There’s only one contender this year for the District 9 South Peninsula seat on the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly. Following current assembly member Mike Tupper’s decision to not run for reelection, Willy Dunne is running unopposed for the upcoming municipal election on Oct. 1.

Dunne is not new to the assembly, having previously served two terms from 2015-2021. He said he didn’t have specific plans to return to the assembly after those two terms, but when no one had filed for District 9 candidacy this year, he threw his hat into the ring.

“After talking with quite a few people over a period of months and trying to encourage people to run, it looked like nobody was going to file for the assembly,” he said. “So about an hour before the filing deadline, I went over to the borough office and filed to run.”

Dunne said that he particularly did not want someone to be appointed to the District 9 seat due to a lack of candidates.

In an interview on Wednesday, Sept. 11, Dunne spoke on a number of topics that the borough has recently been grappling with.

Upon taking his seat in October, he said he’d be looking at issues including adequate school funding, adequate revenue for the borough and renewable energy.

School funding

Dunne commented on the assembly’s decision earlier this year to not fund the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District to the maximum allowed by the state school funding formula.

“It seemed to be a good compromise for what the school district needed and requested,” he said, adding that in addition to KPBSD’s annual budget requests, the borough provides other “in-kind” services. “I don’t necessarily think that we should automatically fund to the cap. I think that we need to look very closely at the budget, see what the school district needs and see if there’s other revenue sources.”

Every year is a unique budget, Dunne said, and part of the problem stems from state and federal government support for schools and borough services continuing to drop, thereby putting the burden on taxpayers.

“I think the taxpayers deserve very critical evaluation of every budget,” he said. “I’m not going to say I’m going to fund to the cap every year just because I want to fund to the cap; I’m going to say I want to look at the budget … see if there’s room for negotiations, see if funding to the cap or perhaps slightly below is adequate.”

Dunne said he would not propose cutting school funding.

“School funding has been static for a number of years … so the school district has been doing more with less for many, many years. I want to see adequate and sustainable funding for schools,” he said.

On the subject of the school bond package and deferred maintenance in the borough, Dunne called it “a thorny problem” that the borough and school district will need to work together on.

“I think there’s room for looking at reworking some of those projects. I think everything should be on the table, but that is the job of the borough administration. The assembly doesn’t have a whole lot of say with bond packages,” he said.

Borough funding and revenue options

In the question of what constitutes adequate borough revenue, Dunne said that the borough provides many services that need funding, including schools, roads, solid waste, planning, and hospital and emergency service areas.

“It’s always a balancing act to try and figure out how much each one of those entities needs to function as a high-functioning department serving the people of the borough, providing those services, and then how much revenue we have in the form of taxes to fund those agencies,” he said. “There’s ideas for other revenue sources that are on the table right now.”

One of those ideas is the bed tax proposal, currently tabled by the assembly for future discussion in conjunction with the recently formed tourism industry working group.

“We’ve been discussing (the bed tax) for many years, and it hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s been approved yet, but I think there’s some worthy discussion there,” Dunne said. “The tourism task force can hopefully come up with some recommendations that might help us refine the ideas behind a bed tax, but I certainly believe that a bed tax is a reasonable source of revenue, especially if it can help reduce the mill rate for property taxes.”

When asked about implementing a tax that targeted specifically the hospitality and lodging industry versus a wider tourism tax, Dunne said that the assembly previously faced problems with increasing taxes broadly across all tourism industries.

“It’s hard to define what a tourism industry is, so that was part of the problem, to define who would be responsible for collecting those tourism taxes,” he said. “It was pretty complicated. I thought that a bed tax was a much simpler revenue source.”

Dunne also had some thoughts on the current borough budget and spending.

“One area of the budget that doesn’t get as much scrutiny as it might deserve is solid waste,” he said.

According to Dunne, a portion of the property tax revenue received by the borough pays for borough solid waste, landfills, transfer stations and recycling. Kenai Peninsula Borough residents are also able to use the landfill “at no charge.”

“That’s really unusual around the United States, and even in other parts of Alaska, people have to pay a fee to dump their garbage in the landfill,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that too much money is being spent on that, but we could perhaps come up with some efficiencies in solid waste.”

Some of Dunne’s other ideas include a fee schedule for residential solid waste garbage dumping, which he says might also encourage recycling.

He also said that the emergency service area mill rates deserve attention, and that perhaps the borough can “find some ways to make some efficiencies” with the “big increases” in emergency service area budgets and personnel.

“(Our emergency service areas) have expanded tremendously in the past few years, and we’re going from less volunteer emergency services to more paid professional emergency services, and that costs a lot more money,” he said. “It’s more efficient and it can provide better services, potentially, than all-volunteer, but … we’ve got a bunch of discrete emergency service areas … and perhaps we could find some efficiencies if there’s more coordination among them.”

Renewable energy

Dunne is “a very strong supporter” of renewable energies and balancing their implementation with fossil fuels.

“Whatever the borough can do to help facilitate renewables, I want to work on that,” he said.

With the looming natural gas shortage in Cook Inlet, Dunne said that importing natural gas is a “relatively reasonable, short-term solution.”

“But we’ve got tremendous potential for alternative energy,” he said, naming the new Puppy Dog Lake solar farm project being developed in Nikiski. He also said that the Kenai Peninsula has potential for wind energy, pumped-storage hydroelectricity, and tidal energy.

“In the meantime, solar is a proven technology, and anything we can do to help promote solar — whether it’s through perhaps some residential tax incentives or tax incentives to independent power producers — I’m all for that,” he said.

In five to 10 years, Dunne hopes to see the Kenai Peninsula Borough as a “healthy, vibrant place to live.”

“I really appreciate where I live, and I want to do what I can to keep it a healthy, vibrant place — keeping healthy schools, keeping those basic services functioning well, getting community members involved in long-term planning,” he said. “I think thoughtful planning will make this place an even better place to live in the future, and I want the borough to provide the services that people want.”