be a full and exciting time. Full and exciting time this morning.

But without further ado, because Barbara is waiting in the wings, let's jump over there and talk to her, get things ready to rock and roll. Barbara Haney, our guest this morning on the big radio show, and she joins us right now. Good morning, Barbara. How are you? i'm fine how are you you know i've uh it's okay it's a it's a rude awakening when everything breaks all of a sudden and you're like that's not what's supposed to happen so I understand that.

whole notion of i paid for this privilege because uh that's kind of what being on assembly is about yeah no um been there done that got that i've got that t-shirt i'll tell you right now you know been there yeah unlike a lot of people um i i largely funded my own campaign last time i had some donations But the purpose of the money to elect me came from me. And I think the same with Mr. Roterman. We both ran at the same time last year. We're both running for re-election.

kind of gives you a different perspective when you put up your own money as opposed to getting hundreds and hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars from outside groups. Yeah, that is kind of a whole different thing, that's for sure. Barbara, do you have any disclaimers you'd like to lay out there before we get started? i am here as a candidate um and i do not represent the assembly it's just me um but i am running for re-election so um and i appreciate the support uh obviously

You can't continue to run every campaign on your own dime unless you're a multimillionaire. And that's the last thing I am. So even small contributions are helpful. All right. And time is expensive, as you well know. And time is money. I feel that for sure. Every 30-second slot is money. That's how it works around here. All right. Well, Barbara, there's a lot we can cover today. I guess we should...

talk about the elephant in the room first things first. And for folks who aren't really paying attention or haven't heard or don't understand exactly what's going on with... the back and forth and the ethics violations that have been going on in the assembly and everything else. Suzanne Downing over at Must Read Alaska has got a great story that kind of timelines it and lays it out.

She put it out yesterday, and the title is, Will There Be Any Penalties for Savannah Fletcher? And it's a great article because it basically lines everything out. So, Barbara, do you want to... Do you want to walk us through, because this will be the first slot because of the meeting tomorrow night. There's going to be a second half. This is the penalty phase.

of this issue with Savannah Flesher, who was found guilty of ethics violations by the Ethics Board, and now the Assembly is supposed to... uh lay down some lay down some some penalties and that meeting is going on tomorrow night at 6 p.m at the assembly chambers and so this is kind of timely so can you walk us through this real quick in the first segment before we get to the rest of the business of the borough

Sure. I have to be a little careful here though because I am a person who is on the on the panel making the decisions i guess but um if anybody watches the video uh the last meeting it was um a declaration of conflicts pretty much way of public testimony And then we went into the declaration of conflict. It was kind of interesting in my case because Ms. Fletcher attempted to argue my case as why I should. be recused But my case is already briefed out.

all the briefs are there we're just waiting for oral arguments and the decision and there's amicus briefs filed as well so i'm not really sure why my case comes into her matter That wasn't really an argument. In fact, that might be the most sympathetic ear she has on that. because I've been through it. But it was very interesting to listen to the others who were there. They

They had all kinds of reasons for declaring a conflict that really weren't grounded. And when you go back and you look at the code on what constitutes a conflict, they really weren't true conflict. Like, I think Ms. O'Neill said she had a tremendous affection for Savannah Fletcher, and that might be true. I don't know, but that's not really a conflict. A conflict is, you know, if you're a spouse.

business partner and the code is very clear as you well know and how that's laid out and having a great affection for somebody really isn't a true conflict the most interesting conflict I thought was Mr. Gottenberg. He apparently claims to have contributed money to pay for the radio spots that Ms. Fletcher aired. That was the base, and just so folks know, that was the base of the board violation is that that Savannah Fletcher purchased radio ads in Fairbanks.

with no disclaimer, didn't identify herself. These weren't authorized ads, but they came out and they were designed to sound like she was a spokesperson for the assembly when she was just an assembly member. And so she paid for these ads and everything else, supposedly. But Gutenberg said, no, he helped pay for them. And that was his conflict of it.

Right. And that's legitimate conflict in my view, because that means he was part of the deal. And so for me, that's legitimate conflict. The other ones. And a couple of people, well, of course, Reeves Reynolds, she's disqualified. She has an attorney-client relationship with Fletcher. But sometimes when you're an attorney, you really don't want your clients to judge you. At least I had a couple of attorneys tell me that. So that may not be.

you know and i just said well that's what code says code says this you know right and so that's you gotta go by what the code says you don't like the code change the code So that's a disqualification. It's not even a recusal because disqualification is a little bit higher standard.

Anyway, they had some very interesting things. It looks like they nullified the order of succession of the gavel because When I first began, Ms. O'Neill, instead of going through, you know, handing the gamble, well, I have to declare conflict, then you hand the gamble, I have to declare conflict, you know, you go down that whole thing, right? Um, they, Mindy O'Neil just got up and walked it over to Brett Roterman, which I guess from a time.

but that's not the proper procedure. Right, right, which in my mind leads to some questions. I mean, did she just skip procedure or did she already know how it was going to play out? I mean, to me, I look at it and go, did you guys talk about this ahead of time? I mean, you skipped right over Scott Krass. You didn't, you know, what, why, Kristen Kelly wasn't there.

But did you talk about it or did she just, you know, why did she just walk it straight over to Brett? I don't know. It seems to me pretty clear that there was a strategy to deny it for. Right. Because that's what happened. You denied a quorum and then they couldn't go through the penalty phase while they're waiting for it to show up tonight, right? Or tomorrow. Right. tomorrow yeah and we had wanted to meet tonight but um apparently there was some kind of schedule conflict of some kind so

We have to meet tomorrow night on a Friday night. So Friday night, fight night, not fight night, but Friday night assembly chambers, and it should be pretty interesting to watch.

quite frankly and you know you shouldn't be there all night so it might be a good warm-up before your date if you got a date and you got a big date night um go down there and watch that before you head out to dinner or something but um it's definitely enemies things that we need people watching um because uh when there's a lot of eyes it makes a big difference

I have to laugh, Barbara. A date night. Yeah, honey, let's go out to the borough assembly chambers first and watch this cage match before we go have a nice dinner somewhere. That's a weird dating scene. Yeah. That's true. I mean, that's kind of a weird date night. But, you know, everybody, you know, you do you. Whoever's out there that thinks that sounds like a great idea. But, you know.

not a bad idea to come out and have your voice be heard and let it uh let it go on there is no public testimony right because there was already public testimony so now this is just the penalty phase Right, the public testimony was closed last time, so they had a closed public testimony to go into the conflicts. But I will tell you, being a former assembly member,

Even if there's no public comment, if there's a weight of eyes on you in the audience when you're making decisions, you do feel it. I mean, you feel a difference whether there's public testimony or not. If there's a room full of people there. You feel, you know, you feel what's going on. So if you want to make sure that, you know, justice is served on this and people, you know, have to be held accountable for it, then this is not a...

This is not a bad time to go out there and get it done. So it's tomorrow night, 6 p.m. at the assembly chambers. as that as well. um all right well i am um we're gonna we're gonna take a quick break and we're gonna come back barbara haney is our guest and when we get back we're gonna dive into We're going to dive into what's going on in the borough assembly.

and what are the goods, what are the bads, what is Barbara trying to work on, why does she want to go back, what kind of madness is she infected with that she wants to go back again, and we'll continue this discussion with Barbara Haney in just a moment. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty Based, Free Thinking Radio. We continue. in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Right after this. If you missed the show You can listen to it on your time with Dukes On Demand. Oh, and it's...

America used to be. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and... Hey, look at that. Everything went to break like it was supposed to. Oh, man. Oh, that's awesome. That's a load off my mind. Definitely not a fun time to wake up in the middle. Why is there no noise here? Why is this off? Why is it? carrier signals on everything. Anyway, it's been an interesting morning. I'm scared. Yeah. Let's see.

Chris just said, something tells me you won't be needing birth control if that's the kind of date you're on. Yeah, no. That's for sure right there. All right. Well, let me see if there's any comments in the chat room here. Yeah, the assembly last year when it came to punishing Barber stated they have to be held to a higher standard due to them being our elected officials.

and they can't set a bad precedent by doing nothing. So that'll be interesting. If that's their actual standard, then yeah, they'll have to do something here. She's the newest appointee on the Alaska Judicial Council. Right, I heard that. I was absolutely flabbergasted when I found that out. There were many wonderful attorneys in the state they could have appointed there, and that's who you picked. Okay.

Yeah, that's a whole different show. The whole Judicial Council appointment process, that's a whole different show right there for sure. And what's your, are you running, you are not running unopposed to this go-around, Barbara? Is there, I haven't been, I'll be honest with you, I haven't been paying that close of attention to all the... candidates who are in the race for this October. Are you and Brett running unopposed or what's going on? Well, we have not had anyone declare yet. How's that?

Okay, yeah. and that and the filing is in july you know when i ran i wasn't gonna really run a friend of mine was gonna run he goes go down and put your name in we'll swap out at the last minute i said okay so i did and then his flight got delayed and he kind of looked at me and smiled and laughed and said guess what you're running and at first i was like well i'm gonna go withdraw i don't want to do this

you know i'm working for the state i'm making good money i you know this conflicts with that but um i did it and you know what i'm glad i did I have learned a lot, even though I've been through the ringer. It has been quite the learning process. What people don't understand is that government closest to you is the one you feel the most. Yeah, I think people miss that. I mean, you know, I will agree. I think that everybody should run for elected. I think everybody should run for elected office.

at least one time, you know, just to get a feel and serve on an assembly, just to see what it's like, because it is, I mean, it's kind of crazy sometimes what happens out there. And when you learn... how the sausage is made and how the budgets work and how it is an eye-opening process. There's no doubt about that. It's frustrating. And, you know, I don't think most people would want to serve more than one term.

but I wouldn't undo it. I wouldn't do it again, but I wouldn't undo what I did already because it was fulfilling in some ways, but ultimately frustrating, but eye-opening overall. Well, and it is the level of government that for most people affects their life the most. And if you really want to, and quite frankly, many of the things we deal with have really very little to do with national politics.

You know, there'll be people that get mad at me and they go, you like Trump. It's like, well, yeah. But what's that got to do with your landfill site? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What's it got to do with your personal problem? taxes, you know, or anything else. Yeah, but what's that have to do with anything? We have no... It means nothing. Nothing! And yet these people are all pushing it.

Yeah, and it really is an area where you're kind of insulated. I mean, the national politics do have an impact, but you're largely insulated from it. you start getting into grants, you know, and those kind of things. That's why we should be paying attention to the local level, Barbara, that's for sure. All right, we're four seconds out. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show.

public enema number one oh wait sorry uh enemy public enemy number one which makes more sense on the other hand he's a little bit of a pain in the uh michael duke show well maybe i am maybe i am Welcome back to the program. Barbara Haney is our guest candidate for re-election at Fairbanks North Star Borough. We're diving into the borough issues right now, so let's get to it.

