Politics

Last-minute campaign pits rookie against GOP incumbent in South Anchorage

Jason Grenn had a job, three kids and a mortgage, and he wasn't planning on becoming a politician.

What he did want, desperately, was for someone else to run for the Southwest Anchorage state House seat held by Republican Rep. Liz Vazquez.

Grenn, 35, was angry that the House, led by Vazquez's majority caucus, left Juneau this year with a budget deficit that will burn through $3 billion — nearly half of the remaining cash in the state's primary savings accounts.

But the clock kept ticking down to the filing deadline, and Grenn hadn't been able to convince anyone else to challenge the incumbent. So with hours to go before the June 1 filing deadline, he found himself on the phone with his wife from a parking lot outside the state Division of Elections office in Midtown, trying to decide if he should run for office and give up his job at the Alaska Community Foundation.

"We couldn't find one person who was willing to at least step up and challenge an incumbent who was part of a majority that didn't do anything," Grenn said in an interview this week. "I was more than happy to not be this person."

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But with his wife's endorsement, Grenn, a lifelong Republican, walked inside and filed paperwork to run for Vazquez's seat as an independent. Nearly five months later, he's collecting $500 campaign contributions from business leaders like GCI chief Ron Duncan and Lynden chairman Jim Jansen, while Republicans are scrambling to shore up Vazquez's campaign.

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"They're really worried about the race," said Marc Hellenthal, a GOP political consultant who's not working for either candidate.

The three-way contest for House District 22 also includes an Alaskan Independence Party candidate, Dustin Darden — the anti-fluoridation activist who drew 1 percent of the vote in last year's Anchorage mayoral race, and who this week hitched a ride to a debate in Grenn's car. The Democrat in the race, Ed Cullinane, dropped out after winning the primary.

Vazquez, 64 until her birthday Tuesday, is a former state prosecutor and administrative law judge who spent six years on the board of the Chugach Electric Association, a Southcentral utility.

She's a staunch conservative finishing her first term after winning her 2014 campaign with 57 percent of the vote. The district, which sits west of Minnesota Drive and south of Raspberry Road, had been represented by Republican Mia Costello, who moved to the state Senate.

Vazquez didn't chair a standing committee in the House, but she seized a few political and personal causes over the past two years. Among them was a relentless campaign against the Medicaid expansion proposal from Gov. Bill Walker, a Republican-turned-independent who clashed with the GOP-led Legislature before ultimately expanding the program unilaterally.

Another was House Bill 147, which changed how the state treats pets whose owners are involved in domestic violence, divorce proceedings or animal cruelty cases. Walker signed it at a ceremony Wednesday, then posed for photos while Vazquez, with a borrowed whippet named Macie in her arms, stood beside him.

The legislation drew effusive praise from advocates, who pointed to cases where domestic violence victims remain in abusive relationships to keep their pets. And one advocate, Melissa Wolf, said she wasn't bothered that lawmakers had taken up issues this year that were far afield of the state's massive budget deficit.

"Just because there are big problems doesn't mean that we should ignore others," said Wolf, who owns a pet boutique, HM Bark, in the Hotel Captain Cook.

Vazquez, like other incumbents, didn't finish this year's legislative business until the summer and was slow to ramp up her campaign, raising just $415 between February and mid-July, plus $10,000 from her own pocket. She was also hit by the state's campaign finance watchdogs this month with two separate fines, for late filings.

Vazquez still says she's "excited about getting a lot done" if she's re-elected and has hired Bernadette Wilson, a conservative political consultant who worked on the campaign of former Anchorage mayoral candidate Amy Demboski.

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Vazquez laid out her agenda in an interview after the bill-signing ceremony. It includes revisions to the state's banking laws, capping the proportion of state grants that can be spent by recipients on administrative expenses, and establishing a state inspector general's office to look for waste and fraud, particularly in health and education spending.

Vazquez is also pushing for adjustments to the criminal justice reform legislation from this year's session, Senate Bill 91, which she said created barriers to law enforcement. And she wants to diversify the state's oil-centric economy through "responsible resource development," she said, though she oddly suggested that diversifying the economy would include boosting the flow of oil in the trans-Alaska pipeline.

"We are in big trouble if we cannot get oil into that pipeline," Vazquez said.

Vazquez wasn't a key player in budget discussions this year since she doesn't sit on the House Finance Committee; as a freshman, she said she had "limited influence." But Vazquez doesn't object to a sales tax, or to using some of the investment earnings from the Permanent Fund to help fill the state's multibillion-dollar deficit — the budget-balancing step that the Legislature's own financial analyst, David Teal, says would be the most painless and sustainable of all the options, like big taxes.

Grenn, during an evening of door-knocking near Kincaid Park, didn't sound much different from Vazquez in his own view of the fund, which he described as the "best and biggest asset to pay for government for a long time."

But he said he was compelled to run against Vazquez because of the failure of her Republican-led House majority caucus to address the state's budget crisis, as well as a consistent refrain from friends and people he worked with on the community council for the Sand Lake neighborhood: that Vazquez wasn't being responsive.

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"The bare minimum an elected official can do is respond to every call and email and message. People weren't even getting boilerplate messages back," Grenn said. "It's no wonder people are apathetic or don't care."

Vazquez, who didn't respond to a reporter's requests for an interview and only agreed to one when approached at the bill-signing ceremony, said she got "thousands" of emails and phone calls during the legislative session.

One of her legislative aides, Anita Halterman, then interjected in Vazquez's defense. "We do get some floods of emails that, frankly, are baiting, and you have to weigh those," Halterman said. "Not every email warrants a response."

Grenn has been connected to politics for much of his life, starting in his childhood when his father worked as an aide to the late Ramona Barnes, the steely Anchorage Republican who was the first woman speaker of the Alaska House.

But Grenn already had a lot on his plate. He's the Sand Lake Community Council president, and had a family and a job running the Pick.Click.Give program, which allows residents to dedicate part of their Permanent Fund dividends to charity.

He was told he'd have to quit his job to run for office, though he's continued working while his supervisors look for a replacement.

He's also a devout member of the Changepoint evangelical church, and he and his wife, Jana, saw the campaign as a sacrifice to help their neighbors and their own children, who they want to raise in a safe place with good schools.

"We decided we can sit and talk about it or we can actually do something," Jana Grenn said in a phone interview. "Our action was going to be to do this."

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Among her husband's top priorities are fixing the state's budget gap — he's open to discussion about how, but favors an income tax, which would take more from wealthy Alaskans, paired with a restructuring of the Permanent Fund, which would reduce each resident's dividend equally, hitting poor residents harder.

He also wants to advance public trust by cutting back lawmakers' perks, like their $200 per diem payments and their travel and office budgets.

Even if he loses, he said, his candidacy will have been worth it by teaching him more about his district and by forcing Vazquez to be more responsive.

"It will get some better representation," he said.

Nathaniel Herz

Anchorage-based independent journalist Nathaniel Herz has been a reporter in Alaska for nearly a decade, with stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. Read his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com

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