Local Candidate, Outside Agenda

How dark money groups from San Francisco and Washington D.C. used local residents to take over Southcentral Alaska's electric cooperatives and raise your rates.

May 03, 2026

Three electric cooperatives serve Southcentral Alaska. Together they power Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley, Homer, and the Kenai Peninsula, from Eagle River to the end of the road. Their combined membership runs well over 150,000 households. In a single month this spring, the same network of organizations ran coordinated candidate slates in all three cooperative elections simultaneously. The organizations behind those slates are headquartered in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Portland, Oregon. They are funded by donors who do not live in Alaska, do not pay Alaska electric bills, and will not experience the rate increases their policy agenda will produce. The candidates they endorsed live here. The agenda they are carrying does not.

This is the story of how that happened, who paid for it, and what it will cost you.

The Utilities at Stake

Start with what is actually at stake.

Chugach Electric Association serves roughly 90,000 member accounts across Anchorage and Southcentral Alaska. It is the largest electric utility in the state, and it absorbed Municipal Light and Power, Anchorage’s second electric utility, in a 2020 merger that ratepayers approved in 2018 on the promise of $200 million in savings over 15 years. Those savings have not materialized. What has materialized is multiple rate increases, a canceled solar project, a wind project that missed federal tax credit deadlines, and community solar offered at 45 to 67 cents per kilowatt-hour against a current retail rate of 21 cents. Five of the board’s seven directors are now endorsed by and accountable to the Alaska Center, giving that organization 71 percent supermajority control of the largest electric utility in Alaska. Two seats are on the ballot right now, with voting open through May 29.

Matanuska Electric Association serves approximately 58,000 member accounts across the Mat-Su Valley, from Wasilla and Palmer through the upper Susitna drainage. MEA held its annual election on April 28. It broke all previous turnout records, with 7,951 votes cast. Despite that record turnout, the coordinated activist network won the at-large board seat by running one candidate against a divided field that split the non-endorsed vote across two competitors. The winner was endorsed by the Alaska Center, Lead Locally, and the Renewable Energy Alaska Project. Her stated approach to MEA’s supply problem is using rate increases to reduce demand rather than developing new supply. MEA’s gas contract with Hilcorp reprices 49 percent upward by 2028. MEA has no executed power purchase agreement with any firm baseload generation source.

Homer Electric Association serves the Kenai Peninsula south through Homer and the lower peninsula. Its election closed May 7. The same coordinating organizations endorsed two candidates there with the same strategic backing. HEA serves a peninsula facing identical Cook Inlet gas supply pressure to the rest of the Railbelt.

Three utilities. One coordinated campaign. One month. The same organizational names on every endorsed slate.

The Organizations and Where They Come From

None of this is secret. These organizations publish their goals, their endorsements, and in some cases their funding. Here is what the record shows.

Lead Locally is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2016 and describes its mission as building power in down-ballot races to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build the Green New Deal from the grassroots up. Its own website describes a strategic goal of blocking pipeline permitting and banning fossil fuel development by electing aligned candidates to local offices. It deployed national phone banking, texting, and postcard volunteers into cooperative elections in Palmer, Homer, and Anchorage during a single month this spring. It has no members in any of these communities. It pays no electric bills in Southcentral Alaska. It will experience none of the rate consequences its endorsed candidates’ policies will produce.

The Alaska Center is based in Anchorage but its funding tells a different story about where its agenda originates. Its top three donors are the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Tides Advocacy Fund, all national left-of-center advocacy organizations headquartered in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is part of the Arabella Advisors dark money network, a Washington D.C. for-profit consulting firm that manages a constellation of anonymous donor vehicles. In 2024, that network sent approximately $625,000 into Alaska through various channels. One analysis of the pattern described it plainly: outside money, hidden donors, familiar outcomes. Alaskans have become unwilling test subjects in a national policy experiment financed by donors who do not live here, do not vote here, and will not carry the cost of higher energy bills or fewer jobs.

In cooperative elections, none of this requires disclosure. There are no campaign finance laws governing cooperative board races. No spending limits. No transparency obligations. The Alaska Center can spend whatever its Washington D.C. donors provide to influence who runs your utility, and you will never see a financial accounting of it.

The Alaska Center’s endorsement page lists its current slate for both the Chugach Electric Association Board Election and the Matanuska Electric Association Board Election on the same page, under the same organizational header. That is not two separate local efforts sharing a philosophy. That is one organization publishing a unified slate across two utilities simultaneously as part of a documented multi-cycle strategy whose outcomes it tracks and celebrates with “Elected!” markers beside past winning candidates.

