When Gov. Mike Dunleavy launched his energy task force last spring he said he wanted to see plans by the end of this year to cut electricity prices in Alaska to 10 cents per kilowatt hour by 2030.

“Now some people will say that’s incredibly optimistic, we can’t do that, etc., etc., etc. But I’ve gotta remind you of a couple of things done in history here in the not-too-distant past. 1961, John F. Kennedy said we’re gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade,” Dunleavy told his task force.

“People laughed at him, nobody can go the moon. That’s impossible. It can’t be done.”

“We went to the moon,” said Dunleavy.

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The Fairbanks borough assembly and school board elections turned into a rout, with right-wing candidates losing by margins of about 500 to 1,800 votes with all 32 precincts counted.

It was a clean sweep for supporters of education and public services and a rejection of the culture war claims the Republican Party injected into local politics.

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The giant Kinross ore trucks will have to make three 90-degree turns to get from the Johansen Expressway to the Steese Expressway during the two years or more that the existing intersection will be closed for construction.

Will the trucks be able to make the turn? How many lanes will they take up when doing so? What is the added cost for building the temporary road to make it strong enough and wide enough to handle the 164,000-pound trucks? How much will the need to accommodate the Kinross trucks add to the cost of the temporary road?

The Dunleavy administration, which is acting like a business partner of Kinross, has yet to answer these and other important questions.

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Assembly candidate Jimi Cash claims in a campaign flyer that the so-called “education investment reserve” approved last week by the assembly on a 5-4 vote will bring “long-term stability to education funding.”

It will do nothing of the kind.

The so-called reserve is an obvious campaign gimmick by Aaron Lojewski and Cash, created to allow right-wing candidates to claim they are all in favor of funding education 30 or 40 years from now and have found a painless way to do it—divert money that would be used for borough operations into a slush fund.

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On Feb. 13, 2019, with lots of fanfare, Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed an executive order to consolidate the procurement functions of state government in a single office.

He said that about 100 non-construction procurement staff in various state agencies were to be transferred to the Department of Administration and he created the new Office of Procurement and Property Managment.

It would save money, lead to staff reductions, streamline ordering, make state government more efficient, end redundant purchases, and make it easier to enforce procurement policies, he said in Administrative Order No. 304.

On July 17, 2023, with no fanfare, Dunleavy signed an administrative order saying never mind.

The new order revoked Administrative Order No. 304, declaring an end to statewide procurement consolidation.

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For the second straight year, Permanent Fund investment advisor John Skjervem denounced ESG and fossil-fuel divestment in the presentation prepared for the Alaska Permanent Fund trustees annual meeting. Skjervem is repeating many of the same points he made to the trustees a year ago.

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Far too much power to control Alaska’s most important financial institution is vested in one individual, the governor.

When the governor chooses trustees from a small circle of supporters, as Dunleavy does, the risk of concentrated power in the handling of tens of billions is far too great to be ignored.

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Alaska news organizations have still not reported on the bureaucratic machinations that led the Alaska Permanent Fund’s chief operating officer to quit his job without notice just as the fund announced plans to open a new office in Anchorage.

This story by the Alaska Beacon treats the decision to open an Anchorage office as normal state business, buried in two paragraphs at the bottom of this financial update.

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The Legislature was never going to call a special session to deal with a fiscal plan.

That’s because 40 members would have to agree to it and we don’t have a legislative supermajority on any contentious topic.

So it’s not because of the Legislature that there won’t be a special session, but because of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the only single person with the ability to make something happen .

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What we need in a school board member is someone with sound judgment, a person grounded in reality who can accurately interpret what is going on around them.

We don’t have that with April Smith, the incumbent running for reelection against challenger Bobby Burgess.

She has a tendency to misinterpret what is going on around her, whipping up hysteria at every opportunity.

In a textbook case exposing Smith’s abysmal judgement a few days ago, she defamed longtime Fairbanks writer David James on Facebook, accusing him of being a criminal, which he is not.

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