Alaska
Arctic Alaska House race focuses on issues that candidates say unite the remote region • Alaska Beacon
The person who represents the nation’s northernmost legislative district in the Alaska House of Representatives is tasked with achieving a special balance.
Sprawling and remote House District 40 encompasses both the oil-rich North Slope and the less-wealthy Northwest Arctic Borough. That means it has two separate hub communities – Utqiagvik and Kotzebue. While both regions are majority Inupiat, they have significant differences in their economies, histories and cultures.
The incumbent House member, who is from Kotzebue, and the two candidates challenging him, one from Kotzebue as well and the other from Utqiagvik, acknowledge that the district’s makeup creates a special challenge. But all three – all of them Inupiat — say there are ways to bridge those differences.
Properly representing the district, with all its diversity and remoteness, requires working with cities, tribes and any organizations that represent residents, said Thomas Baker, the incumbent.
“You’ve got to work with each community individually, see what their wants and needs are, and then you work bigger and then you see what the overreaching, overarching needs are,” said Baker, whom Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed to the seat in November to fill the vacancy left when then-Rep. Josiah Patkotak,I-Utqiagvik, was elected mayor of the North Slope Borough.
Despite the differences, there are common interests, said Baker, who was a Republican when appointed but is now unaffiliated. “We are the isolated north. We are the northern end of everything,” he said.
Democrat Robyn Niayuq Burke of Utqiagvik said a key difference is the wealth gap. Communities in the North Slope have the advantage of decades of oil money.
Burke, who is president of the North Slope Borough School District Board of Education, said she is keenly aware of how oil money has allowed her home borough to provide services that are unavailable in parts of the Northwest Arctic Borough. “It’s not lost on me, especially when I go to the Northwest Arctic and see that there are so many communities that don’t have water or have problems with their water,” she said.
Some of her understanding of needs outside the North Slope comes from her service as an officer with the Association of Alaska School Boards, she said.
Democrat Saima Ikrik Chase, currently Kotzebue’s mayor, also pointed to those wealth differences. That gives the North Slope communities more focus on policies, while the Northwest Arctic communities are more dependent on state-provided services, she said. Still, there are common concerns, like housing, education funding and teacher retention, she said. “They have the same issues. It’s just that they have more resources to depend on to get to where they need to get to,” said Chase, whose professional experience is in health care and emergency services.
Resource money is the obvious difference between the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic. The North Slope, site of Alaska’s big oil fields, has a vast borough infrastructure and service network built on oil money. The Northwest Arctic does not have nearly the same deep pockets, though it benefits economically from the Red Dog mine, one of the world’s largest zinc producers.
Some other differences stretch back further in history. Subsistence food gathering on the North Slope, which has shaped the culture, is largely about hunting bowhead whales and other marine mammals, while terrestrial mammals like caribou and fish, including salmon, make up the bulk of the subsistence harvests in the Northwest Arctic region, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Even though the Inupiaq language is spoken in both parts of the district, there are different regional dialects.
In the past, the North Slope and Northwest Arctic have been represented by some legendary and powerful lawmakers, like Al Adams and Frank Ferguson, both of Kotzebue.
Decades ago, each borough had its own representative in the state House. Now, they share one.
Effective advocacy for the district requires looking past whatever splits might exist between localities, corporations, nonprofits or other entities, said another of those powerful lawmakers who represented the district in the past, former state Sen. Willie Hensley.
“We need to not confine ourselves to our individual cells,” said Hensley, who is also from the Kotzebue region. Doing so in that Arctic region requires special skills. “You really need to put your best people in there,” he said.
Primary results suggest Chase-Burke contest
Results from the primary suggest that Baker faces an uphill climb. Chase and Burke finished in a near-tie at about 35% each, with Chase eking out a three-vote margin over Burke. Baker lagged with 29% of the vote. Since Burke and Chase have similar positions on the issues, ranked choice voting in this three-way contest is expected to be important to the outcome.
All three candidates noted that turnout in August was low, and that results could change considerably in November, when voters will also consider the presidential candidates. Additionally, the two Democrats also noted that during the primary election, there were malfunctions at certain outlying communities that either interfered with people’s ability to vote or impeded the vote count.