Barbara, somebody told me the other day, it was Brett, in fact, Brett Rotterman was on the program, and when I left the borough, which would have been in 2014, so 11 years ago, 12 years ago now almost, The borough assembly budget was $147 million. Watch it out today again. Looks like it's around 240 million. So that's, you know, and you're looking at 423 FTE.

Wow. So, which is basically pretty close to 423 employees. I mean, they're roughly, they're about to get a few that are like part time, but. And full-time equivalents, which is what FTE stands for, is 423. 423, 423, somewhere in there. We know the nature of government is to grow but it's up to us as citizen legislators in these areas, people like you, people who are going to run

to try and hold that growth back because it's all funded on the backs of the taxpayers there, of the local citizenry. We were just talking during the break how... Everybody gets so spun up about all the national stuff and everything. I mean, it's things that they don't have any direct control over. It does affect them a little bit, but what really affects them is things that happen in their local communities.

every day, including your property taxes. And this assembly, or the assemblies over the last 10 years, as evidenced by the amount of money, how much the budget has increased in just the last 10 or 12 years, they have no problem spending more and more money. This is an issue in my mind. Well, you know, May 7th we had a special election. People voted down a $10 million increase in the tax cap. And in this budget, we not only spent $10 million, we took $10 million out of savings.

So and gave more money to the school district. Granted, they probably needed it, but I thought we should have stuck with the $60 million, held back the extra money. to see what happens with the winds of change because we still don't know what the actual budget from the state is going to be. Ms. Barnett, who is the school board president, in her wisdom and in the wisdom of the rest of the board, they did their budget around $60 million. with a 680 BSA.

and then just what's in the budget uh anything over that would have been is what i call hurrah money um you know oh good you got more money so but um we went ahead and added more to that I was a little reticent to do that. It's not that I'm anti-education. I just want to make sure that We have all of our bases covered. There's a lot of deferred maintenance in our school district, a huge amount.

And one of the things that Mr. Roterman and I did was change that CIP, the capital improvement process, to take in some of those school district projects. But if you're spending all your money ahead of time, then you can't actually do those projects. But we were at least trying to give the school district a bigger voice than that. Yeah. Well, and of course, that's the biggest line item, right, in the borough budget is the school district.

I mean, that's the largest component of the borough budget. And it continues to grow. Fairbanks North Star Borough School District has actually done a pretty decent job. They've actually been closing schools when other places have just talked about closing schools. They've been doing some consolidation and things like that. But overall... And I'll tell you, the whole school deferred maintenance issue came up when I was on the assembly.

And I about lost my mind when I found out that this is what was going on, that they were deferring all these things. And that's when we forced the school maintenance fund. I mean, that's when it was really utilized and started to be used. But we're still having that issue. I mean, again, this has been an issue. for at least 10 years. And I know Carl Castle, after I left, who became mayor, was...

He became critical on this. He and I were at odds on many things, but later on he came back and said, wow, you were right. because of the amount of deferred maintenance in the borough overall, but the school district especially. I mean, a quarter of a billion dollars in deferred maintenance in a borough with less than 100,000 people is a huge number. it is it's it's a pretty big deal and um you know it's always

nicer to open a new building and have a ribbon cutting ceremony. It's not as sexy and glitzy to have a ribbon cutting on a repair of a roof. or the repair of a boiler. But those are the kind of essential things that we have to take care of. And I don't, obviously, because this is a reoccurring issue, once again, we're talking about deferred maintenance. And so it seemed to me that there's something more systemically wrong. And that's why I'm trying to get a handle on that business.

The other thing, too, is we have to look at, and this kind of gets to the deferred maintenance issue to some extent, and it gets into some other issues to another extent. Some of these buildings have what I call a fiscal gap.

there's a difference between the revenue that is brought in to support the facility versus you know what the borough's putting in and i get it it's public sector it doesn't have to make a profit but that doesn't mean you disregard that fiscal gap either And to get at the structural component of the deficit, we have to begin looking at that fiscal gap, whatever it is.

And we can close it through utilities, hours of operation, inviting different user groups coming in. And when I look at something like the Carlson Center, that becomes... a particularly important issue. And I'm not saying we should close the Carlson Center, not at all. But I don't know if the borough is the best manager of it. We have to start bringing in more revenue there. And I look down in that zoo, they're having a foreigner in concert, right?

Why aren't they coming to Fairbanks? Right, right, right. No, there's a lot of questions there. I mean, that issue, specifically the Carlson Center. When I was on the assembly, we were subsidizing that to the tune of between $500,000 and $700,000 a year.

And my question was always, why don't we do a better job of, you know, I don't think the borough should manage it. I think it should be a private management company. I think that they have the connections and especially if they can be connected with other. event centers around the state and where they can share shows and do things like that. That makes sense to me.

But, you know, there are a lot of issues just like that where we're expending money that people may not even know about. I mean, when you look at this, Barbara. What's the biggest issue facing the Fairbanks North Star Borough? If there's a problem or there's a set of problems that are going to create the biggest issues for the Fairbanks North Star Borough, What do you think it is? Well, first off you have a group of people on there who have a commitment to spend as much money as they can.

They hate the tax cap. They want to destroy the tax cap. And because in their mind it limits their... It limits their bargaining power. I don't know why they think it does, but they seem to think that it limits what they can achieve through the collective bargaining process. The point of the tax cap, though, is not your union contract. The point of the tax cap is to make government efficient.

accountable I mean transparency and government is a huge thing and when I first got on the assembly that lack of transparency was just glaring You had people getting easements putting on their property. They weren't getting notice. You had people didn't know. You had to pay big FOIA fees, Freedom of Information Act fees to find out. expenditures. And so one of the first things I did is I went after that transparency piece.

with the online checkbook and with getting private property owners at least being notified by a letter that the borough was doing something that affected their property. You know, you had people who were passing comprehensive plans. They had no idea. You go out of the city limits, nobody knew about these plans. And all of a sudden, poof, they just show up one day and you're like, what are you doing?

No, we're doing this. I was playing back three years ago. What are you talking about? Nobody ever told me about this. Right. Well, I think that's the problem. I mean, I had a lot of heartburn. I mean, I was The one thing that I was probably known for on the borough assembly was as an advocate for private property rights.

Right. Because that was my biggest heartache was at the borough. And all it seems like every municipality, they're doing the same thing down here in Homer. They're doing the same thing. is these comprehensive plans where somehow some central planner that they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to to come up with this

overarching plan for years. They don't even live in the community, but they're going to tell us how we should live, how our roads and trails should look. I remember when I was on the assembly that they had a thing in downtown where they were going to eliminate all the parking lot.

and they were just, because they wanted it to be a walking corridor downtown and all this stuff, and all I could think of is I mean, I asked the question, if you're a mother in the middle of January and it's 45 below and you want to go to a local store, but there's no parking there because you've eliminated all the parking lots. And you've got your kids. Are you going to hoof your kids from this centralized parking lot up by JCPenney's and make them walk four blocks at 40 below?

uh to go to this little store yeah i mean it's but this is what a comprehensive you know oh we can see better than you we know but and they pay these outfits hundreds of thousands of dollars to plan our community

When I think the organic growth of it, I mean, the needs, if somebody needs something, if there needs to be a parking lot, somebody will buy the lot next to them and knock it down and create a parking lot. You know what I mean? Or buy the empty lot and pave it or whatever they need to do.

We don't need a lot of that stuff, but this is, again, this is the nature of government. We've got to plan. We've got to be involved. We've got to be in your business because that's the only way society can move forward. Well, and what's even worse if you want to do something that's not in that plan, they will make it exceedingly difficult for you because the plan becomes the overarching document and even lawsuit.

uh over activities uh there's a series of decision now that you're living in homer there's a guy his last name is griswold he's very good at taking people to court over whether something fits in the comprehensive plan or not and he really has a handle on the legal status of those comprehensive plans. In fact, there's a series of decisions, Gridswald 1 through 4, Gridswald v. Homer, and they're very notable legal decisions before the Alaska Supreme Court.

People don't realize the power of those planes. they become huge documents and yet nobody really voted on it um they do at the end they do take public comment but most people when you know when you're looking at that plan and you're just a regular person

The true impact of that plan, you don't really feel until you actually walk through it. And that's why I'm always trying to get the staff to tell me, okay, let's walk through this. What does this mean if I'm sitting here, Sally, at home and I'm listening to this? What does this mean if I live over here? What does this mean if I live over here?

etc you know um right the trails plan when they did that about that was gave me considerable heartache i i get that people want trails i'm not anti-trails I think trails can be fine but I think we have to be somewhat careful about when you're going into people's private property. um trails on public land we have plenty of public land up here

And trails on public land, that's fine. But when you're going into somebody's private property, you're giving somebody the right to travel through your property on this trail.

but there's a difference between traveling through and squatting on and yet that legal distinction isn't there and you know you have private property owners who quite frankly they have no protection against um a group of people traveling through right now so far uh we've been okay but that doesn't mean in the future um you got to take a look at when you're when you're making a situation or a law That has to

That isn't just for like now, that goes into the future. And you have to look at how could this look in the future. Well, yeah, it's the knock-on effect. I mean, Brian makes the point in the chat room that as it stands now, comprehensive plans don't have any force of law. But... comprehensive plans inform every other decision that is made around

planning, zoning, anything else that goes on, it may not have the force of law, but it has the effect of being able to basically force you to do different things with your property that you pay for and that you're currently paying taxes on. It isn't just that it's a force of law, it's a basis for action.

Yeah, that's true. That's true as well. Barbara Haney is our guest FNSB Assembly member. She's running for re-election. We're going to continue with her here in one more segment, but we've got to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty Based. Free Thinking Radio. We'll continue in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Bye. Common sense regularly heard on-

Okay, Barbara Haney is our guest. And, yeah, I mean, the comprehensive plan, we could do a whole show just on these ideas of comprehensive plans around the state. Because, I mean, Brian's right, it doesn't have a force of law, but they reference back to the comprehensive plan for anything that's going on in the borough in a planning way. You know, like I said, zoning streets. any kind of exceptions or exemptions that you're looking for, right-of-ways, everything falls back.

Does this serve the comprehensive plan? I don't care if it serves the comprehensive plan. I pay my taxes. I paid for my property. You know, I don't care if it's mine. And that's always been part of my heart. Yeah. Who's serving who? Does this serve the comprehensive plan? I don't know. The point of the plan is to serve me, not me serve the plan. You know, the role gets reversed a little bit, I think, sometimes. And while it isn't law, those comprehensive plans do become the basis of laws.

you know it's kind of almost like the development bible if you will uh so yeah it's very important uh and i really i gotta admit when i first came into this position I had had a planning background, but I didn't realize from a legal perspective the weight of those plans and what they had for future government after.

