Incumbent Kameron Perez-Verdia is one of three candidates running for Anchorage Assembly District 3, representing West Anchorage. We asked each candidate the same five questions and gave them 90 seconds to answer each one. Read the transcript of Perez-Verdia’s answers below and click the play button above to listen to where he stands. Find the rest of the Anchorage municipal election candidates’ Q&As here.
1. Why should people vote for you for Anchorage Assembly?
My name is Kameron Perez-Verdia. I was born and raised in Alaska. I'm originally from Utqiaġvik, formerly known as Barrow. And Barrow was a big part of how I was raised, and really tells a lot about who I am, my upbringing in community and caring about those around us and learning how to really solve challenging problems. So I have served on the school board for four years. Now I've served on the Assembly for six years. I run a nonprofit here in Alaska called the Alaska Humanities Forum, and all my work is about community. It's about strengthening community. It's about taking care of our neighbors. And so the reason people should vote for me is because not only do I care deeply about this place and the people who live here, but I bring a lot of experience, a lot of experience working with community and municipal government, and ultimately, I'm somebody who is really about solving problems and bringing people together to find collective solutions. So I really believe that right now, we have a unique opportunity with a mayor and an Assembly that are willing to work together, and there's an opportunity for us to actually get some things done in public safety and homelessness, in housing and a lot of areas. So I'm hoping people will vote for me for those reasons.
2. What is the single biggest issue facing the city and how would you address it?
Yeah, there's several issues facing our city, but I would say for me, it's safety. It's people feeling safe. And that crosses over a variety of things. It crosses over homelessness and public safety and services. But when I knock on doors, which I'm doing now, and I call folks, they want to be able to go to the park with their kids and feel safe. They want to be able to walk down trails and feel safe. They want to go out to dinner downtown and feel safe. And even though our crime statistics, if you look at them over the last 10 years, really haven't changed a whole lot. So it's not like we're actually less safe, but people feel less safe than they have in a long, long time. And so that'll be a priority of mine. And I think we do that through: A, making sure that we're filling all of our positions on the police department, because we're many, many officers down at this point, but getting more people out on the street. I've been working with Chief Case on a new program that he's bringing in called Community Service Officers, so folks that are getting out in the street and will engage with more folks. But I think we need to do a lot to improve our homeless situation. I think we need to do a lot to get more folks out on the street and really engage our community, to come back out and be in our parks and be in our downtown. So that'll be a priority of mine over the next year or so, is to really think about safety and how we can make sure our city is a safe place for us all to live.
3. What do you see as the best way to reverse Anchorage’s trend of outmigration in recent years?
Yeah, so we have had a pretty steady outmigration for the last decade, and I think it's somewhere in the area of 12,000 folks have left, and the projections are that it's gonna balance out. So what's happening to our city is it's sort of being resized a bit, and I think there's some things that we can do about that, but mainly I think that we need to be thinking about why folks are leaving. I think a couple of big ones for me, one are our schools, and folks really being concerned about what's happening with our schools, and we're underfunding our schools, which are impacting all of us. Another one that I think is really important is child care. So over the last year and a half, our city has lost 133 child care centers, and for the first time in two decades, we're, we have fewer than 200 child care opportunities within our city. It's a serious problem. In a recent study I read, 51% of people in Anchorage said they couldn't go to work because of child care issues. So that's one of the reasons folks are leaving or one of the reasons folks can't go to work. That's important to me, because I have kids myself. So I worked on a project over the last couple of years called the ACCEE Fund, and that's where we're transitioning marijuana tax funding into funding child care and early learning, and we just got that finished, and now the funding starting to go out. So we'll see about $5-6 million this year going out into our community. So that's a project that I worked on. It'll be a priority of mine moving forward
4. How would you reduce homelessness in Anchorage?
Well, I will just say that it's been a rough last few years and what we're seeing is that COVID increased our homeless numbers significantly. We are working on that. So in 2023 through the Next Step program, 150 people got housed, directly from the street and into housing. Over the last two years, we've brought on more than 400 affordable housing units and put things in place like the Complex Center and the Third Avenue Navigation Center and so, but more needs to be done. We need a better shelter system in our city. We need a shelter system where they're well-run and they're small and they're in different locations around the city so we can get people off the street and transitioned into treatment or into housing, and we need to get more folks into our outreach program so we can connect with them. The last thing we need to do is treatment. We need to make sure that there is treatment opportunities, and getting the Golden Lion up and running as a treatment center is one step. So I think with this administration and this Assembly, I think we are going to make more progress this year in getting people off the street into safe housing and into treatment, but it means we have to work together. It means we have to be creative in terms of our solutions, and engage our community in these solutions. We need the faith community to be involved. We need to listen to those that are experiencing homelessness, to really understand why that they're there, and together I think we can make some real progress this next year.
5. How would you improve public safety in Anchorage?
Public safety is a really important issue to me. I am the chair of the Public Health and Safety committee, and I think we're on the right track. There's a couple things going on. One is that we need to make sure that we're filling all of these vacant positions. We have a number of positions in our police force that need to be filled, and we need to make sure that we're funding police, we're giving them the resources and the materials and the training that they really need to be successful. But the other thing we need to do is we need to have better community and police relationships. One of the things that I'm working on is bringing back the Public Safety Committee, which will be an opportunity for the voices of the people in Anchorage to be heard and to be more integrated into what's happening in our police department. So public safety is really about making sure that we have the people out there that are taking care of us and serving us as police, but it's also about engaging with our population and our folks and listening to them in terms of what they really need. And as I was saying before, people are feeling less safe than they have in a long, long time, and we need to listen to that. So I think mainly it is, it's funding the services that we have, but through the Community Service Officer Program, which I think is going to be really exciting, we'll get more folks out on the street who are there, engaging with those that are having bad behavior, and I think that we'll start to see a different tone in our city.
Perez-Verdia’s competitors, Amie Steen and Jonathan Duckworth, did not participate in our candidate interviews.