Burke pointed to three North Slope precincts that failed to open. “I had people who reached out to me and said, ‘I tried to vote for you, but I just couldn’t,’” she said. Chase pointed to delays in counting votes in some outlying Northwest Arctic precincts.
While they come from different regions in the district, Burke and Chase have similar positions — and similar complaints about Baker’s record.
Possibly topping that list is Baker’s vote in March that upheld Dunleavy’s veto of a permanent increase in the base student allocation, core of the formula that decides the per-student funding provided by the state. The override failed by a single vote.
For Burke, who had traveled to Juneau to lobby for the increase, Baker’s action on that issue was a tipping point in her decision to run for the seat.
She blasted the action in an op-ed published days after the veto override failed.
“Baker’s vote virtually assured deep education cuts that make it improbable to adequately staff our schools or provide basic materials. As damaging as his vote is for the North Slope, it is even more devastating for the Northwest Arctic Borough, which does not have our property tax base from oil infrastructure,” she said in the op-ed, published in the Arctic Sounder and Anchorage Daily News.
Chase, too, said she was upset with Baker’s position, as were many of her neighbors.
“A lot of our residents here in the north were like, ‘What?’ Because, Number 1, he comes from a family of teachers and it’s like, ‘Come on, man, your sibling is a teacher, and your grandmother was a teacher.’ So I guess his actions speak louder than his words on that,” she said.
Baker, defending his decision on that vote, said it would have been pointless to override the veto because Dunleavy would have simply vetoed the money for the next year needed to pay the increase in the formula.
It isn’t clear whether that hypothetical would have come to pass. Dunleavy ultimately signed a budget containing a one-time funding bonus equivalent to the permanent boost envisioned by the Legislature. But the failure of the bill means that there is no long-term change.
His vote on the veto override notwithstanding, Baker said he supports an increase in the BSA, which is why he voted for the final budget and its one-time $680 boost. But addressing education challenges in the far-north district will require more adjustments, he said. “The BSA does need to be higher, but at the same time, the cost of fuel needs to be lower, the cost of energy needs to be lower,” he said. “We deal with a lot of issues in rural Alaska that other parts of the state and the country don’t deal with.”
Splits with Native leaders
Another point of criticism is Baker’s attempt to rejigger the state’s subsistence policies, a subject on which he clashed with Native organizations.
Baker introduced a bill to amend the state constitution, House Joint Resolution 22, that was aimed at unifying state and federal subsistence management — but his version omitted the word “rural,” in contrast with federal law’s requirement for a rural Alaska subsistence priority. Baker’s effort got pushback from the Alaska Federation of Natives, creating an unusual situation in which Alaska’s largest Native organization, along with other prominent Native organizations within his district, opposed legislation sponsored by a Native lawmaker.
“Rep. Baker’s bill came out of the blue,” Julie Kitka, then AFN’s president, said in a March 20 hearing at the House Resources Committee.
AFN and other Indigenous organizations, though they advocated in past decades for a state constitutional amendment, have come to prefer federal management as more dependable and more supportive of Indigenous rights.
Baker, who is on the council that advises the federal government on subsistence management in the Northwest Arctic, defended his constitutional amendment idea, adding that he, too, favors a rural priority.
“The main goal with that piece of legislation was to get the conversation started because it is an ongoing issue that no one was really addressing in the legislature,” he said.
Both Burke and Chase criticized Baker’s effort as ill-conceived and lacking proper consultation with affected people and organizations.
The proposed constitutional amendment lacked support from any other Native lawmaker, and it died in committee.
Election legislation is another area where Baker split from Alaska’s other Native legislators.
Those members staunchly supported a legal change that would have removed the requirement that absentee voters secure witness signatures from designated officials. That witness-signature requirement has proved to be impractical and burdensome in rural Alaska and effectively discriminates against Native voters, said lawmakers who favored the change.
In floor debate on May 15, Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, defended the elimination of the witness-signature requirement. Hoffman referred to the high rate of rural mail-in votes that were invalidated during the 2022 special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat. “Because of the witness verification provision, I’ve had 15 percent of my voters – 15 percent of my voters — their votes were thrown out. Imagine how you would feel if that happened in your district,” he said.
