Patti Higgins

Higgins is a Democratic Party activist.She served a three-year term on the Anchorage School Board, from 1993-96, and has run three times for a state House seat.

They are running for a two-year seat representing District O, which covers parts of South Anchorage and the lower Hillside.The candidates live less than a mile from each other: Cowdery on Lake Otis Parkway near 81st Avenue and Higgins just off Abbott Loop Road near Lake Otis.

The state operating budget has been running several hundred million dollars in the red, a trend officials say will likely continue.The reserve account used to balance the budget is projected to run dry in a few years.This has brought the fiscal gap into relief as a campaign issue.
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Higgins has for six years been calling the budget shortfall the state's most critical issue.She said she'd balance the budget through a mix of an income tax similar to the "parachute" proposal of governor candidate Lt.Gov.
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Higgins favors a statewide vote on the subsistence issue and said she favors the rural priority.

She said Cowdery and his fellow Republican senators have boycotted any solutions to the fiscal gap and other problems.

"I kind of view him as asleep at the wheel," she said.

Cowdery countered that he's proud the Senate, during the past session, never moved on legislation proposing a statewide sales tax, income tax and use of Permanent Fund earnings.

Cowdery has taken stands that would appear to put him crosswise with voters: A big majority of Anchorage city voters, in a city election, said they wanted to vote on the subsistence issue, for example.And at a time when cruise ship dumping was causing public alarm, the Senate Transportation Committee Cowdery chairs bottled up a bill toughening pollution standards for the vessels.

Wording of the ballot question on subsistence was vague to the point of having no meaning, Cowdery said, and the cruise ship bill discriminated against one of several polluters of waters in Southeast Alaska.

Cowdery's formal schooling went no further than ninth grade in his native Missouri and several courses later taken at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
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Higgins, who has lived in Alaska for 25 years, has an education degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage.

She would improve education in Alaska, she said, by holding students to higher standards, shrinking class sizes, developing more schools of choice and finding ways to retain teachers in the Bush.

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Higgins' Oct. 7 statement shows support from environmental activists, Anchorage Assemblyman Allan Tesche and 74 people who gave $100 or less.
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Her campaign will spend up to $40,000, Higgins said.