Mead Treadwell

Mead Treadwell
Lieutenant Governor of Alaska
Incumbent
Assumed office December 6, 2010
Governor	Sean Parnell
Preceded by	Craig Campbell
Personal details
Born	Louis Mead Treadwell II (1956-03-21) March 21, 1956 New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Alma mater	Yale University Harvard University
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Louis Mead Treadwell II (born March 21, 1956) is an American politician and the 13th and current Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. A member of the Republican Party, Treadwell is the former Chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission serving from 2006 to 2010.

Early life, education, and early career

Born to parents Timothy and Anne Treadwell in New Haven, Connecticut, Mead Treadwell grew up in the Sandy Hook section of Newtown, Connecticut where his father was the former first selectman of Newtown with the Timothy B. Treadwell Memorial Park named in his late father's honor. Treadwell attended Newtown Public Schools and attended Sandy Hook Elementary school, known for the 2012 mass shooting. Treadwell attended high school at the Ivy League boarding prep school, Hotchkiss, in Lakeville, Connecticut. He graduated in 1974 and was then accepted to Yale University. In 1978, Treadwell graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in History. Later that year, he moved to Alaska to do an internship with U.S. Secretary of Interior Wally Hickel's run for Governor of Alaska. Hickel lost to incumbent Republican Governor Jay S. Hammond in a four-candidate general election. After that, he became a political reporter for the Anchorage Times.

He then returned to the Continental U.S. where he attended Harvard University and graduated with his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1982. After that, he was hired by Hickel's business company, Yukon Pacific Corporation, where he worked as Treasurer and later Vice President. Yukon Pacific was founded to investigate the possibility of building a trans-Alaska gas pipeline. Eventually Yukon Pacific was purchased by CSX in 1989.

Early political career (1989-1994)

See also: Exxon Valdez oil spill and Alaska gubernatorial election, 1990

In the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, Treadwell left Yukon and went to Cordova, Alaska to serve as the city's director of spill response. Cordova was badly impacted by the spill and was severely affected the area's fishing industry as well as disrupting the general ecology of the area. Their mayor, Bob Van Brocklin, committed suicide. Later, the city elected Kelly Weaverling, the first Green Party mayor in history. Just a year later, Treadwell said "Some of the worst hit beaches look pretty good right now." He also said more than half of the beaches were clean of oil. He said fishing fleets were catching seven times as many fish as they did a few years prior.

Treadwell helped establish the Siberia Alaska Gateway Project of the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce which worked to open the US-Russia border with the Friendship Flight. He led two expeditions to Wrangell Island in 1990 and led a team of nuclear safety experts to the Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant in Chukotka in 1993. He hosted RADEX, the Arctic nations’ first circumpolar radiation release response exercise in 1994.

In 1990, incumbent one-term governor, Steve Cowper, decided not to seek re-election. Hickel decided to run as the nominee of the Alaskan Independence Party, and won with a plurality of 39% of the vote. Hickel appointed Treadwell served as Deputy Commissioner of Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation. He served in that position from 1991 to 1994 and continued to help the clean up the spill. He wrote new oil spill prevention laws and helped create the Department's Environmental Justice division. He also represented the State of Alaska on U.S. Delegations in three circumpolar government groups: the eight-nation Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, the Arctic Council, and the regional Governors’ Northern Forum. He joined Governor Hickel at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.

After Governor Hickel decided not to run for re-election in 1994, Treadwell served as a board member on the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation. He is a member of the Alaska Siberia Research Center board. Treadwell was elected a Fellow National of the Explorers Club in 2002 and chairs the North Pacific Alaska Chapter of the Club.

Business career

Treadwell has been involved in numerous successful business ventures and is a prominent member of Alaska's business community. Treadwell is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Venture Ad Astra, an Anchorage company that develops geospatial and imaging products. Its website states otherwise, that its Chairman is Nick Fowler and its CEO is Harrison Freer. It describes itself as a provider of government services, lists only federal government entities as customers and says that it has "a permanent presence in the Washington D.C. area," with a founding office in Anchorage and service product development in Portland, Oregon. He also claims to be a co-founder of the NASDAQ-listed firm Digimarc, although wikipedia ascribes that to Geoff Rhoads and never mentions Treadwell at all in its history of Digimarc. His bio states that he is a previous Chairman of Immersive Media Corporation (IMC), a company notable for developing the camera used for Google's Street View and Map Quest's 360 View services. Immersive Media was founded in 1994 in British Columbia, Canada. Mead Treadwell served as Deputy Commissioner of Environmental Conservation under Wally Hickel from 1991 to 1994.

Arctic Research Commission

Treadwell was appointed to the Commission in 2001, and was appointed by President George W. Bush to Chair in 2006. He has been called to testify before the United States Congress on several occasions. On August 20, 2009, he was called before the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, when it made a field trip to Alaska. During his testimony Treadwell warned that the recently announced moratorium on commercial fishing of the Beaufort Sea would fail if it were not matched by similar moratoriums by Canada and Russia.

During this time, he also served as Senior Fellow of the Institute of the North, founded by Hickel, which was apart of the Alaska Pacific University. He served as the Institute’s first full-time Managing Director and Adjunct Professor of Business . Treadwell also did research at the Institute. He focused on strategic, defense, management, transportation, and telecommunications of Alaska. He is a co-author of Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century as well as lead author of Why the Arctic Matters, a Commonwealth North 2009 study.

In 2008 Treadwell served as a delegate for Alaska in the 2008 Republican National Convention and served early on as co-chair of Mitt Romney's 2008 Presidential campaign in Alaska.

Lieutenant governor of Alaska

In May 2010, Treadwell announced his intent to run for Lt. Governor of Alaska. He gave his primary reasons for running as frustration with an overbearing federal government, concern for the flagging Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and a need to diversify Alaska's economy through international trade. Treadwell won the August 24, 2010 Republican primary election with approximately 53% of the vote, a margin of more than 22% over his closest opponent, state Representative Jay Ramras. Following his primary campaign victory, Treadwell's campaign joined with that of incumbent Republican Governor Sean Parnell.

Treadwell faced Diane E. Benson in the general election in November 2010. Parnell and Treadwell defeated their Democratic challengers by about twenty points. Treadwell was sworn in as the Lieutenant Governor of Alaska on December 6, 2010.

2014 U.S. Senate election

Main article: United States Senate election in Alaska, 2014

Treadwell announced on December 1, 2012 at a Republican luncheon in Fairbanks, Alaska that he was forming an exploratory committee to seek the GOP nomination to challenge one-term incumbent Sen. Mark Begich.

Personal life

Treadwell married his wife, Carol, and together they had three children, two sons, Tim, Will, and a daughter, Natalie. Carol died in 2002 of cancer. Mead is active in the Catholic Church.

Bibliography

• Roberts, Malcolm B., ed. (1990). Going Up In Flames. (Treadwell with numerous collaborators including Robert B. Atwood, Walter J. Hickel and Irene Ryan; authorship credited to the Commonwealth North Federal-State Relations Committee). Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press for Commonwealth North. ISBN 0-935094-15-6.  132 pp.

Political offices
Preceded by Craig Campbell	Lieutenant Governor of Alaska 2010–present	Incumbent