But when the Senate-passed bill came to the House floor, Baker voted against taking it up, splitting from the other Native House members. The tally was 20-20, so Baker’s vote on the matter was criticized as the decision that killed a bill with a provision important to his own rural constituents.
Months later, Baker said the amended version of the bill was rushed, and he remains unsure of his position on it. “I can’t say that I would have supported that bill because there was no time to review it,” he said.
He also noted that it reached the floor after the midnight adjournment deadline, making it possibly invalid even if it has passed. Dunleavy vetoed several other bills that passed the Legislature after midnight, saying they were unconstitutional.
Burke, in contrast, has been adamant in seeking changes to help rural voters. The current system is plagued with problems, like the lack of polling place access experienced in the primary, she said. And Alaska Natives pay the price, she said in another op-ed essay published in the Anchorage Daily News.
“Barriers to voting in rural Alaska are persistent and glaring, including limited access to early voting tablets, the inability to translate official election information into Alaska Native languages, and the failure to receive absentee election materials before the voting window opens,” she said in the op-ed.
Party affiliations and trends
Baker has another distinction from other legislators representing predominantly Native districts.
He was the first Republican in more than six decades to represent his district or any part of it. The only other Republican representing the Northwest Arctic region was John Curtis, who served one term in the first legislative session after statehood.
After the legislative session, Baker switched his registration to nonpartisan, something that he said was spurred by his experience in the House representing the district. Party allegiances can get in the way of serving the district, he said. “Sometimes there’s going to be a more conservative way to tackle a District 40 problem. Sometimes there will be a more liberal way to do it,” he said. Seeing how much work goes into the job “that was the reason — becoming someone that could work in the middle of the road.”
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Chase said she too sometimes feels like she doesn’t belong to a political party, though she generally sides with Alaska Democrats.
“I feel like I’m always teeter-tottering, with kind of being a Democrat or going, kind of, towards independent,” she said. That is especially true this year, “when the presidential election is happening, and people are so extreme on both sides.”
By extreme, she said, she is referring to policies on mining or other resource development. Extreme Democrats, she said, are “very against any mining or any resource development that could possibly, you know, tarnish the land,” she said. Republicans are extreme in the other way when it comes to mining and other resource development, she said. “That’s all they want to do,” she said.
Burke, who has served on the board of the pro-oil organization Voice of the Arctic Inupiaq, said she remains a loyal Democrat, but of the Arctic Alaska variety.
“You can’t be a Democrat from the North Slope without being pro-resource development,” she said. “So I would probably consider myself a little more moderate.”
Hensley said the region used to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and the meaningful contests were the primary elections.“If you got through the primary, basically, you were in,” he said.
However, the Republican Party label may not be as much of a detriment as it used to be, at least in half of the House district.
While most of rural Alaska remains solidly Democratic, there has been a shift within the North Slope Borough over the last few presidential cycles, according to results from the Alaska Division of Elections.
That is evident in results from the North Slope’s major population center, Utqiagivik, even as voters in the Northwest Arctic’s major community, Kotzebue, remain heavily in favor of Democrats.
In the 2012 election, voters in Utqiagvik’s two precincts preferred President Barack Obama to GOP challenger Mitt Romney by a 2-to-1 margin. Four years later, the majority of the presidential votes in those precincts went to Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump, but the margin was narrower, under 12 percentage points.
In the 2020 election, Trump received 52.6% of the vote in the two Utqiagvik districts.
Hensley attributed that trend to the North Slope’s increasing dissatisfaction over national Democrats’ oil development positions and policies.
“Without oil production, they’re toast,” Hensley said. “That is what fuels their entire economy.”
Burke said it would not surprise her if the North Slope Borough tilted to Trump in this election. However, she would not be part of that trend, she said. “I can’t vote for Trump,” she said.
Baker, as of early September, said he had not made up his mind about how he would vote in the presidential election.
“The concern for me is who is going to do what they can to support the Alaskan economy, who is going to support our Alaskan way of life and who is going to make sure that their administration listens when a community says, ’This is what we need, please work with us this way,’” he said.
In another example of the diversity within District 40, Kotzebue, the other hub community, remains a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, similar to the patterns in most parts of rural Alaska.