And again, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars paid to... firms and organizations to put these comprehensive plans together with some input from the community, but at the same time, how is somebody in Minnesota going to tell me how to live here in Alaska?

Oh, well, you know, and not only that, you know, any planning organization worth two cents is going to have people who can write in on any given issue. Okay, if you are designing, you're doing a playground plan and you want a particular... type of thing you want to do. you already have amongst you.

a handful of people that can write in on something and you know it's amazing what you know a handful of people can do you know they had 30 some odd people that showed up and wanted pickleball courts and now we got pickleball court You know, it doesn't take that many people. Yeah, no, it doesn't. I remember that debate during the whole AstroTurf, not the AstroTurf, the...

The football field, right? When they were begging for these multi-million dollar football fields across the state from the state monies, it was just like... We play football three months a year here, folks. I mean, do we really need to spend $7 million on football? Anyway, it gets a little crazy out there as well. What's been your biggest frustration serving on the Assembly, Barbara? When you look at this, what's your biggest frustration?

Well, I think... I think my biggest frustration is that there's what I call a little cadre that really does not listen. They just have an agenda in their head, and irrespective of anything you have to say as a citizen or otherwise, they're just going to proceed. People can vote 2-1 against the tax cap. they'll still disrespect that. They've got a little vision in their head and that's where they're going to go and it doesn't matter what you have to say.

Um, and I, you know, I've sat there and I've had testimony that's gone on six, seven hours into the night and they still, they don't listen to the people. And it's like when that stuff happened. It is up to the people to vote these folks out. And yet, like last time, one of them got reelected. And I'm just going, oh, wow. This is crazy. You know, this is one of the people that wanted to raise the tax cap.

And yet here I have this person back again. Right. So, you know, people can be rude with me or talk down with me or they do all kinds of things. That's fine. But you can't do that to the citizens. And that's not something I personally like to tolerate. And I so oftentimes... hear people get disrespected. You know, I may not always agree with the folks. That's not the point.

Somebody takes time out of their night to come down and testify on an issue. They don't need to feel belittled. They don't need to feel insulted. They're bringing a legitimate issue. In their mind, it's legitimate. Sometimes there are sort of amusing issues with that one with a rooster at the moment going on. But, you know, at the same time...

I know. You get rooster issues. You get all kind of cow issues. There's another issue going on with a cow. It's like... seriously and this is a real issue yeah it is yeah okay so you know and you're kind of you kind of raise an eyebrow but then you realize this is a real issue to that person yeah no it's and you have to listen to them

It's interesting. Barbara Haney, it's interesting to watch. It's frustrating to watch, but it is interesting to watch. Let's continue here in just a moment. Barbara Haney is our guest. We're going to continue one final segment. Don't forget Bernadette Wilson, candidate for governor, is going to be joining us at the top of the hour. We're about just a few seconds out here. The Michael Duke Show, common sense, liberty-based, free-thinking radio. Like, share, subscribe. Let's go.

The Michael Duke Show. Seriously humorous with a pinch of intellect. Pinch of intellect. Sorry. That is humorous. Here's Michael Duke. oh baby we're back we're ready to go barbara haney is our guest uh fairbanks north starborough assembly member running for re-election and uh we're coming down to the wire here this is the final 10 minutes or so so barbara We just talked a little bit about some of the big issues. What is your attack plan here? Do you have a...

Do you have a goal as you were just finishing up your first term? What's your goal going into term two? What are the things that you're going to be focused on as an assembly member to get things rolling here? Well, first we've got to start reducing the fiscal gap on some of our facilities.

And, you know, I'm open to all kinds of strategies, whether you got to look at the utility bills, the... staff size or you know how how are you generating revenue to support that activity that endeavor um and i think that's where people get frustrated they all want to build the

33 million dollar puppy pal is our animal shelter replacement program i'm sorry well they want to build that and have the ribbon cutting and i get it it's actually it's pretty but once you build that building you have to staff it You have to pay the utilities and you have to maintain it. So reducing the fiscal gap on the operation of some of these facilities is, in my view, important.

The second thing I think that really has bothered me is I so often watch contracts go out the door and they're not going to local companies. And I really want to get a handle on how those bids are valued and assessed. because I think sometimes there was a printer contract that was kind of controversial.

um during my first year on the assembly and it ended up being won by an out-of-state contractor and i thought you know the difference in price wasn't that big you know we should have supported the local vendor But anyway, you know, so I want to see some kind of local buy or local preference of some kind in purchasing if it's, you know, not a huge

a vast difference in price. Of course, that starts getting to be a value judgment. The other thing I really want to see is I want to see greater transparency go. I'm not saying that there's an effort to do things in the dark in the borough, but there isn't as big of an effort to bring things into the light as there could be.

um there's a tendency and this is true with any organization there's a tendency to do um activities in your office and you get that done and you bring it up the food chain okay and that's great But a lot of times the public isn't. as well informed as they could be. And I really would like to see that addressed. The online checkbook that I helped get rolling was a big part of that. But there's still more to do in that area. as well as with public notice.

Getting meetings out. That's the other thing. And this is not a diss on Fairbanks. There's a tendency to do everything in Fairbanks. But the borough is more than Fairbanks. The borough is a huge area, and we've got to start bringing the government, you know, when you're going to do a plan or an action that's major. We have to do it outside. We have to leave the city and start bringing the message out to the rural areas, to the people.

And that's probably my frustration. Like, I'm watching this wildlife fire plan right now. And I really like the guy who runs the emergency operation. But I'm having a hard time getting him to see that he really, if he just has little meetings at the Carlson Center, nobody's going to show up. You have to bring those out to rural areas. You have to bring it on the road.

Anyway, that's another part of it. That's a frustration, though. I'm not sure if that's something you can do by ordinance. Right. Keeping costs of government low, though, is where... Really, yeah. Well, because again, that's where we feel it every day is in our day-to-day lives and the cost of government. We saw what happened in May. They tried to bust the tax cap. They wanted an additional $10 million.

to be funded into schools and everything else. And it just seems like the appetite for spending in the borough is... is, well, in almost any governmental agency, but in that borough specifically, is never-ending. It never slows down. no it doesn't but on this on the flip side we do have some real problems we have um you know back in the old days we had these uh junkyards But the junkyard issue is not really.

anything like what I call the illegal landfill issue that has been cropping up. And that becomes very disruptive to neighborhoods. And that's where you really get to test your commitment to private property rights.

um because you have people who own land or squat um there's been both situations and they haul things from the dump and put that on the land and they're really um how do i say this they're they're they're culinary artists i suppose but what they're cooking isn't exactly legal and so um and they have a lot of stuff on the property to sort of booby trap it if you will and it becomes kind of a problem so we've got to get a better handle on that as well.

And that's been kind of a tricky one. Well, and look, I've, I am, I, this is a thing that we were fraught with this back when I was on the assembly. And my feeling was.

For most of these folks who had what they considered, they called them junkyard ordinances because people had a bunch of cars and stuff stacked up. And to my mind, as long as they're not leaching deadly toxins into the groundwater... uh you know or they're not you know doing things that are going to affect other people's property i say you know let people do what they want to do on their own property especially the one that got my goat was

where a guy had been there and then somebody bought parcels next to him or just down the street or across the street or whatever. And then five years later, they came back and said, this is untenable. We can't do it. You knew he was there when you got there. You knew he had 27 cars in his yard when you got there, and now you're going to cry about the junkyard, you know.

So as long as you're not hurting anybody else, I don't see it being an issue. And again, that's a private property rights issue as well. Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. And those cases don't bother me at all.

The ones that kind of bother me are the ones where there is stuff leaching into the ground and there is um yeah uh we're not talking about junk cars yeah you know if if it was some guy you know is aspiring project car if he thinks he's going to run a part-time parts business or something whatever That's up to that private property owner. The ones that worry me are the ones that were there. burnt out trailers and a lot of things from the landfill that don't have a theme.

But again, if they're not hurting anybody, does it really, I mean, it's not really any of our business. As long as they're not contaminating the groundwater or hurting somebody across the street or doing anything else. Yeah, and when they become what I call the hub for activity, with other neighbors. That's when I start getting very bothered. Are you talking about drug houses? Is that what you're talking about? Well, I don't know that there's drugs involved. I can't do that.

They seem to be cooking some things that really don't smell like any restaurant i've been in and um they it has a pungent chemical smell i don't know what they're cooking or doing and they do have a collection and assortment of of things that are difficult to walk through, but they're not cars. But they do look like things from the reuse pile of the landfill.

We're coming down to the last couple of minutes, Barbara, so I want to give you a chance to have your final say here. How do folks find out about you? Where do they go? Are you doing fundraisers? What's going on? Give us the thing. sure um no okay so my name is barbara haney i'm uh running for borough assembly um i would appreciate your vote i to have strong views when it comes to reducing the cost of government. I think that tax cap is one of the most valuable things that we have.

And I think we need to keep that cost of government low. Gosh, I appreciate your vote. And my website is Amy, A-K-N-E-Y, the number four, fnsb.com. That's Amy, H-A-N-E-Y, the number 4, Amy4AtSB.com. All right. And are you doing any fundraisers here in the near future? I know we're kind of early into the season, but I guess it's time. We're, what, 90, 120 days out, so are you doing anything for get-togethers or meeting greets or anything? I will be. I don't have anything planned at the moment.

You're right, it is still kind of early. After Memorial Day is when really people get their head out of the game. Exactly, exactly. All right, well, Barbara Haney! Barbara Haney for FNSB.com if you want to find out more about her, where she stands on things and everything else. Barbara Haney, thank you for coming on board this morning and being part of it. We appreciate you joining us. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Hold the line for a second.

Folks, we've got an hour or two dead ahead. Bernadette Wilson, our guest. Oh, Barbara, you stirred up the chat room here. You got me thinking about this and this whole, you know, I agree. Look, I don't want to have a meth house down the street either, but that's why the police are around if we suspect that. But other than that, like I said, unless they're burning toxic garbage or they're leaking.

diesel fuel or battery acid into the groundwater other than that i i quite honestly don't think it's the government's business what's going on you know what i mean Well, yeah, but when you have a locus of activity occurring. that involves trespassing on other people's property. and going in and appropriating your neighbor's property.

and it's associated with a assortment or collection of well yeah well that that's different again if you're impinging on other people's property that's illegal that's not what i'm saying i'm saying if you're on your property and all your stuff is on your in between your your monuments right on your property you can you know

As long as it's not a nuclear reactor or a toxic waste dump, I don't care, right? I mean, that's kind of where I sit on that. If you want to live in a gypsy's junkyard, then so be it. That's how it is. Wait a minute. You're not going to get an argument from me out of that. Like I said, if it was just These are... These are not your father's junkyards. We're talking about things that are... um i would you know i i guess not just fumes and and

Not your standard junkyard. Yeah, that's when you step outside in North Pole and you take a deep breath and... I love the smell of meth in the morning is what you're saying. Okay, I got it. I got it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you're talking about, you know, they're using that property as a locus for...

doing other activities that are perhaps not very friendly to the rest of the neighborhood. Right, right. All right, well, Barbara Haney, thank you so much for coming on board this morning. We appreciate it. I look forward to talking to you again in the future. Yeah, thank you.

