Special Interest Groups - Groups seeking or wanting to keep benefits or privileged treatment through political activity or legislation.

Alaska Center/REAP -  website  - Dropped the “for the Environment” part of its name a few years ago, but its mission has remained the same — support Democrat candidates and build a Democrat, climate-change and anti-oil political base in Alaska controlling local, state, and national government (from Must Read Alaska below).   

IBEW Union:  Chugach Reliability Group  Traditionally, the IBEW Union Chugach employees and their allies have funded campaigns for the Chugach Board timed so that they would hold a friendly majority on the Board just in time for their contract renewals. The worst example of this was approval of a pair of outrageous contracts the day before the Board majority was overturned in April 2007 (Red County - April 28th, 2011 - The forces behind candidates matter - Chugach Reliability Group - By Alex Gimarc)

CURRENT CHUGACH BOARD SITUATION

Chugach Stability   coalition ad (1 minute) is a good summary>>

* 2023 Election	Working Majority	Blue-Green Coalition
* Bettina Chastain
* Harold Hollis
Sisi Cooper
Rachel Morris
Mark Wiggin
Sam Cason
* Bernie Smith		Was

Chugach Electric customers continue to pay grossly excessive rates.  High rates hurt low and fixed income customers the worst.  Businesses and government just pass high electricity costs on to the consumer.  Your Chugach Electric bill is only one-third the electric cost you are paying...the rest hits you as higher taxes and prices in stores, especially for food.

IBEW Union took decisive control of the Chugach Board in 2008 with the support of the climate-change and anti-oil green Democrats (Alaska Center/REAP and allies).  This has been maintained since then but the change this year is that an approaching natural gas supply pinch is focusing concern on the extreme views of the green faction that is against producing or importing natural gas and wants Chugach to abandon the natural gas now used for 80% of its generation.

There has been a fragile 4-3 working majority that appears to have been trying to ensure that the most irresponsible extreme green renewable energy proposals get rational analysis.  It has not, however, addressed Chugach's long-standing IBEW Union issues or the extremely high electricity costs which are now over twice the national average, certainly a disgrace for an energy and resource-rich state like Alaska.

This year, the Blue-Green Coalition is making a move to strengthen their control and shift the board even more left, but IBEW appears to be showing some concern by endorsing Harold Hollis instead of Jim Nordlund. 

Two members of the Chugach Board (Sam Cason and Mark Wiggin) are working behind the scenes to take over the cooperative with a new pro-RPS majority bloc.

Appearances are that Mark Begich continues to call the shots at Chugach Electric through Julie Hasquet, his former press secretary, now embedded at Chugach as Senior Communications manager.  She presides over a heavy-handed transparency cover-up regime which among other things no longer releases the Chugach salary list to the membership.  She rejected our request unless we paid over a thousand dollars (this in violation of the Chugach Member Information Bylaw).  She has hassled a reporter who wanted to attend a board meeting and tolerated (or favored) her political operative employee who trolled (sent abusive, derogatory messages to) conservatives on company time, from his Chugach desk, while drawing his salary paid out of your bloated electric rates.

Now we have two more Begich operatives entering the scene as Blue-Green Coalition, special interest, dual-endorsed board candidates:

• Susanne Fleek-Green - Mayor Ethan Berkowitz's former chief of staff, now superintendent of Lake Clark National Park.  She also managed Berkowitz's mayoral campaign.  Prior to working for Berkowitz, Fleek-Green was state director for Sen. Mark Begich, and she managed Begich's 2014 re-election campaign and also worked for Begich when he was the mayor of Anchorage.

• Shaina Kilcoyne - Was Energy and Sustainability Manager for Mayor Berkowitz and worked on Mark Begich's senate campaign.  Kilcoyne believes that we need to stop traditional energy use and development today.

Outside money is heavily funding the Blue-Green Coalition candidates:  

• The Alaska Center’s top three donors are the Sixteen Thirty Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and Tides Advocacy Fund, all 501(c)(4) left-of-center advocacy groups.  The Sixteen Thirty Fund has gotten involved in Alaska politics increasingly in recent years, including supporting Forrest Dunbar for mayor, unsuccessfully, and successfully opposing an Alaska constitutional convention.  The Sixteen Thirty Fund also brought ranked choice voting to Alaska by funding Alaskans for Better Elections.