KOTZEBUE, Alaska (AP) — The low autumn light turned the tundra gold as James Schaeffer, 7, and his cousin Charles Gallahorn, 10, raced down a dirt path by the cemetery on the edge of town. Permafrost thaw had buckled the ground, tilting wooden cross grave markers sideways. The boys took turns smashing slabs of ice that had formed in puddles across the warped road.
Their great-grandfather, Roswell Schaeffer, 78, trailed behind. What was a playground to the kids was, for Schaeffer – an Inupiaq elder and prolific hunter – a reminder of what warming temperatures had undone: the stable ice he once hunted seals on, the permafrost cellars that kept food frozen all summer, the salmon runs and caribou migrations that once defined the seasons.
Now another pressure loomed. A 211-mile mining road that would cut through caribou and salmon habitat was approved by the Trump administration this fall, though the project still faces lawsuits and opposition from environmental and native groups. Schaeffer and other critics worry it could open the region to outside hunters and further devastate already declining herds. “If we lose our caribou – both from climate change and overhunting – we’ll never be the same,” he said. “We’re going to lose our culture totally.”
Still, Schaeffer insists on taking the next generation out on the land, even when the animals don’t come. It was late September and he and James would normally have been at their camp hunting caribou. But the herd has been migrating later each year and still hadn’t arrived – a pattern scientists link to climate change, mostly caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal. So instead of caribou, they scanned the tundra for swans, ptarmigan and ducks.
A lifetime of hunting
Caribou antlers are stacked outside Schaeffer’s home. Traditional seal hooks and whale harpoons hang in his hunting shed. Inside, a photograph of him with a hunted beluga is mounted on the wall beside the head of a dall sheep and a traditional mask his daughter Aakatchaq made from caribou hide and lynx fur.
He got his first caribou at 14 and began taking his own children out at 7. James made his first caribou kill this past spring with a .22 rifle. He teaches James what his father taught him: that power comes from giving food and a hunter’s responsibility is to feed the elders.
“When you’re raised an Inupiaq, your whole being is to make sure the elders have food,” he said.
But even as he passes down those lessons, Schaeffer worries there won’t be enough to sustain the next generation – or to sustain him. “The reason I’ve been a successful hunter is the firm belief that, when I become old, people will feed me,” he said. “My great-grandson and my grandson are my future for food.”
That future feels tenuous
These days, they’re eating less hunted food and relying more on farmed chicken and processed goods from the store. The caribou are fewer, the salmon scarcer, the storms more severe. Record rainfall battered Northwest Alaska this year, flooding Schaeffer’s backyard twice this fall alone. He worries about the toll on wildlife and whether his grandchildren will be able to live in Kotzebue as the changes accelerate.
“It’s kind of scary to think about what’s going to happen,” he said.
That afternoon, James ducked into the bed of Schaeffer’s truck and aimed into the water. He shot two ducks. Schaeffer helped him into waders – waterproof overalls – so they could collect them and bring them home for dinner, but the tide was too high. They had to turn back without collecting the ducks.
The changes weigh on others, too. Schaeffer’s friend, writer and commercial fisherman Seth Kantner grew up along the Kobuk River, where caribou once reliably crossed by the hundreds of thousands.
“I can hardly stand how lonely it feels without all the caribou that used to be here,” he said. “This road is the largest threat. But right beside it is climate change.”
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Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.
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President Donald Trump has signed bills nullifying Biden-era environmental protections in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in Northwest Alaska in an effort to promote oil and mining activity.
The actions were a win for Alaska’s congressional delegation, which sponsored the measures to open opportunities for drilling in the refuge and development of the 200-mile road through wilderness to reach the Ambler mineral district.
The actions are part of Trump’s effort to aggressively develop U.S. oil, gas and minerals with Alaska often in the limelight.
Potential drilling in the refuge and the road to minerals are two of the standout issues in the long-running saga over resource development in Alaska, with Republican administrations seeking to open the areas to industry and Democratic administrations fighting against it.
The signings were a loss for some Alaska Native tribal members and environmental groups that had protested the bills, calling them an unprecedented attack against land and wildlife protections that were developed following extensive public input.
