The Alaska Public Offices Commission isn’t letting former Attorney General Treg Taylor skirt the state’s financial disclosure rules as he enters the race for governor.
At least for now.
The commission issued an order last week that allows Taylor to use an alternative method to report his business dealings at an Anchorage apartment building he co-owns with his wife, Jodi, but he is still expected to report the identities of renters and the income he receives from them, just as the law requires of every other candidate. The latter part of the order is based on a technicality, finding that the duo’s request to hide the information was never officially submitted to the state.
“Although there was some discussion at the September 10, 2025, hearing whether Attorney General Taylor is required to produce the full names of all tenants, the Commission does not believe that such a request has been sufficiently raised by either the Attorney General or APOC Staff,” explains the order. “ In the event Attorney General Taylor seeks to withhold tenant information from public disclosure, he shall formulate his position in writing for Commission review.”
According to the online database of administrative orders, Taylor has not made such a request. He has also yet to file his financial disclosures. He officially entered the race for governor last week, making him the 10th Republican and third member of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s cabinet to join the race.
Under state law, candidates are required to disclose each tenant who paid more than $1,000 in rent during a calendar year. The reports are part of a larger public official financial disclosure process intended to give voters insight into candidates’ financial dealings and flag potential conflicts of interest. According to the request, the Taylors have 234 tenants at the Anchorage Inlet View Tower apartment building.
Taylor asked for an exemption from entering the renter information through the traditional system – most candidates don’t have more than 200 renters to report – arguing that the work required to enter the information was “extensive.” It wasn’t until later that the Taylors raised the possibility of hiding the information from the public altogether.
During the Sept. 10 hearing, Jodi Taylor argued that tenants’ rights to privacy override the public transparency law, claiming that “political-minded people” would use the information to harass tenants in an effort to dig up dirt on the Taylors.
“I felt like, in this case, people are trolling,” Jodi Taylor said at the hearing, which Treg Taylor did not attend. “It’s been weaponized by the media, and others have already come to try to reach out to our tenants.”
Commissioners and APOC staff seemed skeptical of the request and noted that there was no provision in state law that would grant them the legal authority to entirely waive the disclosure requirements. Some members questioned whether the additional attention is just part of running for a high-profile office like governor, while others openly questioned how the public was supposed to assess whether Taylor has a conflict of interest if he wasn’t reporting his interests.
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APOC Executive Director Heather Hebdon stated at the meeting that devising an alternative method for filing the information was feasible within the existing laws and regulations, but cautioned against granting a blanket exemption from disclosure.
“But with the argument that the tenants’ right to privacy outweighs the compelling state interest in disclosure, I would say that the staff disagrees with that,” said APOC Executive Director Heather Hebdon at the hearing. “The purposes of public official financial disclosures in part are to assure that public officials and their official acts are free from the influence of undisclosued business interests and to allow the public to have access to the information necessary to judge the public officials’ credentials or performance in office.”
When Jodi Taylor suggested that they would be willing to provide APOC staff with a list on the condition they didn’t disclose it publicly, Hebdon shot back that the point of the information wasn’t just for campaign regulators but for the public.
“This is what the statute tells you that needs to be disclosed,” Hebdon said. “It’s not for APOC’s information; it’s for the public information.”
According to the administrative order, the exemption the board ultimately granted will allow Taylor to upload the document as a single spreadsheet rather than individually through an online form.
Internal divisions over the coverage of the Taylors’ attempts to conceal their business dealings ahead of his run for governor ultimately led to the exit of conservative writer Suzanne Downing from Must Read Alaska, after she claimed the outlet’s Republican owners ordered her to remove a story that pointed out it was a bad look for the Attorney General to be asking for special treatment.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
