The trustees, meeting this week in Juneau, need to explain to Alaskans exactly how and why they gave a policy directive to the staff—one that directly led to Chief Operating Officer Mike Barnhill quitting his job—a month after they met in public and declined to take that step.

I suspect that Gov. Mike Dunleavy inserted himself into the process and orchestrated events that led to the bizarre Permanent Fund press release on Aug. 10, the one that promised the fund will "open a satellite office in Anchorage as soon as possible to support the retention and recruitment of professional staff.”

The governor may have intervened on his own or at the request of one or more of the trustees who called him in for political muscle to demand instant action.

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I’d like to see the Daily News-Miner start to use its pages to tell its real story: “Not owned by a vulture hedge fund” would be a good slogan for an ad campaign.

The best thing the newspaper has going is that it is locally owned by a nonprofit that is not trying to bleed the place dry and is focused on keeping the paper going. It deserves support.

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Borough Chief of Staff Jim Williams says there was a ”breakdown in the exercise of authority to request protestors to move” Saturday outside the Carlson Center.

City police officers, who said the were acting on behalf of Kinross, threatened a group of protesters with arrest if they did not leave the parking lot where the Kinross truck was parked.

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Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor has resurrected the mutual legal aid society that met statewide opposition on legal and ethical grounds when Dunleavy floated it during the Kevin Clarkson era of justice.

All of the public comments submitted to the state in 2019-2020 were opposed to the plan and it was never adopted.

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There was almost no press coverage of the golden shovel ceremony in Tetlin Tuesday that brought Gov. Mike Dunleavy and top executives of Kinross and Contango ORE to mark the start of the Manh Choh mine project.

The local TV stations had a brief story, but there was nothing in the Daily News-Miner and no press release from Dunleavy, any state agency or Kinross.

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City police officers said that Kinross, not the borough, insisted that protesters of the Kinross trucking plan be removed from the parking lot of the Carlson Center, which is public property.

“Kinross Cares” in this case means that Kinross cared to get the protesters out of the way.

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“It was based on the assumption that the vehicles Black Gold is proposing to use are able to stay within their lane while negotiating curves and corners as required by nationally recognized highway geometric design criteria – which DOT told me is – in fact the case. Given that assumption, what I learned from a high school Physics class and personal driving experience is that increasing the distance between the steering axle and the trailing axle reduces the tendency for the back of the trailer to ‘drift’ to the outside of a curve at any given road traction condition and vehicle,” Rep. Mike Prax writes.

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I suspect that Rep. Mike Prax was just passing along something that someone told him when he claimed to the Daily News-Miner that the safety difference between 95-foot trucks and 75-foot trucks is “statistically insignificant.”

Let’s be clear. Prax would support any Kinross trucking plan. This is a political reflex that he can’t control, as predictable as breathing.

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The job Mike Porcaro is filling is the essence of waste, fraud and abuse. The job should have been eliminated long ago, following a 2015 audit that said there is so little work to do that full-time commissioners are not needed. The audit said the commission is ineffective and inefficient.

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The 165,000-lb. Kinross mining trucks will carry a weight that is legal in Alaska and illegal in every other state.

The reason the proposed Kinross loads are legal in Alaska is that almost any load is legal in Alaska no matter how heavy, if there are enough axles on the truck to reduce the per-axle weight. That’s why the trucks have 16 axles.

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