“The $1,050 deficit for FY23 is based on $101 oil. If the actual price is merely in the mid $90s, we zero that out and then we're either into the CBR (without a 3/4 vote) or an overdraw from the permanent fund. Yes, at this moment we're sitting on a large slug of short term money. So we ‘can’ afford a fat dividend. It's just incredibly shortsighted and irresponsible.”
Read MoreAlaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy is strong-arming House members with secret promises and threats about what he will or will not veto to get them to vote to approve the Senate’s reckless budget. Alaskans need to know what he is telling legislators to try to get them to do his bidding.
Read MoreAs of this month, the Dunleavy administration says it wants to hire someone to repeat what was to be done under Kelly Tshibaka, which is to “complete IT and procurement consolidation.”
Read MoreRight-wing Republicans in the Senate, assisted by Senate Democrats Scott Kawasaki, Bill Wielechowski and Donny Olson, are betting on high oil prices to pay inflated dividends and provide state services in the next fiscal year. It’s a reckless gamble, one that should be reversed by the House-Senate conference committee on the budget.
Read MoreSens. Lisa Murkowsi and Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young crossed party lines and voted for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress approved last summer. The most vocal opponents of what they did are Republicans who first claimed that the state was shortchanged, only to drop that argument when the multi-billion-dollar scale of the Alaska portion became obvious to them. The new argument is that the law contains too much.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan wants to overturn the court precedent on abortion rights, but he and his PR man in D.C. can’t possibly say that to Alaskans.
Read MoreNot much has changed since Palin couldn’t identify what newspapers she was reading in 2008, claiming she read “all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”
Read MoreA Supreme Court decision Tuesday makes it critically important for the Legislature to act now and preserve what former Gov. Sean Parnell called the “moral obligation” to create a sustainable source of funds for post-secondary scholarships.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy and Administration Commissioner Corri Feige are putting on a big government overreach act for the Dunleavy reelection campaign. They have branded a harmless little dock in a remote part of the state as an enemy of the people—built without a state permit—and an illegal blight that must be removed—or else.
Read MorePolitical news coverage in Alaska stands to improve with the opening of an Alaska branch of States Newsroom this month. I say this with confidence because of the skills, integrity and experience of the four editors and reporters who will be running the independent Alaska operation—Andrew Kitchenman, Yereth Rosen, James Brooks and Lisa Phu.
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