I'm not going to be a fascist in coming and telling you how to run your property. Trust me, that is not my agenda. I'm looking at the... what i call the um places that need an extreme epa right exactly goodly exactly all right well luckily the borough doesn't have a lot of authority on those things so i'm not too worried about it barbara thank you so much for coming thanks for coming on board Thank you. And joining us this morning, Barbara Haney, our guest here on The Michael Duke Show.

All right. Hour two is about to kick off and we're going to be talking with Bernadette Wilson here in just a moment. She's going to be joining us. and going on yeah i mean this is this is the thing and i don't know if it's uh let's see anthony said i'd settle on an in-between and say if you're going to start a car graveyard on your property

It'd at least be a courtesy if you were to line them up in rows and stacks and at least bring some order to it. Some of y'all got front yards that looked like downtown Mogadishu after a gunfight. Yeah, but again, that's, I mean, that would be nice, but it's not our business, right? And what really burned me up, again, that whole thing, I remember the commentary about the guy out in Esther who had this junkyard, they called it a junkyard, and

He was just kind of a car hoarder. He just would collect them. And he'd been there for years. And then people bought properties around him and moved in. And then they started complaining about it. And then they're like, oh, well, this is really down for a minute. You benefited.

If there was a property value devaluation, you benefited because you bought the property after he was there already doing it, and now you're complaining about it and want to force him to change how he lives? That's just, I mean, you know, come on. Put up a fence around your house. If you, if you want to pay, offer to pay to put a fence around his place. If that's what you want to do. I mean, come on guys. Yeah, and luckily, the borough doesn't have a lot of power over those kind of things.

And Brian said, why not a nuclear reactor? That's actually in code as far as general use GU-1 land in the Fairbanks area. uh gu on land um allows for any use other than A nuclear reactor or a pig farm, I think, are the two things that you have to get an exception for if you want to put a pig farm. Not of just pigs, but like a farm. Like if you want to put a whole, you know...

I think those are the two written exceptions in the code on that. See, Barbara says she agrees with me on that. So there you go. It's all good. Alright, we're getting ready to jump in here. Let me make sure that this issue is coming on here. I lost my... I lost my thing here. Where is it? Right there. Right there. Okay, so we're going to see... We're going to see Bernadette here in just a moment, I hope. And we're going to continue things on. We're about 90 seconds out from starting.

Anthony said, man, I feel like people moving into an area and then complaining has some kind of overarching relevance both at the state and national level, but I can't quite lay a finger on it. Um... Brian says, oops, I don't want to delete Brian's comment. Do like a former neighbor of mine did, buy the guy out and tear down the house. Yeah, I mean, you have that option. If you don't like what somebody's doing, you can buy the property up. Like I said, or you can, like I said, you can, uh,

You could offer to pay to, you know, get together with all your, if you're all burnt up about it, get together and pay to have a fence put up around their property. Or offer to put a fence up around their property. I mean, you know. By the way, you guys like my shirt? Just say no to government dough. You guys seen this? You guys need one of these, don't you? Go out to my website, you can get these, you know. You can buy them from Zazzle.

All right. Well, here we go. We're about to get into it. Hour two is dead ahead. Bernadette Wilson will be joining us. Luke Show, Common Sense Radio. Whoa, buddy. Put that thing back in its holster. We haven't gone anywhere. I don't understand. Check out themichaeldukesshow.com for information on how to get access to the podcast. Welcome to the party pal. The Michael Duke Show.

Greed and the entitlement is astounding to me. What more could you want from a low-budget radio program? This is a dumpster fire. Not just me asking. time to get a new perspective. what you need and we've got just the cure open and prepare for Cup of freedom. Show streaming live live around the world on the internet at michaeldukeshow.com and across the great state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Good morning, my friends.

Welcome back to the program. It is hour two of the big radio show, and we're about to jump into it. Today seems to be the day for technical difficulties. We were waiting for Bernadette Wilson to come on the program. And she just got a message that she was having a hard time logging into the interview software this morning. I don't know why. It's one of those things. So instead we're bringing her on the telephone this morning and we'll be, uh,

Bringing her on right now, in fact, joining us via telephone is a brand spanking newly minted candidate for governor of the state of Alaska, Bernadette Wilson. She joins us right now. Good morning. Good morning. So good to be with you. Yeah, I kept getting, you know, error message, error message this morning, but it's great to be with you on the phone. Welcome to my life. That's been my life all since.

since 3am this morning. That's been my life. Error message. Error message. It's one of those things. Well, Bernadette, I welcome you to the program. I don't think you and I have ever actually spoken on the air before, and it's good to talk with you, and I'm excited to hear. what you're bringing here to the table. I had not considered your name

For governor, we've been kind of postulating who might be governor and everything else. And then I saw that poll that Suzanne Downing put together on Must Read Alaska. And then your name popped up and I'm like, wow, all these other candidates, which I was not excited about any of those candidates.

And then you. And I was like, well, I know the name. I know the track record. I know what you've been doing. And I thought, well, this could be good. So tell us when exactly you lost your mind and decided that this was a good idea. Well, you know, I over all the years. I have worked on, I mean, it's been 20 plus years that I've been involved in conservative politics here in Alaska.

running everything from statewide ballot measures to various campaigns at different levels. You know, most recently I served as senior advisor on Congress, now Congressman Nick Begich's race. And you go through all of those different campaigns and different things that I've done. Nick Begich is doing awesome. What an awesome congressman we have there. I could not be more proud of him.

But I've worked on so many other races over all the years and I will be honest with you Michael I have found myself frustrated incredibly frustrated we bust our butts to get these people down to Juneau we expect them to do a job and they get down there and they are more worried about keeping a job than they are about doing a job They get down there. It appears.

though they lose all sight of their values and their convictions you know they come they come during campaign season and they go campaign all around the state and they're looking for volunteers they're looking to raise money And then they get down to June 1st. Well, if I do this, my district, my district, my district's not going to, they're going to boot me out, my district. And I'm saying, you know what?

This is about the state, and if you are going to campaign and be a so-called purple or left or Democrat legislator, Then you know what? Get out. And so I have found myself frustrated with the entire process of it. You know, you look at the permanent fund dividend for a family of four. They've taken more than $80,000 from Alaskans, right about $80,000.

dollars from Alaskans since they started taking money from that permanent fund, but then simultaneously We will watch them get down there and say well We need to have defined benefit that the house just passed to find benefit So here we've got billions of dollars in previous debt from defined benefit. They'll tell you that they don't have the money to pay out the permanent fund dividend.

And then they'll turn around and they're spending money on all these different things. So here Alaskans are showing up at our stakeholder meeting at the end of the year, so to speak. And they're showing up and saying, well, we can't pay it, but there's new Ferraris out in the driveway and the books seem to be a little gray and nobody can tell us where the money went. This is not a welfare program. The citizens in Alaska are stakeholders. They are shareholders.

If the members of a native corporation or the stakeholders in Siri were to show up and they were to say, well, you're not going to get your dividend this year, guys. You are darn right those stakeholders would be having some grave concerns and some questions and saying, well, are you really capable then of leading this organization? And you look at look at infrastructure. Michael, the last time the state of Alaska built a major highway in this state was nearly 45 years ago.

That's how long it's been. We've talked about the road to King Cove for 40. We've talked about the Juneau access for 30. And I'm tired of hearing and talking about it. We just need to go. That was one of the promises at statehood, right? That was why they had to take us under their wing, and this is why they had to... to subsume all the private mineral rights in the state because we just couldn't do it on our own and we needed to make sure we had it. And so they promised infrastructure.

uh in this state and yet it seems like over the last 40 years any single piece of info all we've done is repave the roads we got we haven't had a we haven't had a big road project in this state for something new Yeah, you know, over in India, it took them four days. I looked it up, it was four days and like nine hours or something to build a 47-mile road.

Now, you're going to tell me Alaskans aren't capable of that. They're absolutely capable of that. We've got to get in there and we've got to push. And so, you know, you're asking me, well, how did you get to this, right? How did you decide that you're going to jump in and do this thing? Well, that frustration became very personal for me. I'm here not too far back. My oldest son came to me and he said, Mom,

I've made the decision. I'm not going to go to college. I want to go into the workforce and I want to look at property investing. His grandfather had invested in some pieces of property here in Anchorage several years back. And so we got to talking about property investment and the economy and just opportunity in whole. And he said, mom, you know, you look at Texas and Arizona and my gosh, those guys are booming. They're absolutely booming. Right, right. I had to admit to my child

I said, you know, if I were your age, I would probably go out of state. I don't know if I would set up roots here. I'm just being very candid with you. I don't know if I would. I think I'd probably be looking at saying, well... Holy crap, you know, I need to get the heck out of here. And I went to bed that night and then I laid there and I thought, you know, my great uncle served as governor twice here in Alaska. My grandmother was born in the village of Nakne.

My grandfather built the Captain Cook Hotel, the Northern Lights Center, properties for Elmendorf Air Force Base. I mean, his name is written on buildings all over and on projects. My mom and my dad have a trucking company that they've owned in this state for 40 years. My biological father has a business that he, my grandfather started. My dad now owns it.

And that business just celebrated 50 years in March. And I myself have had a business for nine years. I don't want my kids to move. And honestly, on a selfish note, i don't want to be the grandma that gets to come you know grandma will be here next month guys and she'll be here for 10 days No, I want to know that when the grandkids are sick, I can go pick them up from school. I want to know that I can hop over to the baseball game in the evening or go over to my daughter's house on a whim.

so that frustration suddenly became very personal for me and i looked at it and i thought you know what President Donald Trump has done a phenomenal job in his first few days in office. You look at Congressman Nick Begich, he has done a phenomenal job in his first few days in office. Both of those men have accomplished way more than their predecessors.

I would make you a bet that if we were to sit there and do a little tally or a tick mark, Nick Begich has accomplished more than probably every Democrat in Alaska put together in the last several years. And then you look at Governor Hickel and what a visionary that he was for Alaska. And many people will tell you that he was arguably one of the best governors Alaska's ever had.