• In addition, the Alaska Center is funded by the Soros-linked Tides Advocacy Fund, which also helped pay for the expenses of Alaskans for Better Elections, the ranked choice voting group.

• IBEW Union of course continues to manage funding of Chugach board candidates from their own sources. 

Why are they doing this?

To push uneconomic, ill-advised featherbedded projects that would otherwise never be undertaken by any experienced, rational, utility management that had to sell such an overpriced product if there was consumer choice in a competitive electricity market. To do so, they have to impose it on captive electric customers who have no other choice but to pay…customers like Chugach customers.

This is done by going behind the scenes to slip through various subterfuges, the consequences of which are not noticed until it is too late to get out of them. The current example is their desired government-mandated Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) which will be very bad for the Railbelt electric utilities and consumers.

Guaranteed to put average voters to sleep (and even most legislators) the RPS could be slipped through the legislature with little scrutiny and no fiscal assessment unless a solidly pro-consumer Chugach electric board majority is in place to make sure the legislature understands the harm the RPS will have on the public.

The contentious RPS has been introduced in the legislature (HB 121 and SB 101) and it (among many other things): 

• Forces Chugach Electric into 80% renewables generation by 2040, which is not reasonable, technically feasible or realistic. 

• Fails to recognize $2 to $3 billion in costly transmission system upgrades required to use power from intermittent, renewable power sources. 

• Allows confiscatory fines to be imposed on member-owned Chugach that likely would lead to bankruptcy of the utility and customers paying the ultimate costs if these mandates can’t be met, even if they are impractical or impossible. 

• Fails to recognize alternative carbon reduction measures and other clean energy solutions such as microreactors (nuclear), carbon sequestration, carbon capture, emissions reductions, and other potential alternatives.

More information: Chugach Consumers RPS Info Sheet

CHUGACH CONSUMERS ENDORSES

These candidates running as the Chugach Stability Team that DO NOT support the RPS above and believe that enforcing these standards on utilities in Alaska, at this time, in their current form, is absolutely the wrong approach to integrating renewable energy into the current Railbelt grid.

• Reelect Bettina Chastain - Current Board Chair, Engineer, Executive, Business Owner.

• Reelect Harold Hollis - Current Board Treasurer, Engineer, Executive, Business Owner

• Elect to the vacant seat Brad Authier - Engineer, Business Owner, Environmental Consultant

They are not taking contributions and are self-funding:

100% paid for by us - the candidates.   No Financial Endorsements.

We're spending our own money in this fight to keep the Special Interests from taking over the board – so that you, our members, do not have to spend more of your money paying higher rates in the years ahead. Special interest agendas have no place in the CEA Board Room.

Chugach rates started skyrocketing from 50% above national averages in 2012/3 until they plateaued in 2017 at over 100% above national averages.  Bettina Chastain was chosen board chair in 2018 and Harold Hollis began his board service the same year.  After that rates didn’t further escalate.  Our recommendation is that both these board officers be continued.  They have important experience and are clearly qualified.

They are not politicians or activists and are funding all of their own campaign costs themselves.  They are engineers with technical backgrounds who have successfully owned, grown and managed successful companies here in Alaska.

Chastain, Hollis and Authier will be the best choices for the Chugach membership.

MEDIA

5/14/23 - Must Read Alaska - Who to vote for in Chugach Electric board elections Ray Kreig and Liz Vazquez - 

5/11/23 - Northern Journal - As natural gas shortage looms, Alaska electric utilities and advocates are feuding over a renewable power bill - Nat Herz - RPS requirements could boost consumers’ electric bills between 5% and 28% [Matanuska Electric Association]...  Analyst Alan Mitchell, found that ... $6.7 billion in fuel costs over the next 35 years [could be saved], compared to the $3.2 billion investment in new projects required.  KREIG:  Must look at discounted cash flow to make any sense of these numbers. 

4/17/23 - Must Read Alaska - Why is Alaska Center trying to take over Chugach Electric Board?  by Suzanne Downing - The “climate change” industry is making a play to take over the board of Chugach Electric. The current election of board members attracted endorsements from The Alaska Center for three candidates: Shaina Kilcoyne, Susanne Fleek-Green, and Jim Nordlund. These are the candidates who have made promises and pledges to the environmental industry to kill natural gas.