Closing the glaring Hilcorp loophole, which could be costing the state $100 million a year, is long overdue.
SB 114, introduced by the Senate Rules Committee Friday, would do that, among other things.
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At 1:58 p.m. on Monday, March 13, the Dunleavy administration posted a public notice online that the state salary commission would meet two days later in the Atwood Building.
The meeting was illegal. It should never have been scheduled or held. The law requires 20-day notice. And only one of the five commissioners who got the notice would still be on the body by the day of the meeting.
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If you haven’t done so already, please listen to the March 15 meeting of the new Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission, the meeting that followed the coup engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. It won’t take long. The corrupt process employed by Dunleavy and some legislators to rig the salary commission results is a disgrace.
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Sen. Gary Stevens is getting close to the end of a distinguished legislative career, perhaps with this term, and he shouldn’t sign off on the salary subterfuge engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Stevens should realize that denying a legislative vote on whether lawmakers and top officials in the executive branch should get raises is unethical.
Refusing to hold a legislative vote will make Stevens a partner with Dunleavy in subverting the public process.
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Tregarrick Taylor, the third attorney general under Gov. Mike Dunleavy, disputes the notion that anything he does from his state perch is motivated by personal opinion or interpretation.
“I don’t get to provide advice based on what the law could or should be; my duty is to provide advice based on what the law is,” Taylor proclaims in a stuffed-shirt document published in the Anchorage Daily News and elsewhere.
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Imagine if a fast-talking salesman tried to pay a multi-million-dollar debt by offering to unload property he didn’t want anymore and claiming the asset is worth $13.9 million.
A shell game like that wouldn’t go far before the other party would demand that the salesman produce the cash.
But the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is trying to pull a similar scam right now with its attempt to transfer a North Slope road instead of handing over $13.9 million in cash.
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The Alaska Salary Commission coup, engineered by Gov, Mike Dunleavy and legislative leaders, is a prime example of political cowardice.
The brand new members of the commission met for the first time this week and unanimously approved a pay raise for the governor and his top appointees and legislators without any work.
The pay raises will automatically take effect unless the Alaska Legislature rejects the plan, which was obviously worked out in advance in secret.
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Unless there is a change in state law, state revenue will decline by $1 billion to $1.6 billion during the development and early operational years of the Willow oil project because of a gift to the oil industry built into the state oil tax law, according to state reports from 2018 and 2023.
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Election Director Carol Beecher, who said she did not know the meaning of the group’s acronym, said there are benefits and drawbacks to ERIC. The main drawback, she said, is that it is expensive, that Alaska is a small state and she doesn’t know if the group provides a good return on the state’s investment and maybe the state can do the work more cheaply. She did not mention and she was not asked what qualifies as “expensive.”
But the membership in ERIC is not at all expensive.
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Hundreds of the best young cross-country skiers in the nation are converging on Fairbanks this weekend for the Junior National Cross-Country Ski Championships.
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