The mishandling of the STIP, the most serious management failure of Dunleavy’s time in office, has put hundreds of millions in federal highway funds and thousands of Alaska jobs in immediate jeopardy. The entire road-building season is at risk.

This, from the governor who complains about people who don’t say yes to every idea about using public resources for private gain. He should have said something about saying yes to getting the STIP done on time so that the road construction season is not canceled.

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While Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor is occupied elsewhere polishing his right-wing political image, there is an important disclosure in the Washington state lawsuit against the Kroger-Albertsons case that is relevant to Alaska.

The disclosure adds weight to the notion that pledges to keep Alaska stores open after the merger are meaningless.

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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.

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Alaska 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.

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The 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.

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I 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.

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Largely 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.

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Predictably, 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.

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The 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.

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Blogger 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.

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