The Renewable Energy Alaska Project, known as REAP, is based in Anchorage and presents itself as a coalition of energy stakeholders. Here is the part worth sitting with: MEA is a dues-paying organizational member of REAP. MEA is literally funding the organization that coordinated the endorsement campaign targeting MEA’s own board. REAP’s founder has chaired the state’s Renewable Energy Fund advisory committee for years, appointed by successive governors, while simultaneously running the organization coordinating board election endorsements at the utilities that receive those grants.

The Susitna River Coalition, based in Talkeetna and backed by Patagonia, the California outdoor apparel company, and the Wild Salmon Center, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, explicitly promoted MEA board election participation on its Facebook page during the same election cycle. The reason is not subtle: MEA is the utility most likely to be asked to purchase power from a coal plant in the West Susitna drainage, and blocking the West Susitna Access Road that would provide infrastructure for that plant is the SRC’s primary mission.

How the Strategy Works

The math is not complicated. Cooperative board elections typically see between 11 and 13 percent of eligible members vote. The total electorate for an MEA board race is roughly 58,000 member accounts. At 12 percent participation, roughly 7,000 votes determine who governs a utility with 4,000 miles of power lines and a $324 million generation station.

A coordinated organization that can mobilize even 2,000 to 3,000 targeted voters across a service territory, through phone banking, text campaigns, and postcarding, can determine the outcome of a cooperative election even when the majority of members, if they voted, would prefer a different result. The strategy is not about winning hearts and minds across the full membership. It is about turning out a reliable slice of the electorate while the rest of the membership does not know an election is happening.

The MEA result illustrates the mechanic precisely. The at-large race produced 7,951 total votes, a record. The endorsed candidate won with 3,404 votes, which is 43 percent. The two non-endorsed candidates together received 57 percent and lost. If either had withdrawn in favor of the other, the outcome reverses. The coordinated minority ran one candidate. The uncoordinated majority ran two. That is not democracy failing. That is coordination succeeding.

The bylaw amendment MEA members also voted on, passing 53 to 47 percent, eliminates member elections in uncontested races, allowing direct board appointment instead. The same organizations that run coordinated candidate slates now have an incentive to make future races uncontested by organizing before filing deadlines. If they succeed, they get board seats without any member vote at all. The 47 percent who voted against that amendment understood exactly what was being proposed. They were outweighed by six points.

A Local Candidate Is Not a Local Agenda

Go ahead and raise the obvious objection. These candidates live here. They are neighbors. They have as much right to run as anyone.

That is correct. It is also beside the point.

The question is not whether a candidate holds a Mat-Su address. The question is whose agenda the candidate is carrying and who is funding the campaign to put her there. A Palmer resident endorsed by a San Francisco organization whose stated goal is stopping fossil fuels, backed by a Washington D.C. dark money network, coordinated by an Anchorage advocacy group funded by national foundations, and promoted by a Talkeetna conservation coalition backed by a California apparel company, is a local face on an outside agenda. The address on her driver’s license does not change the origin of the policy framework she is being deployed to advance.

The organizations that endorsed and supported the winning MEA at-large candidate do not pay electric bills in Palmer. They will not pay the 49 percent gas price increase MEA members are absorbing by 2028. They will not be home in the Mat-Su Valley in January when the temperature drops to minus 20 and the heating load is not optional. They chose this candidate for her alignment with their policy goals, not for her service to MEA’s 58,000 members.

The same pattern applies at Chugach, where five of seven board directors owe their seats to the Alaska Center coalition, and at HEA, where the same organizations ran endorsed candidates in the same month. In every case, the candidate is local. The funding, the strategy, the organizational infrastructure, and the policy agenda are not.

What Captured Boards Actually Do

Chugach Electric is the preview, because the Alaska Center has held supermajority control there long enough for the consequences to become visible.

The Chugach board with five Alaska Center-aligned directors adopted a decarbonization commitment in 2022, two years after absorbing Municipal Light and Power and eliminating Anchorage’s only competitive utility alternative. That commitment set a goal of 35 percent carbon reduction by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040, with a clause that it would not materially impact rates. The clause has not governed subsequent decisions.

