"Vote for me or vote for Babe Ruth," said Anna Fairclough with just the hint of a smile. "But please vote yes on the school bonds."
In an election cycle in which she drew no opponent from her Eagle River district, that's about as close as Fairclough gets to campaigning for a second term on the Anchorage Assembly. She has the luxury of campaigning more for the Anchorage School District's two bond packages than for herself.
Her reference to Babe Ruth came after a Letter to the Editor called Fairclough a member of the "Taliban wing" of the assembly because she voted against allowing Little League ballparks at Far North Bicentennial Park in Anchorage.
Maybe that goes to show politics get ridiculous even without an election opponent, but it doesn't seem to have slowed down the 45-year-old Fairclough, who rarely misses a meeting of any kind in her assembly district.
Saturday, for instance, she was at the legislative town hall meeting, asking the lawmakers to take steps to ensure that a new Eagle River high school will be built. She said Anchorage School District officials could be busing Anchorage students to Mirror Lake Middle School.
They refuse to do so, Fairclough said, but she contends such a move would solve two problems -overcrowding at some Anchorage middle schools and the surplus space at Mirror Lake, a situation which has so far led to the denial of state funding for a second high school in Eagle River.
The previous week, she was at the Eagle River Community Council debating more-or-less the same issue with Tim Steele, a school board member. Why, she asked Steele and the audience, doesn't the district bus students to Mirror Lake as a way of wiping off the books that school's surplus space.
She said she plans to be present when the school board takes up Chugiak High overcrowding at its meeting Monday. She told the legislators at the town hall meeting she wasn't holding out any hope.
"I believe nothing will be done except to add more portables."
That's why she was at the town hall meeting - asking for legislative help in any way possible that would get a new high school built sooner rather than later.
Schools aren't the only issue Fairclough is looking at in this season of minimal campaigning.
At Saturday's meeting, she brought up several other items of interest to her constituents - utility assessments for the new sewer-and-water mains being planned for Birchwood and Chugiak that will equal nearly as much as the property's assessed value; speed limits on the Old Glenn Highway near where Fred Meyer plans to build a store; progress on finding a location for the Alaska Veterans Museum, of which she a board member.
She also asked that the state allocate land for an Eagle River civic center that could house a new branch library, local offices of municipal agencies and possiblly provide space to nonprofit organizations.
With or without an election opponent, Fairclough has not shied away from taking stands on community issues.
At the Eagle River and Eagle River Valley community councils this month, she took on the proposed antenna tower being built off Skyline Drive, and said she's "willing to hold their feet to the fire," referring to the municipality's planning-and-zoning bureaucracy and the owner of an existing tower. She agreed with neighbors that the public-notification process was unfair, and she's going to take a proposal to the assembly that would change the way legal ads are published.
"No one knew," she said of the tower, and added that the proposed structure does not fit into what she thinks the assembly wants as a policy over such towers.
Fairclough, a Republican, said she may someday be interested in higher office, but only in a future that she describes as "when my kids are out of high school in a few years."
"I would never think to challenge" one of the sitting legislators, she said.
How about running for mayor of Anchorage?
"I don't have any aspiration to be mayor," she said.
She said she's happy to be an assembly member for at least another term, and was initially happy she didn't have an opponent.
"It is like a vote of confidence, at least that's how I felt originally," she said. "Now people are starting to say it is because of voter apathy."
