Greetings, City of Ketchikan residents:

I am running for a seat on the Ketchikan City Council and I would appreciate your vote!

For the past six years, I have been the Mayor of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough and for five previous years I was a Borough Assemblymember. During much of that time I was one of the few city residents on the Borough Assembly. It was a distinction that I took very seriously because although Borough officials are elected borough wide, most of those who have served over the last two or three decades have been non-city residents.

As you know, the city and borough governments have not always seen eye to eye and those disagreements have occasionally fueled consolidation and unification debates. During my time as an elected official I have always strived to reach "across the aisle" to get the two governments working as cooperatively as possible.

As Mayor, I have chaired the Legislative Liaison Committee, which has usually managed to see that Ketchikan's "message" to the state government in Juneau is a unified one, one that supported by the Borough, the City of Ketchikan and the City of Saxman. I also, as Mayor, convened a Cooperative Relations committee comprised of City and Borough officials. The committee has successfully solved numerous city/borough issues and is a crucial venue for communication between the governments, something that was not happening before I took office.

So why I am I running for City Council?

As a nearly life long city resident, I have been acutely aware of how actions by the city council affect my life, my family and the nearly all the residents of the borough. I have seen good things done and I have seen bad things happen. I know where the skeletons are and I know who buried them. But more importantly, I have seen the borough government improve its services and its relationship with its constituents over the past decade and I believe the city government can also make changes in terms of transparency that will allow all residents to feel they have a greater say in how their community can be run.

I also believe very strongly that it is time for the City government to take stock of where it is and make plans for where it needs to be. Too many decisions in recent years have seemed based on reactions to emergencies and other "unforeseen events" and yet nearly all the "unforeseen events" would have been seen coming had people been looking ahead. I hate to say that sometimes city government has "kicked the can" down the road rather than solved problems, but that has happened.

I am concerned about the seemingly endless need for bond sales to support infrastructure. This money will have to be paid back eventually. I do believe the local economy is stronger and more stable than it has been for the past two decades, but I am worried that between borough and city bonds the community is approaching $200 million. That is a large sum for an overall community of 14,000.

I am also concerned about the level of city property and sales taxes. I personally did not think the most recent city sales tax increase was necessary and I look forward to helping make city government more efficient, making future sales tax increases unnecessary. As a local business owner, I understand that higher sales taxes can hurt local businesses.

No one knows everything about city government, especially about a city government that also includes a municipal utility that brings its own challenges in terms of transparency and comprehension. But I am more than willing to find out what I need to know. One of the best things about Ketchikan is that somebody always knows what's going on and I have always found it very easy to ask around until I find out who!

In short, I am running for city council for the same reason I first ran for borough government 11 years ago. I want to leave a better community for my family and for yours.

Once again, I would appreciate your vote.

Dave Kiffer

PS, I almost forgot my personally information! I work as the education coordinator at the Ketchikan Correctional Center. I also am a free-lance writer and historian and a local musician who also teaches music. I am an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska-Ketchikan and I dabble in poetry. My wife is Charlotte Glover, the owner/operator of Parnassus Books and Gifts and a longtime former librarian at the Ketchikan Public Library. My son, Liam, is a 13 year old eighth-grader at Schoenbar Middle School who is into BASEBALL, soccer and cross country. My mother's family has been in the Ketchikan area since 1894-5. My dad's family, the Kiffers, are "blowins" having arrived in 1919. We like it here. Despite the rain.

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Ketchikan, Alaska

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