An Alaska Native group from the North Slope region where the refuge is located, however, said it supported the passage of the bill that could lead to oil and gas development there.
One of the bills nullifies the 2024 oil and gas leasing program that put more than half of the Arctic refuge coastal plain off-limits to development. The former plan was in contrast to the Trump administration’s interest in opening the 1.5-million-acre area to potential leasing.
The federal government has long estimated that the area holds 7.7 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” on federal lands alone, slightly more than the oil consumed in the U.S. in 2024. The refuge is not far from oil infrastructure on state land, where interest from a key Alaska oil explorer has grown.
Two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge so far have generated miniscule interest. But the budget reconciliation bill that passed this summer requires four additional oil and gas lease sales under more development friendly, Trump-era rules.
Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, a group of leaders from tribes and other North Slope entities, said in a statement that it supports the withdrawal of the 2024 rules for the refuge.
The group said cultural traditions and onshore oil and gas development can coexist, with taxes from development supporting wildlife research that support subsistence traditions.
“This deeply flawed policy was drafted without proper legal consultation with our North Slope Iñupiat tribes and Alaska Native Corporations,’ said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the group. “Yet, today’s development shows that Washington is finally listening to our voices when it comes to policies affecting our homelands.”
The second bill that Trump signed halts the resource management plan for the Central Yukon region. The plan covered 13.3 million acres, including acreage surrounding much of the Dalton Highway where the long road to the Ambler mineral district would start before heading west. The plan designated more than 3 million acres as critical environmental areas in an effort to protect caribou, salmon and tundra.
The bills relied on the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress a chance to halt certain agency regulations while blocking similar plans from being developed in the future.
U.S. Rep. Nick Begich and Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan attended the signing in the White House.
“We’ve known the road to American prosperity begins in Alaska; the rest of America now knows that as well,” Begich said in a post on social media platform X.
Alaska’s story is one of vast potential and opportunity. Equally as important, America is stronger when Alaska is empowered to lead in energy and resource development.
With the leadership of @POTUS and @HouseGOP, we are advancing legislation at an historic pace to unlock… pic.twitter.com/c0cjA2lNcK
— Congressman Nick Begich (@RepNickBegich) December 12, 2025
Begich introduced the measures. Murkowski and Sullivan sponsored companion legislation in the Senate.
They were part of five bills Trump signed Thursday to undo resource protections plans for areas in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, using the Congressional Review Act.
Trump last week also signed a bill revoking Biden-era restrictions on oil and gas activity in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, another Arctic stretch of federal lands west of the refuge. That measure was also sponsored by the Alaska delegation.
The Wilderness Society said in a statement Thursday that the bills destabilize public lands management.
“Americans deserve public lands that protect clean air and water, support wildlife and preserve the freedom of future generations to explore,” said the group’s senior legal director, Alison Flint. “Instead, the president and Congress have muzzled voices in local communities and tossed aside science-based management plans that would deliver a balanced approach to managing our public lands.”
Alaska tribal members criticize end of Central Yukon plan
The Bering Sea-Interior Tribal Commission, consisting of 40 Alaska tribes, said in a statement Thursday that it condemns the termination of the Central Yukon management plan using the Congressional Review Act.
The action dissolves more than a dozen years of federal and tribal collaboration, the group said.
The termination of the Central Yukon plan will hurt tribes that hunt caribou and other subsistence foods, the group said.
“On the heels of the seventh summer without our Yukon River salmon harvest, we are stunned at the idea our leaders would impose more uncertainty around the management of the lands that surround us,” said Mickey Stickman, former first chief of the Nulato tribal government. “The threat of losing our federal subsistence rights, and confusion over how habitat for caribou, moose, and salmon will be managed, is overwhelming.”
After the signing, federal management of the Central Yukon region will revert back to three separate old plans, removing clarity for tribes and developers and requiring the Bureau of Land Management to start again on a costly new plan, the group said.
“This decision erases years of consultation with Alaska Native governments and silences the communities that depend on these lands for food security, cultural survival, and economic stability,” said Ricko DeWilde, a tribal member from the village of Huslia, in a statement from the Defend the Brooks Range coalition. “We’re being forced to sell out our lands and way of life without the benefit of receiving anything in return.”