All three of those men have one thing in common. They had never served in political office before, and they had not come up through a bureaucratic system. They had never worked for government. They came from an entrepreneurial background. Ronald Reagan is a Republican favorite. Here he was when he ran for governor of California, same thing. He didn't work for government, wasn't a bureaucrat, didn't come up through the ranks, so to speak, and yet Republicans love Ronald Reagan.

One of our top most favorite presidents. And so you stop and you think about it and you think, you know what? Maybe. just maybe, it's time for us to have somebody from outside the system, somebody who has not become jaded or forced to accept the idea, well, this is just how government works. This is just the speed at which government works.

Well, we're facing some serious issues here in the state. And one of the things that it makes me belly laugh is the fact that, you know, I've been following, I've been on the air for 25 years, basically preaching the same thing. In this state, we don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. Now, we've had a...

We've had a spending problem so long that it's now created both a spending and a revenue problem, but we essentially have a spending problem. And we knew this. The governor's own 10-year forecast for the last five years has predicted that in 24, 25, 26, somewhere in there, You know, five years ago, it said we're going to start seeing this real problem. And here we are.

And now everybody's acting shocked, including the governor. Oh, I'm shocked. We've got to put a freeze on. We've got to have a comprehensive plan. And the legislators, Lyman, Hoffman, et cetera, are like, man, next year is going to be rough. We could see this coming. And like you said, they're so worried about the next election cycle, they've lost.

the ability for that forward thinking. And even the governor, when he did, he had Donna Ardwin on his staff and they put together a great budget in 2019. And the minute that they dropped it, It was dogs and cats raining from the sky, mass hysteria, apocalyptic whatever. because they dared to want to try and cut the size and scope of government. As a governor, do you understand, I mean, do you understand that that's what has to happen? That's a huge component of what has to happen here?

Oh, absolutely. You know, we've got the highest rate of government employees per capita than any other state. We are at the top in the country for spending on education while our kids come in at the very bottom of the barrel. We have got to have a difficult conversation and get in there and say, you know what? I'm here to do the job. If I don't get reelected, then I don't get reelected. But I'm in here to get a job done.

Let's get the job done. And I am so fed up with people. And that's the excuse I hear. Well, you know, Bernadette, if I don't, if I don't vote for this certain spending thing. If we don't do that, if we don't do that, then, you know, I just, I'm going to lose my election. Well, I don't care because I'll tell you what, if you can't get down to Juneau,

And you can't do right by the people of Alaska. And if you can't have an honest conversation, then why the heck do I care if you are there in the first place? I'll be honest with you, I don't. If the state of the state is going to be in the same situation, that it is today when you run for office as it's going to be tomorrow, then you know what? Give me back my time. Give me back my treasure and my talent.

and i'll go spend my time with you know my evenings with my kids i don't need to spend it out on the campaign trail with you i don't need to be giving campaign contributions we've got to get this under control And I bring all of that up to say we have to focus on getting this job done. Bernadette Wilson is our guest. We're coming up on the break, so I got one final question in light of just kind of a perfect segue for what you just laid out there.

If elected, would you be willing to serve as only a one-term governor to make those hard decisions? Because I think that's what, you know, Dunleavy got slapped down hard with the recall after that, and he's kind of been a whipped puppy ever since. I mean, I love the guy, but... Seriously, it's just ever since then, it's been kind of business as usual. If you go in there, would you be willing to say, if I'm a one-term governor, I'm a one-term governor?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Let me get back to my kids and my business and my family. Right. Absolutely. And you know, the thing about being one term. I'll add this. I know that you've got to get to a break. But you look at the speed at which President Trump is operating. I think a lot of that is motivated by him knowing I've only got four years.

And even for elected officials, if you are a governor, I think that sometimes people fall into the trap of, well, you know, I got eight years to get that done. That's not the reality. Alaska doesn't have eight years. We have four years. That's it. That's all that this next governor is going to have. Right. That's it. Well, and next year we have a billion plus dollar, maybe up to a billion six dollar deficit.

We don't have time to wait around for another four years with that kind of problem, for sure. Bernadette Wilson... She is candidate for governor here in the state of Alaska. We're going to continue on our discussions here. and we're going to see what her vision for the future of the state looks like. We're going to continue here in just a moment. The Michael Duke Show continues. Common Sense, Liberty Base. Free Thinking Radio, back with more right after this.

Listened to by more staffers in Juneau than any other show. because their bosses told them to. And after what they just heard, They're gonna be best. You're a bad, bad man. The Michael Duke Show. We're in the break right now. I just heard Bernadette laughing. I love it. That's what sorts is. We're going to get your full bot. Go ahead. Someone told me the other day, they said, well, because I spoke out, I was so frustrated with the stupid HB 57 bill. Right. And.

I had a legislator reach out to me and say, Bernadette, these legislators, they're just not going to support your gubernatorial rent. I mean, you really just, you just can't be talking about this. And I said, let me tell you something right now.

I am not running to get legislator support. I don't care if every single last one of you votes against me. But I'll tell you what, you go into your district and you go explain why you voted against me. You go explain to conservatives why you voted against me. You have fun with that conversation. Because guess what? I'm not here. In fact, I know darn well you guys aren't going to like it. Because guess what? The party is over and you know it. And that's why. Why on earth?

in the halls of Juneau, would all of you be talking about, oh my gosh, we can't have her, we can't have her. You're not saying that about Cliff Bishop. You're not saying it about Craig Taylor or Nancy Dahlstrom. Why is it that Bernadette has you all riled up? I'm just some little... you know, mealy mouth business owner, grassroots activist, remember? Like, who cares? I just find it so interesting, you know?

I don't know. I sent CJ the link. I don't know if the link you had was broken or not. I don't know if you want to try it again. I sent it to CJ. I tested it while we were on the air and it works fine. Okay, she said try this.

yeah try that link and maybe i don't know this one looks like it's working it says entering the studio okay all right good well we'll we'll pull you in here in just a second if it starts doubling up on the audio then we know you made it or actually i'll see you before you uh come in so as soon as you get in the studio we can jump over should i

Okay, should I go ahead and allow mic and cam access, or do you want me to wait until you come back? Go ahead and do that and jump in, and you won't be live in the studio until I put you live in the studio. Okay, got it. Once we get it out. Oh, there we go. And look at that. Okay. I'm waiting for you to pop into the, uh, uh, popping. Oh yeah.

There you go. I see you popping. Ah, awesome. Okay, all right. So I'm going to mute your phone for just a second, and I'm going to bring you back up onto the stage here, and we'll see if we can get you going. Bernadette Wilson, can we hear you? Can you hear me? yes okay all right good look at that all right i can hear you good we'll hang up the phone and um

Turn that off. And where do we go? Okay. Well, good. Well, I appreciate you doing that for me. It's always better when folks can see and hear and do all that kind of stuff. This cycle... I'll be honest, Bernadette, I was not excited about this cycle at all when I started seeing all the names that were being thrown around on the Republican side, right? Especially after the disappointment that I've had.

from the governor uh you know i love mike i think he's a great guy the problem is is that ever since 2019 It just really kind of, you know, kind of rolled over and wet on himself. And, you know, I won't do that again. They smacked me on the nose of the newspaper. And, you know, and you're right. They've got it. You've got to have the. You've got to have the fortitude to basically say, I...

I don't care if you re-elect me. I don't care if you like me. I don't care if you try and recall me. I'm going to do the thing that I think is important to save the state. And that's the kind of fortitude that we need because somebody's got to be the adult in the room, right? Somebody's got to be the adult in the room. Well, and you know, the ironic thing is that

Trump won Alaska by 13 points. Right. So the ironic thing about it is the electorate is attracted to strong leadership. They want strong leadership. They know that. And so it's so frustrating. I had a reporter ask me the other day, are you going to continue on with the projects that Dunlevy's done? And I said, what projects are you referring to?

i mean he's got conversations going on a gas line and that's awesome but i don't know what what project we're referring to is there a massive road project underway that i didn't right you know the carbon sequestration project i mean what what's you know what do you do again what's going on and uh we should do that all right

We're going to continue. You heard the ding. That means we're about to return to the radio. Bernadette Wilson is our guest. Now she's live and in color, so we're all good here. and we're going to continue on the Michael Duke show. Please like and share. Like and follow the show page if you haven't liked it and shared it. Why? you like me, man? Don't you like me? Let's do it. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show. Not your daddy. Wait, sorry. Not your daddy. Ooh, not your daddy's.

Thought we were going. It's not your daddy's talk radio, nor do I play him on TV. I mean, I could, but that would be weird. Let's continue on. Bernadette Wilson is our guest candidate for Alaska governor. And I was a little remiss, Bernadette, because I think, you know, one of those things where I assumed everybody knows Bernadette.

Give us a little bit of your background, who you are, where you are, where you came from. We should do that before we dive into the deep end of the pool here and get down to the nitty gritty. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was born on the Kenai. Raised here in Anchorage, as I mentioned earlier, my grandmother grew up in the village of Naknek, deep family roots here. I grew up, went to school here in Anchorage, Alaska, and figure skated all growing up.

Now I'm the mom of three, the proud mom of three. I've got one that's already graduated and then another one who graduates here in a week and a half. He's hoping to go. play baseball in college somewhere and then i've got my bonus baby my daughter just turned 10. And I used to have a radio show, had a TV show there for a little while, have quite an extensive background on conservative political politics, and I ran the 2010 statewide ballot measure, parental notification of abortion.

and clear on up to most recently senior advisor on Nick Begich's congressional race. and I own a business. I own a garbage company. If all the businesses don't, I own a garbage company. I tell people, Don't let the high heels and blonde hair fool you, alright? You're the queen of trash, right? I am the queen of trash, man. I have climbed in the back of more dumpsters.

then I should probably admit shoveling that trash out. You'll appreciate this. Quick side note, I had a dumpster one time that was just nasty. I mean, it was filled with just a bunch of crap. I told one of my employees, I said, well, we're going to have to climb in the back of there and clean that thing out. And he looked at me and said, well, I'm not going to climb in the back of there.

And I said, go get me a ladder and a shovel. And I was in my jeans and my red patent leather stilettos, and I climbed in the back of that thing, just jumped right in. And he looked at me, of course, I can barely see out up over the edge, you know. And he says, boy, I didn't think you were going to do that. I said, no, I wasn't kidding. Somebody's got to pay the bills around here. You ain't going to do it. Somebody's got to pay the bills around here.

Yeah, that's right. So we're in our ninth year of the business. jumping into the governor's race and you know i i hope to bring i don't hope to bring i'm going to bring that entrepreneurial spirit to this campaign and force a strong um business conversation. You know, you addressed it a little bit in the first segment, but I want to highlight again, you know, the

People are going to complain that Bernadette has never held public office. Now, grassroots advocate, you know, all this kind of stuff, worked on campaigns, done that. Joe Miller, Mick Beggage, the whole thing. She doesn't know how it works. I don't know. What do you say to people who say, well, you just don't have the experience necessary to be the chief executive of the state?

