Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, who makes about $2 million a year from Contango ORE for developing the Manh Choh and other Alaska mining ventures, says that a future project near Willow may one day lead to ore hauling on the Parks Highway from Hatcher Pass to Fort Knox.
Read MoreI want to thank everyone who reads this blog all the time or just once in a while. It means a great deal to me. I take it as a compliment that you spend time reading what I have to say, whether you agree or disagree with the contents.
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Bob Ballinger of Arkansas and Rep. Sarah Vance share a connection though the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, “godly leaders” who want to impose their interpretation of the Bible on all levels of government in the United States. Vance has given Ballinger, who lives in Arkansas, a state job.
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Alaska Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson called a halt to the Transportation Advisory Committee meetings as of Thursday, a surprise announcement at the end of a four-hour meeting.
Now we know why the state had planned a “virtual only” meeting of the group until community pushback caused the department to reverse its ban on in-person participation.
The commissioner instructed the consultant to have the committee studying the Kinross ore-hauling project end its meetings and finish its work by email and phone calls, assembling a final report with no meeting to vote on a draft or even a final report.
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I don’t know how it happened, but the Dunleavy administration reversed itself on the Transportation Advisory Committee meeting plan, dropping the ban on in-person participation.
The meeting is set for Thursday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Key Bank Building at 100 Cushman Street in downtown Fairbanks.
This was the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do was the earlier decision by Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson to ban in-person participation to better control the group.
Read MoreDepartment of Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson still has time to correct the blunder he made by ordering that a Thursday meeting of the committee reviewing the Kinross ore-hauling plan will be “virtual only.”
The meeting of the Transportation Advisory Committee is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday is a crucial one for preparing its final report. It needs to be held in person. Those who can’t make it in person can use the online approach.
Read MoreI think I made it clear in a series of blog posts over the last two months that the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund were on the wrong track with their strategic plan because they failed to include the public and the Legislature.
In the end, they did the right thing and followed the advice of financial experts by pulling back. What I don’t understand is why they waited so long to ask for advice. Or why they aren’t making a concerted effort to ask Alaskans what the strategic plan should include.
Read MoreMary Vought’s contract to burnish the national image of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been extended eight times over nearly four years, a textbook case of ignoring the state procurement law that requires competitive bidding. Two more contract extensions are already in the works.
The Vought contract, which could cost nearly $400,000 by the end of 2026, does not match up with any of the nine examples mentioned in state regulations about instances in which sole-source contracts might be appropriate.
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If you haven’t done so already, read the latest investigation by Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.
Hopkins’s investigation of the deaths of Jennifer Kirk and Sue Sue Norton reveals an outrageous failure of the justice system in Alaska.
Read MoreA reader writes that the questions I put to Sen. Dan Sullivan’s office about the delay in selecting potential judicial nominees for a vacant federal court position in Alaska were of the predictable kind, all guaranteed to produce pat answers. I missed the big picture, the reader said.
I thought it over and came to the same conclusion.
It is not mentally rewarding or enlightening to read Sullivan’s pre-packaged statements that senators have many different ways of recruiting and vetting nominees for federal judicial appointments, and that his new committee is nonpartisan, etc.
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