Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

The Forum IN PERSON at AUUF & on Zoom

9:00 am Sunday, July 12, 2026

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"Gubernatorial Candidates"

Former Governor Bill Walker 

Former State Senator Shelley Hughes

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Bill Walker served as the 11th governor of Alaska, from 2014 to 2018. He was born in Fairbanks, and raised in Delta Junction and Valdez. Bill grew up building homes with his dad and financed his education by working as a carpenter, laborer, and teamster on the Alaska oil pipeline. At age 27, he became the youngest person to serve as mayor of Valdez, and later serving as city attorney there. He earned his bachelor's in business administration from Lewis and Clark College, and a J.D. from the University of Puget Sound in 1983. He worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and co-founded a law firm with his wife, Donna, specializing in municipal, oil, and gas law. In 2020, he was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. He and Donna, have four children and six grandchildren. As governor he worked with both Presidents Obama and Trump, expanded Medicaid coverage, established a Tribal Advisory Council, and advocated for responsible resource development and a gasoline.

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Shelley Hughes served over a dozen years in the Alaska Legislature, representing Palmer and the southern part of the MatSu Borough. She served in the House from 2012 through 2016 and then in the State Senate, including two years as Majority Leader, until resigning in 2025 to focus on her gubernatorial campaign. Shelley had been married to her husband, Roger, for 48 years when he died in May of this year. During the1970’s and 1980’s, they lived in Hoonah, Bethel, Fort Yukon, Fairbanks, and Seward. After raising their four children, she began her second career with a move to Palmer in 1990. She completed her bachelor’s at the University of Alaska, worked briefly as a legislative aide, and then was a policy affairs director in the private sector. Among the issues she’s focused on in the Legislature were unmanned aircraft, toughening sexual assault laws, bipartisan fiscal plan proposals, safeguarding seniors against fraud and abuse, and the Alaska Reads Act, and she led the repeal of the crime reform act SB 91. She has 12 grandchildren.

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