You know, my response to that is Donald Trump has done a heck of a job as president, especially in just these last few months. You look at what he has accomplished. He has accomplished things that even supportive conservatives did not think in a million years that he would be able to accomplish and at the speed to which he has accomplished them.

Congressman Nick Begich, same thing, in just a few months has accomplished so much for Alaska. I would argue that he has probably accomplished more than all of the Democrats in Alaska put together in the last several years. Those two men have been phenomenal in their first few months in office. Governor Hickel, for those long timers, those old timer Alaskans, we'll recall Governor Hickel served as governor twice. That was my great uncle.

And, you know, Governor Hickel, people will tell you, well, he was one of Alaska's greatest visionaries. He was one of the best governors Alaska ever had. He could see the projects, get the projects done. You know, those three men all had one thing in common. They had never served in political office before. They hadn't worked for government. They weren't government bureaucrats that had been commissioners and all these different things. That was not their background.

And Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is a favorite of Republicans all over the place. Ronald Reagan was phenomenal. When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, He had never served in lower office. He wasn't an assembly person and then a legislator and everything else. So he didn't come up through the ranks. So I would challenge people and I would ask them.

Is it perhaps time for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit? Because so far, the examples that we have of that, have produced some pretty solid individuals. And I will also add, Michael, it's very interesting to me because conservatives will say, We don't like government bureaucrats, career politicians. We don't like them, we don't like them, we don't like them. But then you go to run for office and they want to see that political resume. Well, where's your 10 pages of political office?

Do you like government bureaucrats or don't you? Let's make up our minds, guys. I think we could be witnessing a sea change in the country because, again, The political politician class has become a thing. It didn't used to be that way. They were truly citizen legislators. citizens who just wanted to go and get the job done and then go back to their lives. And that's now become, I mean, we've got people who've been in the legislature for 40 years.

25 years, 33 years, 28 years. I mean, there's a handful of them in there that have been there two to three to four decades. And you're like, that's not a citizen legislator. I mean, you're in there, you're a professional politician. And what have we got for that? Well, where we're at now, billion dollars upside down, money going out the door and everything else. I think it's a breath of fresh air to bring somebody in who hasn't, who's had to make a payroll.

who's had to look at the bottom line and look at that. I would much rather have somebody like that than somebody who's gamed the system for the last 25 years and played all the power games, you know, the political power games. in the halls. I would love to see that. So again, I appreciate your answer to that.

We're facing a huge deficit, and the huge deficit is because we try to be all things to all people. It's never what we must have according to the Constitution. It's all these nice-to-haves, and that's where we're at right now. The governor just called for another... confab uh conclave i guess if you know in light of recent events a new conclave this one to create a new fiscal plan now

it feels like groundhog day because we just did this in 2021 right i mean the left and the right the hardcore pro-government big government people and the small government people they all got together and they fought it out and in the end they came out with a unanimous decision of here's our document, the Fiscal Policy Working Group,

This is how we can't do just one piece. It's got to be all together. Here's what we got. And then it went exactly nowhere. In fact, it got Ben Carpenter unelected because he tried to continue to push the parts of the fiscal policy working group plan. and that actually, they turned it against him and got him unelected. Are you familiar with that plan? Do you think that that's, do we need that long-term fiscal plan in this state?

Well, I will say this. I definitely support a long-term fiscal plan. We need a long-term fiscal plan. My understanding is that in that long-term fiscal plan there was a statewide sales tax. is that accurate there was a there was cuts there was cuts to the government there was a statewide sales tax there was a constitutional spending cap there was protections for the pfd there was a small increase to the oil industry taxes

And one other thing, there were seven different things. But they said, you can't do these in isolation. You can't just do one thing. And they're all contingent on another. You have to do everything together. And that was part of their plan. Yeah, and I'll tell you, I don't support new taxes. First and foremost, we need to go through this state and we need to doge it, all right? We need to go through our budget and we need to say, here's all the fat.

All these departments, can you go find 3%? Can you go find 5%? You talk to Donna Ardwin, she'll tell you, hey, you can go find 5% easy in each of these areas. A few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman who works for DOT, and I won't tell you where he was at or the city that he was in, but he is head of DOT in a particular area of the state, and he called me. And he said, Bernadette, it's the end of the snow season. We have all of this road salt.

We didn't need it this year. Millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of road salt that we didn't need. They're telling me to go out on dry roads and spread it. Because if we don't use it, we will lose it for the following year. That's a problem with how we budget. We should not be having departments that are out there with waste.

abuse and you know I would say waste fraud and abuse but they know but they're being told hey you got to go do this that means that the system is broken in the way that we are even budgeting for these certain departments A department head should feel quite confident That they don't have to go take millions of dollars with their road salt. spread it out all over the road.

Because if they don't do it, they may not get the money next year. Right. You're talking about zero-based budgeting, essentially. Right. Where you have to justify. You don't just start out at where you were last year and add more to it. You start out with a justification for every dollar spent.

Which, here's the thing, Bernadette, I'm in 100% agreement with you. I've been preaching that same thing for 25 years, that we need to cut the size and scope of government. The people on the program 100% agree with that. But we have had... zero impact on that are you going to be able to actually

force that through because i agree i think we could cut our way to this it may take some time it may be painful i mean it's going to be ugly we're talking about cutting a billion dollars out of this budget you know billion and a half dollars out of this budget which is a huge chunk and there's going to be a lot of screaming and counter-walling. Can you do it, is the question.

Absolutely. And I will tell you the difference between myself and other individuals. When you don't come up through the bureaucratic system, when you haven't been in Juneau, when you haven't become immune or inoculated to this.

where you haven't got, well, this is just the way that government works. It brings an entirely different perspective. And I think that what it does that fighting spirit is alive and well you haven't been browbeaten you're still you're still ready to stand up and unfortunately we have people that get down there that they say that when they're running for office

But they get down there and they don't have the backbone to do it. They just don't do it. All of a sudden they're getting really squishy on you and everything else. The other side of that is a lot of times when these people are running, they don't have a history or a background. If they have a history or a background, it's in the bureaucratic side of things. Michael, I've got a 20 year background in conservative politics.

I was told when I took on parental notification of abortion that I shouldn't do that, that it was going to ruin my political career. It would be the end of me. I would never work on another campaign in my life. When I helped Joe Miller on his campaign, I had people come to me. I served as Joe Miller's campaign manager for a while. I had people come to me and tell me, you can't work with Joe Miller. And yes, we know Lisa's not doing the right thing, but...

You know, we just can't do that. She's a sitting senator. Michael, Republicans today... who do not like Lisa Murkowski, were the same Republicans who back during that campaign told me I was going to ruin my career. And I will tell you time and time again, I have taken effort after effort, conservative effort, one after the other. I was told that I shouldn't be out and I shouldn't do a Memorial Day celebration in downtown Anchorage.

And I shouldn't speak out against COVID and against the commissioner of health at the time, because boy, that's really going to upset the governor. You shouldn't, you shouldn't do that. And I've done it over and over and over and over. 20 years later now I'm saying, you know what?

it's time to get in that seat we've got to make a change alaska let's go let's do this i know that we can do this and i'll tell you what this the development that needs to happen If I gotta put on a hard hat and a safety vest myself, I will jump up in the seat of that excavator. and find people to go out with me. And if you don't believe me, go find that employee who saw me jump in the back of a garbage can. Right. They'll let you know she's not joking. Exactly.

Bernadette Wilson is our guest. We're going to continue here. We've got to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to have one final segment with her and ask her about what her vision looks like. And what's the battle plan here? We don't want to telegraph too much of it, but we want to know where it's going. We're gonna be back The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free-thinking radio.

Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also, some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show. Okay, we're in the break with Bernadette Wilson, just you, me, and 80 of our closest friends here on the internet. That's what's going on right now, Bernadette. And, you know, I don't, again, I wasn't trying to be too hard, but I mean, we've talked about cuts for years on this program and it just never occurs.

We have this thing on the show called the Charter of Changes, and I don't know if you're familiar with the show or not, but... You know, there were four things that we needed to do, I thought, and I came up with this about five years ago, four things we needed to do to change the direction the state's going. We needed to change the players.

which we've done quite a bit of, but like you said, they go down there and all of a sudden they become pod people. So we've changed out like 60% of the legislators in the last five years. We're getting the same thing. Second thing was change the venue. And what I meant by that was we need to move the legislative session onto the road system.

You know, don't move the Capitol. Just put the session on the road system so people can stand in the room and look their legislators in the eye with a four or five hour drive. You know what I mean? Instead of having to spend $3,000 to go to Juneau. change the rules, and by that I mean no more binding caucus, none of this nonsensical conflict of interest rules that they do, no more closed Open Meetings Act violations by the legislature. They exempted themselves from their own.

Everybody else, if you're a commissioner on the lowest dog catchers committee, you've got to have an open meeting thing. They all know they can have closed door meetings all the time because of what we need to. But the fourth one was changing the funding and change the way that we build the budgets. Now, I advocated that what we should do is we should start with a five-year rolling average of what our revenue has been for the last five years.

That gives us an idea instead of this, oh, we think oil is going to be at $115 a barrel, but really it's going to be at $85. You know what I mean? And it creates this crisis. I just said that yesterday. I just said yesterday. You know what? If we got to start somewhere, we'll take a five-year average.

And that's the number that we'll start working with. Yeah. I mean, zero-based budgeting is the goal. I mean, that's the golden standard. That's what we should be using. But if nothing else, at least have a five-year rolling average of what's going on so you're not... This pie in the sky, oh, it'll just start at the baseline and then we'll increase. That makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, no, it's a mess. I mean, and I really think that a lot of it, Michael, is

I truly believe this. There are legislators down there who I think go down with the best of intentions, but I really think that it starts with the governor. strong bold leadership and a good vision and laying that vision out and that expectation for legislators is mission critical and when they don't when you're not providing that to them Now they're all running around like crazy. There also has to be a healthy amount of fear.

And, you know, I tell people in the legislature, you know, doesn't like this, but you compare it to raising a child. Your kids love you, but there has to be a little bit of amount of fear. They have to know that if you cross the governor, if you don't get this done, There's going to be repercussions. We will go into your district. We'll see you at the ballot box in November. Right.

you know you want to talk about losing an election let's talk about you well consequences i mean we have the strongest governor in the united states they admitted you know this governor is one of the strongest governors in the country And if he puts out a budget and says, this is my budget.

You need to fiddle with it. But if they come back and then stuff it full of a bunch of other stuff, they've got to know that he's going to go, no, I gave you my budget, and here's where I'm going to start redlining everything that you put in. I mean, that needs to happen. And if you take the slings and arrows and it makes you a long-term governor, So what if it saves the state financial? Yeah. Nope. I see it. We see it all the time. And like I see that frustration, it just got to be too much.

