Recently, Stephanie Taylor urged voters in East Anchorage to not “let special interests buy your vote.” As a longtime resident of East Anchorage, I couldn’t agree more. But it’s her favored candidate, Representative Stanley Wright (R – Anchorage), who is the poster child for carrying the water for special and partisan interests.

A review of Stanley’s APOC reports shows a litany of contributions from oil company PACs, oil company executives, GCI executives and other wealthy special interest groups. And they sure got their money’s worth from their contributions. Stanley voted to continue a huge corporate tax loophole for Hilcorp – literally owned by a single Texas billionaire. This tax break has cost Alaskans nearly $1 billion in the last few years. That money could have been used for education funding, snow plowing or to fund the millions of dollars in East Anchorage projects that Governor Mike Dunleavy (R – Alaska) vetoed this summer while Stanley literally stood by smiling.

While Stephanie wrings her hands and urges that we “follow the money” why didn’t she follow massive amounts of money flowing from “out-of-state funded entities” campaigning against Democrat Ted Eischeid? Americans For Prosperity (AFP) is one. A group founded by-you guessed it – Lower 48 oil billionaires – AFP has hired canvassers to go door to door to badmouth Ted Eischeid. Why? Well, Alaska has the worst public retirement system in America for teachers, firefighters, State Troopers and police.

It’s a big reason we have a shortage of teachers, firefighters and police in Alaska. But these Outside billionaires don’t care about that – they just want more for themselves and less for us working people. And Stanley did their bidding by casting the deciding vote to block a bill that would help these public servants retire with dignity. So, the next time you call the police, and they can’t show up because of the dozens of vacancies they can’t fill – ask Stanley to get his outside billionaire friends at AFP to come help.

The huge contributions to Stanley from GCI executives are curious. Remember years ago when GCI executives spent millions trying to convince Alaskans to slash our PFDs? Now they are turning their focus to supporting Stanley – who, despite his promises to protect Alaskans’ PFD’s, voted to cut our PFDs by over 50% – while he got a legislative pay raise of over 50%.

As if Stanley’s campaign contributions didn’t raise enough red flags, he has sadly also chosen partisan political interests over our district. Despite two schools in his district being on the school closure list just two years ago, Stanley voted to uphold Governor Dunleavy’s veto of education funding in 2023 – causing Eastside class sizes to balloon even further. And despite having a district with large and diverse communities of color, Stanley cast the deciding vote on the last day of session against bringing up an elections bill, which has disenfranchised many low-income voters in East Anchorage and thousands of Native voters across Alaska.

Fortunately, Alaskans have a choice to replace Stanley Wright with Ted Eischeid, a long-time teacher, who has been active in our East Anchorage community. It’s an easy choice.

Ken Varee is a resident of House District 22 and longtime Anchorage School District educator.