Community Presentation to Address State’s Fiscal Crisis

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Local organizations and governing bodies including Koniag and the City of Kodiak will hold a State of the Alaska State Budget community presentation Saturday. Guest speakers will talk about the state’s fiscal crisis and the options ahead.

Stacy Simmons, the office director for Koniag Incorporated, says Governor Walker met with Alaska Native leadership when he visited Kodiak to discuss his fiscal plan in December.

Simmons says they wanted more time to focus on those issues.

“We hadn’t got to discuss all the things that we wanted to. And it really comes down to education. And we wanted to be educated, we want the community to be educated, so we took the reins to this and decided that organizing a community presentation would be the best way for Kodiak to be educated.”

She explains why they need to create that awareness.

“As a community we need to know what’s going to happen and we need to advocate for what’s best for Kodiak. I know that everybody has a voice, and so our sponsors thought that educating the people, knowing what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen and how we can have a direct effect on it is really what the basis of having this community presentation is.”

One speaker will be the president and CEO of the Rasmuson Foundation, which is a philanthropic organization.

Cassandra Stalzer is the Vice President of Communications at the Rasmuson Foundation, and says the organization will speak about the results of their state-wide poll on how Alaskans are feeling about the state budget situation and how they would like to see their elected leaders address that budget. She says they’ve surveyed Alaskans twice before.

“In this latest survey, which happened in early January, we wanted to see what the movement was as far as how many people knew about it, what people were thinking what was a good way forward, and how concerned they were. So what Diane will be sharing on Saturday is not just how people feel, but how their feelings have changed since July.”

Also speaking will be the Alaska State Budget Director and members of the Alaska’s Future campaign. Alaska’s Future is aimed at convincing the legislature through public support that it should use Permanent Fund earnings to reduce the budget deficit.

If you’d like to attend the presentation, it’ll be at the Kodiak Convention Center between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Saturday. You can also hear KMXT’s coverage of the event by tuning in on Monday.