News of the North was privileged to sit with Alaska House Majority Leader Rep. Chuck Kopp recently for a wide ranging discussion. This is the transcript of that conversation with News Director Greg Knight.
GK: What exactly does the House Majority Leader do?
CK: More than anything, a majority leader keeps the cadence of the House, the priorities of the House moving forward, and the membership of the House attended to as far as what are the needs of the members for travel absences, making sure that the key votes that coming up, making sure there’s members in attendance needed for those votes, and that members aren’t surprised that something happened while they were gone.
A lot of it is just good communication with with the whole body, making sure they understand the priority pieces we’re moving through, and answering questions about process, facilitating a process for members. Some members are new. They’re freshmen and just learning their way around the building, and the things that a more seasoned legislator takes for granted should not be presumed upon a new legislator. The majority’s office is really a resource for the House, and their primary duty is to control the calendar on the floor during floor sessions, making sure we get through the agenda and then when we’re not on the floor, to be very relationship-centered with the offices
I also make sure absences are taken care of; necessary leave, and sometimes emergency leave. We’ve had members out on on emergency leave for medical situations. All those things are more administrative and may seem more on mundane, but the Majority Leader’s office just make sure the house functions well.
GK: Did you past service as the House Rules Chair help prepare you to become House Majority Leader?
CK: It sure did, yes, it sure did. In that job, there was a lot more focus on the rules of the House and rules pertaining to procedure and process in floor debate, and decorum on the House floor, but then also the calendar of the bills and also helping people with office needs. It could be everything from a broken chair in your office to your computer just crashed. ‘What do I do? I can’t communicate with my constituents?’
The rules chair was responsible to work with the IT department and the legislature to to address issues like that. So again, it was a lot of administrative processes, and the rules chair also handled all the personnel aspects of staff, hiring matters, and I interfaced a lot with the press, as does the majority leader. So yes, the prior role was serving me well and helping me be, I hope, a better Majority Leader.
GK: Senate Bill 109 came out this session, and it aims to have a 75-25 split in the Permanent Fund. Seventy-five percent to government and 25 percent to the PFD. What are your thoughts about that concept?
CK: On one hand, I’m sympathetic to the idea of how do you come up with a fixed structure, where there’s some predictability on how the government will determine what percent of the earnings from the fund will go to state services and what percent will go to a dividend. But, I would say that if any fixed formula puts us at a risk that we faced earlier, back in 1982.
When we established our first formula, we established a formula based on what we knew then, and that formula then worked when our population was less than half of what it was today, and we had only about 1/3 of the infrastructure. We have built schools. We have 262 airports today, in small communities all across Alaska. We own about half of them. We’ve expanded in our infrastructure and, as the state grew, state services expanded. So, all of a sudden we had more and more pressure as oil revenue dropped, because we weren’t doing 2 million barrels a day through the pipeline. We’ve dropped now into the high four hundreds.
So, with less revenue, more state services, and as our population grew, all of a sudden we realized we have to make a structured draw from the fund, which in 2018 the legislature did, and they said, okay, we know we have a dividend formula, and we know we have a need for state services. We cannot spend more than 5% of the total market value of the fund in any one year, plus the current year’s oil and gas revenues added to that, and we have stuck with that. But, along the way, we have obviated the original permanent fund dividend formula, because following that put us into huge billion dollar deficits. You saw the budget the governor introduced this year, it gave us a billion and a half dollar deficit because of a full statutory PFD.
My concern about a 75-25 split is if the price of oil drops significantly, which the oil price futures people say it could go all the way into the 50s. If all of a sudden we lost a massive portion of our revenue, but we were locked in again to a 75-25 split, we would see simply unmaintained state airports, unmaintained roads, etc. We would see a significant number of our schools close. We would see even a worse public safety situation across Alaska. State Troopers are already down over 50 troopers today. Our maintenance stations, heavy equipment, mechanics, everything would take a dramatic hit to fund a 25% dividend. And so, because we can’t control the future of revenue that we depend on, being a natural resource state, I’m very hesitant to lock us into a formula, which then we have to go back to the people again and say, here’s why this formula has failed us, and it’s because, you know, we just, we just had 20% of our revenue picture wiped out.
A promise, a promise to give away a certain amount of money, I think, is always setting us up for failure, and that’s why I personally believe that we should pay a dividend that is sustainable. After the whole legislative process weighs in, we can take the concerns of the various communities around Alaska, and we can come up with the best dividend we can, but we also need to make sure we don’t leave any communities high and dry without critically needed state services.
Kopp represented South Anchorage in the House from 2017 to 2021. He then co-founded Winfluence Strategies, an Anchorage-based public affairs firm specializing in corporate strategy and policy development. In 2024, he was elected again and was seated in the 34th Alaska State Legislature in January 2025.