The board that adopted the decarbonization commitment then refused to purchase power from Terra Energy Center, the only local firm baseload generation option currently being proposed for the Railbelt. It pursued a Kenai Peninsula solar project that was canceled. It pursued a wind project that missed federal tax credit deadlines. It authorized community solar at 45 to 67 cents per kilowatt-hour against a current retail rate of 21 cents. A Chugach board member who describes himself as a clean energy advocate acknowledged publicly that the price of renewable power in Alaska is “really high.”

Look at what that has produced on your bill. A 4.3 percent permanent base rate increase from the 2023 rate case. An 8 percent energy charge increase filed three days after those new rates took effect. Another rate case filed in August 2025 requesting a 3.5 percent increase, just over two years after the previous case. Multiple increases in rapid succession from a utility that promised savings when it absorbed its only competitor.

Alaska already has the third highest residential electricity rates in the nation at 26.57 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average Alaska household pays $215 per month. And those are the numbers before the newly captured board seats have had time to fully shape what comes next.

MEA’s trajectory, without course correction, follows the same path. A board member whose stated approach to a 49 percent gas repricing is demand reduction through rate increases is not planning for the 58,000-member cooperative’s future. She is managing its decline on behalf of organizations that regard reduced energy consumption as a policy victory regardless of what it costs the people doing the consuming.

The Development That Needs the Power

The Mat-Su Borough is the fastest growing area in Alaska. In 2024 it built 768 single-family homes, the most since 2018, and is building most of the new construction in the entire state. The Alaska Department of Labor projects its population will reach 146,262 by 2050, up from roughly 115,000 today. Every one of those homes is an MEA service connection. Every commercial building going up along the Palmer-Wasilla corridor, every healthcare facility on Seward Meridian Parkway, every data center being discussed at Port MacKenzie, is additional load on a cooperative facing a near-50 percent fuel cost increase with no committed generation alternative.

None of this requires a political opinion to understand. Load is going up. Gas is going up. The cooperative needs more generation capacity from something other than an increasingly expensive and depleting Cook Inlet gas supply. The Borough power plant ordinance that blocked coal generation for 13 years was repealed in November 2022. The fuel is available: Wishbone Hill bituminous coal sits on the road system 10 miles northeast of Palmer with 14 million tons of identified reserves and 30 years of environmental baseline data already collected. Usibelli coal, documented by the EPA as having the lowest sulfur content of any coal in the nation, moves by rail from Healy to Interior Alaska power plants today and has done so since 1943.

The coal that could power the Mat-Su’s growth was always there. The Borough ordinance that blocked the connection between that fuel and the cooperative that needed it is gone. What replaced the ordinance as the primary barrier is a cooperative board that will not buy it, installed by organizations that regard any firm fossil fuel generation as a policy defeat regardless of what it costs the residents who need the power.

The Susitna River Coalition, whose national backers include Patagonia and the Wild Salmon Center, promoted MEA board election participation specifically because MEA is the utility most likely to be asked to purchase power from a coal plant in the West Susitna drainage. The fly-in lodge operators who oppose the West Susitna Access Road because a road would end the inaccessibility that their premium pricing depends on are aligned in that opposition with the national conservation network. The national Green New Deal organizations are aligned in opposition to coal generation regardless of geography.

All of these interests converge on the same outcome: keeping the fuel in the ground and the load growing on increasingly expensive imported gas. None of them pay the bill when that outcome arrives on MEA’s monthly statement.

The Coordinated Takeover Across All Three Utilities

The Alaska Center publishes its unified slate openly. Right now, its endorsement page lists candidates for both the Chugach Electric Association Board Election and the Matanuska Electric Association Board Election on the same page, under the same organizational header.

REAP coordinated endorsements at both MEA and Chugach while its board chair simultaneously ran as a Chugach board candidate in a previous cycle. MEA pays REAP membership dues while REAP coordinates the campaign to reshape MEA’s board. Lead Locally deployed national volunteers into Palmer, Homer, and Anchorage cooperative elections in a single month, with no Alaska staff and no Alaska members. The Susitna River Coalition promoted MEA election participation on its Facebook page with a direct organizational interest in the outcome.

The three utilities are physically interconnected through the Railbelt grid. They share transmission infrastructure and participate jointly in integrated resource planning that determines what generation gets built and purchased across the entire Southcentral region. When the same organizational network holds board influence across all three cooperatives simultaneously, energy policy for Southcentral Alaska is no longer being set by 150,000 member ratepayers through democratic cooperative governance. It is being set by organizations headquartered in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Portland, Oregon, none of whom will receive a Southcentral electric bill in 2028 when the gas repricing arrives.

