The mishandling of the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan by the office of Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson is a real problem.
Anderson is now claiming he did not know about the rule requiring that projects in an area with a Metropolitan Planning Organization, such as Anchorage and Fairbanks, must have those projects included in the local plan to be in the state plan.
He also claims it is a new rule.
Anderson did know about this rule. And it is not a new rule.
Read MoreAlaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor has signed onto another federal court case that has nothing to do with Alaska and everything to do with bowing to Donald Trump and the Trump followers who rule the Republican Party.
Taylor used state resources to add Alaska’s name to a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting Trump’s bid to delay a federal court case against him.
Read MoreThe trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation voted 5-1 last week to release what they are calling “Trustee Paper No. 10.”
Trustee Paper No. 10 became a public document when the trustees voted February 16, but the staff of the corporation has yet to release the paper to the public.
Read MoreI found it disturbing that two trustees, Craig Richards and Gabrielle Rubenstein, were quick to claim that the fund did not want to borrow money to make investments, dressing up their comments with gibberish.
Contrary to their claims, the strategic plan memo released by the corporation to explain the plan to the public said that the borrowed money would be used for investments. Perhaps they failed to read their own report.
Read MoreLargely ignoring the substance of the public comments they received on a proposed strategic plan, the six-member Permanent Fund board of trustees pushed ahead with a proposal promoting the idea of borrowing billions to make more billions.
They did scale back the size of the proposal, however.
Read MorePredictably, the Dunleavy administration is trying to direct blame everywhere except where it belongs for the state highway funding fiasco. It’s all damage control.
And the potential damage if the state cannot get the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan approved by the Federal Highway Administration by the end of March could be enormous.
The Dunleavy administration created this failure by not following specific guidelines or instructions provided by the federal agencies. There are numerous errors that should have been fixed months ago.
Read MoreThe federal government, which provides most of the construction money, rejected the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan for 2024-2027, which puts the road building season in Alaska and thousands of jobs at grave risk.
This is not a case of federal overreach. The blame for this rests entirely with the Dunleavy administration.
Read MoreBlogger Matt Buxton did a good job capturing the bizarre press conference Gov. Mike Dunleavy gave last week. The news stories that treated this event like a normal presentation did not convey just how weird and disjointed it was.
The press conference, unlike the news stories that presented a few topics as if they were dealt with in a rational way, was as random as the spinning images on a slot machine. This was Dunleavy behaving like a free-lance rapper, stringing words together.
Read More“As a matter of fact, our charter schools are actually doing better because of kids that aren’t white,” Dunleavy said. “That’s what the research says.”
That’s not what the research says. Even if it did, a competent governor would not be making the sweeping claims about charter schools that Dunleavy is based on a single small study.
Read MoreRead the public comments submitted so far and you will see skepticism and opposition regarding: the notion of borrowing billions so that billions more can be invested to produce billions more in income; the dream of “outperformance through the generation of alpha’; the idea that the corporation needs to keep the names of applicants for its top job secret; and the wish to open satellite offices in the Lower 48 or in foreign lands.
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