Miguel asked a question. He said, will you hold your lieutenant governor to the task of fixing the voter rolls among all the things you want to do? Absolutely. It's time for us to clean up our voter rolls. Our voter registration is at, gosh, I think last time I checked 110% or something.

And you don't think we've got a problem with voter rolls? This is insanity. Well, and will we see the report? Mike Showers has been asking for this report from the governor, from the lieutenant governor, for four years now. This is the report that Kelly Chewbacca put forward when she was in OMB. We still haven't seen the report on the division of elections.

Right. And if there's nothing wrong with division of elections, then what are you hiding? That's the question I have. You can tell me all day nothing's wrong. I'm saying, well, then why not put out the report? why why are you if you have nothing to hide most times people are like yeah you know here it is it's a public document you know it's not

It's not your personal information. It's public state information. And so we definitely need to get our election system cleaned up in this state for sure. Somebody just asked, would you try to ask Ben Carpenter be your running mate? Oh, man. Oh, man. That would be so juicy. So juicy. Absolutely. You know, I'm encouraged, Bernadette. I mean, I know your track record, I know your background, but you've come out stronger than I could have ever have hoped.

Again, totally unenthusiastic about, you know, we've got Click Bishop, we've got Nancy Dahlstrom. It's rumored that maybe Natasha Von Imhoff and maybe Peter Michicki may jump into the race. Adam Crum. Taylor. None of these names excite

But what you've done this morning, I think, is you've given us some hope that maybe what we've been pushing for for the last 25 years maybe has a chance, especially after seeing Suzanne Downings. Now, granted, that's an echo chamber. It's the right-leaning echo chamber. I think what you're saying could resonate with a lot of people. Where is Bernadette on Lisa Murkowski? Well, she ran part of Joe Miller's campaign against Murkowski, so I think you can pick on that and figure that out, Ruben.

All right, Bernadette Wilson's our guest. We're jumping back into it. One final segment. Like, share, subscribe, ring the bell. Let's do it. Here we go. Public enema number one. Oh wait, sorry. Ah, enemy. Public enemy number one, which makes more sense. On the other hand, he's a little bit of a pain in the Michael Duke show. I'm not. I'm a perfect angel.

Not a pain in any, well, no, that's not true. All right, welcome back to the program. Bernadette Wilson, candidate for governor of the state of Alaska, joins us here. Bernadette, I was just telling you that again, this has been a very pleasant surprise this morning. I knew that you were conservative and strong, but you've come out

You're not pulling any punches. Your gun's blazing. And some people are going to be scared to death of you, like you said, when legislators tell you, oh, don't talk about that because then the legislature won't support you. I don't give a crap. I want the people's support, not the legislators' support. I think that's a powerful, powerful statement.

So what's the plan, Bernadette? As you look at this and you see where we're at, I'm assuming you sound like you've read up the 10-year forecast. You know what it looks like. You know where oil's going. You know what's happening with the permanent fund and them trying to combine the corpus and the ERA so they can tap into the nest egg.

and all these other things. What's Bernadette's plan? Give me the outline. I don't need the details because I don't want you to reveal your hand, but give me the broad strokes here of what your plan would be as a governor. Well, I'll tell you what, in a few years, Alaska.

At minimum, we'll be working with those legislators on the budget to say, at minimum, you're going to take a five-year rolling average. If you're going to tell me you can't get back to zero-based budgeting, which is most certainly what we're going to push for, minimum when it comes, especially when it's calculating revenue. For the state of Alaska, we're going to be looking at we're going to take those five-year averages. You're not going to go off of just what it is today.

i think we need to go through we need to doge this state we know that there's fat we know that we have a record number of public employees per capita than any other state you look at the money that we're spending on education and yet we're falling at the bottom of the barrel And so that's on your financial side. When you look at infrastructure and development, we've got to get out. If India can build a 47 mile road in four days, there is no reason, no reason at all.

that alaska cannot go get some of these roads built i'm going to use the example of king cove and i know people are tired of hearing about king cove i don't blame you you've been hearing about it for 40 years But I'll tell you what, if we got to get in that excavator and go do it ourselves, then we're going to do it.

Well, you know, we don't have the permits and we don't have this and everything else. You know what a permit is, Michael? It's a black and white piece of paper that you're supposed to print off from your printer. or your computer to put up at the job site says you have permission to be here so the question becomes all right so i have a permit what are you going to do

You're gonna take us to court? You can't send in the National Guard against a governor. That's not allowed. You're gonna take us to court? I'll tell you what, if India can get that road done in four days, I know Alaskans can get that road to King Cove done real quick. I'll have that road done before you even get your court here. Okay?

I have seen roads in India. So maybe we should take 98 days instead of 45 because I have seen those roads. Okay. I mean, but, but yeah, I mean, exactly. I mean, during World War II, We were building airports like every five months there was an airport built. Now it takes 25 years to build an airport because of all the governmental red tape and everything else.

I understand it was wartime. Don't drop me DMs on that. But, you know, it's gotten ridiculous to where we can't even build out anything. And infrastructure and energy are the things that drive any economy or any society. Well, and the thing is, you know what? Let's go build. And let's build so fast. This is my urge to Alaskans. Join me in this battle and let's go build things so fast. that if their only options are to take us to court or pull federal funding

That we've got the project done before they can stop us in court. And that we've got so much money coming out of that oil and out of that resource development. By the time they figure out pulling their federal funding, the state's looking and saying, you know what? That's alright. You go have fun. On education, my hope is that we can end the income inequality and the discrimination that is happening in this state when it comes to education.

The fact that low income kids are being told you have to go to that school, even if it doesn't work for you, even if it's not, you know, you're not performing well. Just because you happen to have a single mom who can't afford a private school for her children or maybe she can't afford getting them to a private tutor after school or whatever it is.

This is a travesty that our kids, especially our low-income kids, are being told, you have to go to that school while they're held at the bottom of the barrel while we spend records amount on education. My hope is that in a few years. People are going to look back and say, you know what? My grandchild is getting ready to start kindergarten at one of the best schools in the entire country. That's what our education system should look like.

Well, we know education is the second largest component of the budget. Billions of dollars, right? 2.2, 2.4 billion dollars. For 120,000 kids, 30,000 of whom are being homeschooled because they pulled themselves out of the broken school system.

And yet they continue to come back and say, well, we need more money. We need more. We're not, we're not failing. We're starving, right? That's the latest thing. We're not failing. We're starving. You're failing. You're failing and you can't do it. And you want even more. What's your thoughts on the education? You just talked about HB 57, but what's your thoughts overall on the size, scope and education and where it stands in the state of Alaska?

Well, here's the thing. I want to know from the education bureaucrats, how much money do you need to make us number one in the country? I see all of these arbitrary numbers that get thrown out. It's $1,200. It's $700. It's all these things. But they can never tell us. What exactly is that money going to get us? If we put in X amount more dollars, is it going to put us in the top 10 in the country? Is it going to put us in the top 20? Is it going to put us in the top three?

I'm asking a genuine question from the education bureaucracy. Here's the thing. I want to sit down and I want to see our kids be number one. So how much money is it? What is that number? I want to know that number and I want to hear that number from them. I want them to sit down in front of me and say, Bernadette, this is the number that's going to make us top three in the country. That's the question I want to have.

but i will add this it's so interesting and so alaska at the moment for this moment in time that we are so far behind the conversation you look across the country And states like Tennessee, Texas, Florida. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. I'm pretty sure Utah, just recently, they're having conversations about education savings accounts, backpack funding, learn everywhere legislation. I mean we're still having this standard.

brick-and-mortar stuck school and this we think that it's great that we're discussing charter schools and I love charter schools in fact my children are enrolled in a charter school here in Alaska and they are awesome But here in Alaska, it's like we've kind of capped our vision at just, you know, well, there's the charter schools because we just.

We're not going to get school choice. There's so many things. There's backpack funding, Learn Everywhere. There's a whole education conversation and world out there. that we've just have not even been a part of. It's time for us to jump in and have a serious conversation about this. yeah absolutely and i think it's time for people to admit that the current educational system is busted. That there's something fundamentally broken in the system.

that they can't produce with the money that they've got right now. I mean, during COVID, we discovered that most of us could telecommute, right, at some point or another. Why can't we utilize those kind of technology? We're the 21st century. We shouldn't be doing things the same way that they did it in 1935. It's just, it makes no sense at all.

We're down to the last two and a half, three minutes here, Bernadette. Anything that I didn't get to, any burning issue that you think is important in the state that people need to know about before we do your wrap up? You know, I would just say this. I understand that there is a lot of frustration. There's a lot of disenchantment because we've heard the same story over and over and over again. And I want to urge Alaskans that, you know what?

If you look at this, what's different this time is the background of the person running. And I would really ask people to consider out of the elected officials that you like and the ones that you look at that are currently doing well. And like I said, I hold Donald Trump and Nick Bagich up as a prime example. But look at their backgrounds and ask yourself, you know what, maybe this is indeed possible. And I figure this, Michael, I've been telling everybody, I've decided this is...

One of my favorite parts of this campaign is you look at Donald Trump as saying this is going to be the golden age of America. This is his big push. Well, if this is going to be the golden age of America, then I'm asking everybody, let's make sure that those history books are filled with Alaska stories. Yeah, well, we've got a president who is very supportive of Alaska, who very, you know, through his executive orders and everything else understands that we are a critical bridge to the future.

In many ways, whether it's mineral resources, strategic location for military assets and everything else. Alaska could be at the top of the heap. And I agree. I mean, now is the time to do it. And what we need is somebody strong to jump in there and drive the bus. That's the thing. Drive the bus and school the children and be the adult in the room.

60 seconds. Your final thoughts, Bernadette Wilson. Where are you going? Are you doing meet and greets? How do people find out about you? When are you going to Fairbanks? All these kind of questions. Hit me with it. Absolutely. So BernadetteForGovernor.com is the website. BernadetteForGovernor.com. I would urge everybody to go on there. Right on the homepage, there's a button that you can fill out that says Join the Movement.

That will help us keep track. It'll make sure that you get updates from the campaign. We're on Facebook. We're on X. We're on Instagram. Bernadette4Governor. Go check that out. There's lots of... that's posted there. I will be out in the valley this week.

on Saturday speaking an event for the Valley women I hope to be up in Fairbanks beginning of June we've got an invitation to be up there and so lots of opportunities coming up if you stay in touch with our website and our facebook as those things come up they'll all be there

Hopefully I'm going to be right here quite frequently. Yeah, no, we'll invite you back on the program to have it done. Bernadette Wilson is our guest. We're out of time, folks. We'll see you tomorrow for Firearms Friday. Be kind. Love one another. Live well. Alright Bernadette, this is where I give you one final bite at the apple. Oh man.

