The headline number about Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes—that he trimmed more than $200 million from the operating and capital budgets—is misleading. It disguises his focus on cutting education at all levels.
More than 85 percent of the real reductions in programs and facility maintenance are in budget items related to education, the most important public service for families in Alaska.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than $140 million in funding for education at all levels, but refused to explain or try to justify his latest attack on education.
His vetoes included cutting half of the education increase approved by the Legislature to prevent layoffs and cutbacks in districts across the state. Dunleavy cut $87 million from the one-time boost that districts had said wasn’t enough to offset years of not adjusting for inflation.
Read MoreThere are many public safety questions about turning our highways into industrial mining roads that remain intentionally unexamined by the Dunleavy administration.
The new plan to double Kinross truck traffic from Fox to the mine is the latest evidence of the pitfalls of saying yes without blinking or thinking.
Read MoreThe six trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation all live in the Anchorage area, but that’s no reason for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to expand its bureaucratic footprint beyond Juneau and waste hundreds of thousands leasing new office space in the state’s largest city.
Read MoreWe now know more about the alleged “Alaska Office of Family & Life” that Gov. Mike Dunleavy claimed to have created when he promoted philosopher/photographer Jeremy Cubas and set his salary at $110,000.
There never was an office, just a task assigned to Cubas to create a website, oppose abortion and speak about why young women need to have more babies. Cubas resigned two weeks ago. the website was never launched.
Read MoreWe haven’t been blindsided by the police staffing crisis in Fairbanks. We just haven’t been paying attention to an emergency that has been years in the making. Our elected officials have downplayed the severity of the situation.
Seven years ago, former Police Chief Dan Hoffman said the “department is on the verge of operating at true crisis levels.”
Read MoreThe City of Fairbanks is moving to a part-time police department in August, ending 24-hour patrols and cutting back by four hours, leaving 8 a.m. to noon with no officers on patrol.
This is alarming, to say the least. If you call 911 in an emergency, what answer can you expect if you are within the City of Fairbanks? Same-day service? Maybe not.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan should come clean with Alaskans about why he didn’t actually read the 37-count indictment before announcing his verdict that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
The all-purpose “Blame it on Biden” Sullivan statement recycles lazy talking points, which is also what happened March 31 when Sullivan attacked the previous Trump indictment without bothering to read it.
The first indictment “moved our country into banana republic territory,” Sullivan falsely claimed in March.
Read MoreThe Alaska Permanent Fund and the state’s retirement systems have billions of dollars invested and managed by “private equity” companies.
We know little about the specifics because of blanket confidentiality rules. We are told to trust that the experts know what they are doing. Perhaps that’s true.
What we don’t hear from anyone in Alaska state government is any discussion of the impacts of this investment category for the state, the nation and the world.
Read MoreThe alleged office, which I suspect is nothing more than a set of talking points that will be assigned to someone else in the governor’s office, is not something Alaska needs.
What we need is for Dunleavy to do much more about the deficiencies in state government in dealing with families and children.
It is hypocritical of him to claim to be ”pro-life,” while doing nothing to fix the gaping holes in our system that destroy families and lives.
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