Chugach: The Election That Is Still Open

Two Chugach board seats are on the ballot now, with voting open through May 29. The Alaska Center has endorsed two candidates. If both win, the supermajority that already controls five of seven Chugach board seats deepens further. If the two candidates who are not Alaska Center-aligned win, the supermajority begins to reverse.

Chugach members vote through their SmartHub accounts. Voting opened April 29. The instructions were emailed to members on that date from noreply@directvote.net. If you are a Chugach member and you have not voted, that email is likely in your inbox or your spam folder. The annual meeting where results are announced is May 29 at 4 p.m. at ChangePoint Alaska.

The organizations targeting this election know exactly which candidates they are running, why they are running them, and how to mobilize their voters before May 29. The question is whether 90,000 Chugach members will know the same things about their own election before the window closes.

What Can Be Done

Vote in the Chugach election before May 29. This is the immediate action available to every Chugach member. Two seats determine whether the Alaska Center’s supermajority deepens or begins to reverse. The organizations targeting this election have been organized since before the filing deadline. Chugach members who vote for candidates not aligned with the outside network are the only counterweight available.

Demand cooperative election transparency. Alaska election law does not cover cooperative board races. There are no disclosure requirements for what outside organizations spend supporting cooperative candidates. Any MEA or Chugach or HEA member can petition their board to adopt voluntary disclosure rules requiring candidates who receive endorsement support from outside organizations to disclose those organizations, their headquarters location, their stated mission, and the nature of support provided. That is a bylaw proposal any member coalition can bring forward at an annual meeting.

Push the non-eco MEA board members to commission the study that does not exist. No independent analysis of a coal plant fueled by Wishbone Hill or Usibelli coal without carbon capture has ever been produced for the Railbelt. MEA’s board can direct staff or request the Alaska Energy Authority to produce one. The question it would answer is straightforward: what does it cost to power a 146,000-person borough in 2035 with local coal versus imported LNG at whatever price the market charges? That study has never been funded because it generates no federal tax credits and therefore no developer has paid for it. The MEA board can change that with a motion. The non-eco board majority has six of seven seats. That majority can direct the question to be answered honestly and put the result in front of MEA’s 58,000 members.

Contact your state legislators with a specific ask. The legislature has authority to direct the RCA to produce a public report comparing the actual outcomes of the Chugach-ML&P merger against the public interest findings that justified its approval. That report should be required. The RCA’s public interest finding promised $200 million in savings and competitive efficiency. What it produced was a regulated monopoly whose board was then systematically targeted by outside dark money organizations with no accountability to ratepayers. The legislature that authorized the RCA has the authority to ask what that approval was worth and whether the mechanism needs revision.

One more thing worth remembering. Cooperative democracy was designed on the premise that the people who own a utility govern it. That premise holds when the owners participate. At 11 to 13 percent normal turnout, the owners are not participating. The organizations exploiting that gap are not doing anything illegal. They are doing something that any organized group can do, and that any organized group of members can reverse. The MEA result at record turnout shows what happens when the non-endorsed field is split. It also shows that when members show up in numbers they have not shown before, the outcome is competitive rather than predetermined.

The organizations that took a seat on MEA’s board, that hold 71 percent of Chugach’s board, and that ran candidates at HEA in the same month, are counting on the next election looking like the last one. They are counting on 11 percent turnout, a fractured non-endorsed field, and a membership that does not know what it does not know.

Now you know.

The Bottom Line

The candidates endorsed by Lead Locally, the Alaska Center, and REAP across three Southcentral Alaska electric cooperatives this spring live here. That is real. It is also the only thing about this campaign that is local.

The funding came from Washington D.C. The strategy came from San Francisco. The organizational infrastructure came from Portland and California. The policy agenda, stopping fossil fuel development and building the Green New Deal locally, was written by people who will never pay a Mat-Su electric bill, never heat a home at minus 20, never absorb a 49 percent gas price increase on a cooperative member statement.

The Alaska Center will add another “Elected!” marker to its endorsement page. Lead Locally will call it a win for the Green New Deal. REAP will note another utility moving toward renewable portfolio alignment. And MEA’s 58,000 members will see the consequence on their bills, which is the only place in this entire story where the cost actually lands.

That is the transaction. They get the policy win. You pay the bill.

Knowing that is happening is the first step toward changing it.