Donald Trump hates Americans for prosperity. He compares that group to sorrow, so she's a hard pass for me. Alright, Kelly. I'm, you know, I don't even know what to say to you. Sorry that you can't decide for yourself. I gotta tell you. America's for Prosperity fired me. Yeah, they fired me. She was too hardcore for them. They fired me, guys. Yeah, too hardcore for them.

I got to tell you, I was not knowing what to expect, expected you to be a good guest, but now I'm actually more excited than I've been in a while because I've been waiting for somebody to say, I'm willing to be a one-term governor. I'm willing to make the hard choices and the hard cuts. I'm willing to be the adult in the room and take the slings and arrows and the anger of everybody out there who's been suckling off the government teat for so long. I'm willing to take that fire.

That's what I've been looking for in this state. And we just haven't had anybody who's been willing to do that. So that makes you a breath of fresh air. Final thoughts, wrap-ups, anything else, I want to give you the floor here for a couple minutes without the timer breathing down our neck. Well, I want to add to Michael, and I think it's important for people to know that. I absolutely oppose ranked choice voting.

And if I am not the top vote getter in this Republican primary, I will most certainly be bowing out and supporting the person that Alaskans do feel like is the person they want in that seat. So that's important to me that people know that. Ranked choice voting has got to go. It's not good. It disenfranchises voters. It's confusing to voters.

It's not a transparent system. It's not a timely system when it comes to counting votes. And so I would say that is another item that I would most certainly add to the conversation. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. You're part of the new Ranked Choice voting repeal effort, right? I mean, you've had your hat in that ring as well.

Yeah, so I'm one of the three sponsors. I'm not running the initiative or anything like that, right? But I was one of the three sponsors who agreed to put my name forward to the state of Alaska. I think that's very important.

yeah no and i agree i've signed everybody i know is signed we're all ready to go we needed to we need that to go down as well i mean we just need a we need reboot in this state we need to come back to our base core principles of smaller limited government and live within our means i mean hammond and your and your great uncle hickle they both understood when they looked at that and they saw that first check coming and people don't understand

The state of Alaska's budget in late 1969, early 70, when they got that first royalty check, the state of Alaska's entire budget was like $162 million. That was the whole budget for the state. and they got a check for just under a billion dollars in royalties.

and they burned through it. It made drunken sailors look bad, how fast they burned through it. And that's when your grand-uncle and... and uh and hammond said whoa wait a second we got to do something to put a governor on that we got to do something to slow that down because

This is government's deal. It's Parkinson's principles for government. They will consume every dollar available. And they've done that and more now. And so it's exciting to see somebody who actually understands that the base core principles should always be first. fix the spending it's the one thing you have ultimate control over you can't control a lot of the other stuff but you can control the spending first and then start talking about all these other fixes

Yeah, and I'll tell you, Michael, when people tell me the budget can't be cut, I've had people tell me that, you know, Bernadette, you don't understand. There's just nowhere to cut. And I tell those individuals, I said, so what you're telling me is that a budget that we had under Walker, a budget that we've had under a Democrat controlled House and Senate. You're telling me that those individuals really and truly gave us the best absolute budget that they could?

There's no way we continue to increase and increase and increase. We're working off of... Old budgets for the most part, right, by and large. Now you can go find like your little line items here and there. And as you mentioned, Donna Ardwin attempted to do it and get in there and that ended quite unfortunately, in my own opinion.

But I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it at all. And if we have a budget problem, it's interesting because there's conflicting messages coming out of the legislature. We hear, well, we have a budget problem. but then they're passing to find benefit. We hear there's a budget problem, but then you have even Republicans voting for a $700 increase to the BSA on education. So forgive me when I look at you a little funny and say, well, do we really?

have a budget problem are you not being transparent and there's just simply cuts that you don't want to make right well we saw that we saw that during dunleavy when he put that first budget out And the Republicans had an opportunity to back him up and uphold his vetoes. And they said, well, we want cuts, but just not in our district. Everybody's gonna feel the pain. Everybody is gonna feel the pain. You're gonna get sick from the cure or you're gonna die from the disease. Make your choice.

Well, and my message to legislators is this. If this is not about the state as a whole and it is only about your district, your district, your district, I hear that all the time. then by God, when your election comes up or your re-election comes up, don't you dare raise a single dollar outside of your district. Don't you go get a volunteer from outside of your district and don't you hold an event that is with us that's outside of your district

If this is only about your district, then you go raise money in the district, you only hold events in your district, and you only take volunteers. It's interesting to me, when they're looking for a campaign check, they have no problem taking it outside of their district.

Yeah, no, it's frustrating to watch. It's absolutely frustrating to watch this kind of stuff go on when we know that eventually it's going to lead to catastrophe. Because as Nick and I said, talking to Nick the last two years on the program every week, or every other week, and it was.

arithmetic don't lie, right? Maths are hard. Arithmetic don't lie. You can't keep spending more than you take in and expect that it's going to work out. Okay. That's just, it's not going to happen. Not going to happen.

Bernadette, I'd like to invite you to come back on the program on a regular basis between now and Election Day. I would love to do that. I would be honored to do that. Yeah, we'll save this link that I sent you here. Apparently, I sent you an old link earlier, and I apologize for that. This is the permanent link to the...

to the studio. So if you ever just want to get a wild hair one day and want to join in, feel free to just link in and I'll see you pop in. You know, you hear me say something that you just want to argue with me about something. feel free to jump in and we'll have a conversation about it. But as of right now, like I said, I mean, I'm in 100% agreement that the cuts have got to happen. And we probably agree on probably 90% of everything else so far. So I'm excited to see.

where this goes. And I'm hoping that what you're saying is going to resonate with those same Alaskans who decided to vote for Trump and baggage and others who aren't professional politicians. and do their thing. So, appreciate it. Again, one more time, your website. Bernadetteforgovernor.com. Okay, alright. And you can find us on Facebook. Lots of good stuff up there already. Oh, and are you doing the TikTok thing with all the kids too yet? Or Twitter? We're on...

I still call it Twitter as well. We're on X. We're on Instagram. It's all there. In fact, if you go to the website, the social media handles are there as well. Thank you so much for the opportunity this morning. It was great to spend an hour with everyone. I believe in long form. I believe it's the only way to get stuff. And I'm sorry, let me quit. You have the opportunity and I think you've got the presence and everything else to really be able to be the great communicator.

And that's where I think this governor has fallen apart is that he's just not... You can leverage those social medias. Are you going to... Would you... are you going to like use that to to push your message and would you would you um commit to coming on the program occasionally i mean once a month once every six weeks or something once you're governor

Because I get everybody to promise that, and then they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, like, I haven't had Mike Dunleavy on this program in three years. Every time I ask, Oh, it's just too busy. I'm too busy. Sorry. He's too busy. He's in Kuala Lumpur sunning his back. I don't know what he's doing, but you know what I mean? I just, I think communicating with the public, this is the strongest component that any governor to do, to rally the people around them.

So yeah, and communication. And I think that that's a lot of the, you know, the unraveling that we see in Juno and the lack of vision and the lack of leadership. You know, you can have the best leadership and the greatest ideas, but. If you're not out there communicating with people and having a conversation and a back and forth and where you can have people that are challenging those ideas, right? Having a good challenge and testing those different ideas.

And, you know, everyone brings up a different point or they've got something to add to it. And so communication is key. I ask, I'll throw this in just really quick. I know my phone's beeping at me for my next meeting, but. It was interesting to me. I was on the plane flying back from Juneau about a week before session. It was six days, I believe, and I had a particular legislator in leadership on the Senate side sitting next to me on the airplane.

And, you know, not someone that I align with particularly. And I said, so what's the goal for this year? What's the vision? Where are we going? What's the budget look like? What are the priorities? And he looked at me, he said, well, I suppose when you find out, let me know. I have no idea. And I said, well, the session starts in six days.

you guys don't know where where's the expectation on what you're supposed to be working on right he said i don't know i guess legislature fill it out i said you haven't had a brief or anything from the governor nope i i don't know

So we'll see, but I hope to do things a little differently. But anyhow. Thank you, Bernadette. My next one. Yes, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Okay. Thank you so much for coming on board. Bernadette Wilson, candidate for governor. Thank you, Bernadette. Bernadette4Alaska.com. Was that right? Did I screw it up? Bernadette4Alaska.com. Alright, well that brings us to the end of the broadcast for today. That's some good stuff right there.

Gotta be honest, I'm a little excited, and maybe that's just my naivete showing, but I'm a little excited about how she's talking and what she's talking about. i mean how do you guys feel do you guys feel like this is a a breath of fresh air do you feel like this could possibly work and happen what do you guys think Do you think this is good? Bernadetteforalaska.com. Thank you, CJ. Bernadetteforgovernor.com, rather. Do you guys

Do you guys feel like there's a good opportunity? I mean, I'm a lot more... I'm more excited now than I was to begin with because I thought, oh, she's a good name. She's got name recognition. She knows. She's pretty conservative. I think that's a good idea. But she just, man, she just laid it down. She just laid it down. And Kelly's comments aside, I am going to believe in somebody until they do differently. And her track record says that she's been 100% pretty much all the time.

since she got started in this gig, this political arena. As a private citizen, not jumping into the political bath of being a politician, but as a private citizen. I think it's exciting. I really do. I mean, we've been asking the question lately, what's the solution? What do we do? And I've been dobbered down. I've been like, oh man, maybe we just let it crash. Maybe that's all we can do.

I did say a couple weeks ago, right, we need a strong governor. That's really what we need. I mean, that would be the good case. Maybe this is it. You know, maybe this is a good opportunity. We'll have to see. We'll have to see who else comes to the party. But as of right now, she is the lead contender by a wide margin of anybody else out there.

Um, so exciting stuff. Yes. As a private citizen, in my own opinion, that's you're a hundred percent right. You know, I definitely like her style. I like that. She's not pulling any punches and that she's not afraid to say, I don't really care what you think. Tell the legislator, oh, don't talk about that. the legislature won't get behind you i could give two i could really not even care going to be interesting to watch. excited.

All right, my friends. Well, I appreciate you coming on board. We're out of time. Tomorrow's Firearms Friday. I'm going to go back and see if the duct tape is still holding on the rest of my system. Back tomorrow. Be kind, loved one. Live well. i put the t-shirt link in the chat room earlier if somebody was asking about the t-shirt link here's the link to the t-shirts if you want to buy Just say no. It's my favorite right there. I just realized that there's no link to the store on my website.

I'll go fix that too. Thanks, my friends. We will see you Tomorrow. Rest Real Radio Ski. And now we are slimy lizard internet people. It's time I call Jim.