The sun was shining Tuesday, when thousands of Kenai Peninsula residents took to the polls to decide the fate of various municipal seats, on top of a handful of propositions.
On the ballot for all borough voters this year is the question of whether to hand-count local election results and to align local and state election days. That’s in addition to a proposal that’d tie the borough’s sales tax cap to inflation, and another that’d increase the property tax exemption for borough homeowners.
Linda Murphy voted in Soldotna on Tuesday. She used to run borough elections and has voted every time she could since turning 18 — she’s 77 now. She’s against the proposition to hand count ballots. Murphy doesn’t think the borough should get rid of ballot tabulators, which she says in her experience are more accurate than hand-counting.
“I think the paper ballots, they just ask for mistakes to be made,” she said. “For one thing, when the polls close at eight, if these ladies or gentlemen or whoever's there have been there since seven o'clock in the morning, they're really tired and they make mistakes.”
Murphy says she’s also skeptical about aligning local and state election days, pointing to snowbirds who already vote absentee anyway when election season comes around.
Voters in two communities are considering one extra proposition each.
By around 11 a.m., more than 100 people had cast ballots in Ninilchik. Poll worker Patricia Wheeler was helping voters and reported steady turnout, which she suspects is tied to the number and nature of ballot propositions.
“It was slow at first, but it picked up,” she said.
Ninilchik is considering whether to create a new tax base to support recreation services. Proponents of the propositions say the money could pay for running the pool at the K-12 school. The school district considered closing that pool as part of its last round of budget cuts.
But Jeff Ambrosier isn’t convinced. He’s a former principal of the school and voted against the proposal.
“If they're going to charge us a property tax, increase our property taxes, then do we get to use the pool for free?” he said. “Or how is that money going to be used? And so I just didn't think that the overall plan was really that well thought out. And so that's why I voted no.”
The Soldotna Public Library was also bustling. On top of the borough’s four ballot propositions, Soldotna voters are also deciding whether the city should annex 2.6 square miles of land into the city. The issue ended up before voters at the direction of the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled against the city on the issue last year.
Shannon Dwyer voted in favor of annexation because she thinks it would help more people than it would hurt.
“It's a bigger tax base to help the city out,” she said. “But also services provided – I think the people who live outside annexation will be covered anyway, but, but not as well, maybe as once they become a member of the city, then the city has obligations to them.”
Daniel Owen also supports annexation. He’s a custodian at Skyview Middle School, which is in one of the chunks of land that would be brought into the city. He thinks bringing the school into Soldotna's boundaries could open up more resources, like for their own school pool.
“We're having trouble funding the pools as a district,” he said. “So if it was annexed by the city, potentially, the city could take over the pool. So that might be good, but I understand a lot of people are against annexation, so I don't know if that's gonna pass or not.”
Polls are open until 8 p.m. tonight. Preliminary election results are expected this evening. The results reported tonight won’t include absentee or questioned ballots, which the borough canvass board will review in the coming days. Assembly members are scheduled to certify boroughwide results next week.
For election results later tonight, go to KDLL.org.
