Anyone who runs for the Legislature this year against an incumbent has a ready-made campaign issue—the underhanded manner by which legislators raised their pay from $50,400 to $84,000, starting this week.
They can thank Gov. Mike Dunleavy and incumbents in both parties for this 67 percent gift.
Read MoreSomeone once said that whether auld acquaintances should be forgot really depends on what kind of old acquaintances you have.
On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, “Auld Lang Syne” gets ritualized or loving attention that is denied auld acquaintances 363 days a year.
Read MoreIn the middle of the last century, Larry Fanning was a premier editor in San Francisco and Chicago. After he moved to Alaska in 1966, newly married to Kay, his third wife, the only thing he didn’t have much left of was time.
Read MoreTim Ames was desperate that December day in 1988.
“I was in a blind panic,” he wrote. “I had been asked to paint a cover for Heartland magazine; the theme was ‘Christmas in Fairbanks.’”
Read MoreThe Dunleavy proposal would increase dividend spending—$882 million this year—by $1.4 billion, the biggest factor in creating the proposed $1 billion Dunleavy deficit.
Dunleavy has refused to propose taxes, reductions in services or changes in the dividend formula in state law, ignoring his responsibility as governor to balance the budget.
Read MoreWhat Porcaro doesn’t mention when he boasts about his personal budget discipline and self-sufficiency as a model for others is how much Gov. Mike Dunleavy is now subsidizing his lifestyle.
The subsidy is in the form of a full-time state job that requires little work and should be a 15-hour-per-week job with no benefits, as recommended in a 2015 state audit.
Read MoreIn the past, Deena Bishop made a clear case for increasing the Base Student Allocation to offset the bite that has been taken by inflation since 2017. Bishop wrote in the 2022-23 Anchorage School District budget that the purchasing power of state school funding with no increases had cost Anchorage $40 million over five years.
Along with declining enrollment, the flat funding “continues to negatively impact ASD’s ability to maintain smaller class sizes to better address student learning,” Bishop wrote.
Read MoreThe Pebble case has nothing to do with the Kuskokwim fishing case, so this should have been a separate procurement, but the Dunleavy administration prefers doing business with Consovoy McCarthy and avoiding competitive bids, so it added the Pebble mine case to an unrelated contract to keep the work with a law firm it likes.
Read MoreFormer Sen. Mark Begich is among those getting paid under a no-bid statehood defense contract for the Dunleavy administration.
The contract is for $50,000 and it runs from September 11 until January 30. Had it been a $50,001 contract, the state would have had to seek some competition.
The contract is so short and so small that I suspect that the state intends to extend the duration and amount, contrary to a procurement regulation cited in the contract that allows no-bid deals only if the cost does not exceed $50,000.
Read MoreThere are at least a half-dozen major legal deficiencies with one of the statehood defense contracts the Dunleavy administration has with Holland & Hart LLP, a contract under which former legislator Drue Pearce collected $450 an hour.
Last week I wrote about the $2 million contract the state has with Holland & Hart to handle legal issues for the Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority.
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