Alaska may soon face major decisions about the future of the Alaska LNG project and, if so, the Legislature will need to ensure that every step serves the best interests of Alaskans.
It is essential to remember that Senate Bill 138, the blueprint for state involvement in Alaska LNG, was passed in 2014 for a very different project: one led by ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips, with a key role fulfilled by TransCanada. Today’s project is led by a private-equity developer, Glenfarne, pursuing a structure that diverges dramatically from what lawmakers contemplated more than a decade ago. When a project changes this much, the underlying statutes need to be revisited.
In June, the Alaska Gasline Development Corp.’s president told his board that AGDC would be coordinating with the developer, the administration and the Legislature regarding legislation needed to support project development. He also noted that AGDC would work with the administration and Legislature on policies required to exercise the corporation’s option to invest 5% to 25% equity at Final Investment Decision, or FID. When AGDC itself signals that legislation is necessary, we should look forward to their outreach.
SB 138 also assigned important responsibilities to the departments of revenue and natural resources that may require legislative action. One key responsibility is the Legislature’s authority to approve major gas project contracts negotiated by the DNR commissioner. The law clearly states that balancing, marketing and gas sale agreements for North Slope gas cannot take effect without explicit legislative authorization. That statutory requirement was intentional and recognizes a project of this scale demands legislative oversight.
We also know that the pressure for speed on complex megaprojects often backfires, sometimes creating more problems than it solves. The Legislature must balance the legitimate need for progress with the responsibility to ensure Alaskans are not asked to assume unreasonable financial risk. As Speaker Bryce Edgmon recently observed, legislation of this magnitude “could dominate the session” and “take significant time.” Senate Finance Co-Chair Bert Stedman was even more direct: if we get this wrong, it could be “detrimental for generations.”
Last week, 4,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., Glenfarne and POSCO International announced a major strategic partnership. It is a meaningful milestone. But Alaska has seen similar announcements before, and it does not diminish the need for hard questions. If anything, it raises them.
Final Investment Decision is when investors and lenders commit billions based on the project’s economics and the state’s fiscal terms. Any legislation affecting property taxes, payments-in-lieu-of-taxes, aka PILTs, state equity, fiscal stability, or upstream royalties and production taxes must be decided before this takes place.
The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee has focused on providing lawmakers and the public with the information needed to understand the choices ahead. I revisited the Legislature’s 2014 “Alaska LNG: Key Issues” report, which helped lawmakers evaluate the original SB 138 framework. Building on that model, I directed our consultants, GaffneyCline, to prepare an updated “key issues” report; not to endorse or oppose the current project, but to provide a high-level overview of potential policy choices, which should be available to the public within the next few days.
The refreshed “key issues” report will be an important starting point. I ask Alaskans to approach it with an open mind and to read it as objectively as possible, free from assumptions shaped by past disappointments or early optimism. Keep asking tough questions of the Legislature, AGDC, Glenfarne and the administration. Don’t assume the project is a done deal or a doomed one. This is not about cheerleading or obstruction, but insisting on rigorous analysis, strong oversight and a fair deal for our children and grandchildren.
Some Alaskans have raised questions about a potential conflict of interest: GaffneyCline is a subsidiary of Baker Hughes, which recently announced agreements with Glenfarne to help advance the Alaska LNG project. I share those concerns, which is why I have met with the Legislature’s director of Legal Services and with GaffneyCline’s North America director. I have been assured by GaffneyCline’s leadership that no one outside the GaffneyCline project team has influenced their analysis, and that their global reputation for independence and trust remains intact. Still, we also must fully vet this issue when we convene in Juneau next month. Transparency and independence are non-negotiable.
The recent ceremony in Washington, D.C., with Glenfarne and POSCO International underscores the project’s potential; however, the authority to determine how and when Alaska monetizes its resources rests here, not with dignitaries celebrating overseas commitments. Our future will be determined in Alaska, by Alaskans, based on the fullest and most honest understanding of the choices before us.
Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, represents Senate District G, which includes Midtown, Spenard and Taku Campbell in Anchorage. Sen. Gray-Jackson serves as the chair of the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee.
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