“I think the educational discussion is over and we got to move into energy,” Dunleavy said.
The lethargy conveyed in that sentence stands in contrast to the urgency of the situation in Alaska’s schools.
The state employee hired to lead the education department, Deena Bishop, is the model of lethargy when it comes to answering questions about what Dunleavy claimed was his priority before he moved onto energy.
Read MoreSens. Robert Myers, Mike Shower and Reps. Frank Tomaszewski, Mike Cronk, Kevin McCabe, Mike Prax and Will Stapp said Brandy Harty no longer deserves to be school board president in Fairbanks.
Nonsense.
The politicians have yet to accept their share of the responsibility for the budget crisis facing Alaska schools. They are desperate to change the subject.
Read MoreThe revised contract with Craig Richards as statehood defense coordinator for the Dunleavy administration expires at the end of May, but the agreement does not authorize enough money to pay him until then.
I’ve asked the attorney general’s office for an explanation on the discrepancy between the promise to pay Richards $12,000 a month until May 31 and a contract that is tens of thousands short.
Read MoreThe $700 billion claim is bogus, about as reliable as the press release from Taylor’s office—which remains uncorrected on the AG’s website—that the state government created the $700 billion guess and that the federal government has violated the “statehood act of 1953.”
Perhaps the attorney general doesn’t know as much about the statehood defense industry as he lets on.
Read MoreWealthy hunters, both in Alaska and Outside, bestowed hunting gifts worth $55,000 or more on Gov. Mike Dunleavy last year, equal to more than one-third of his salary.
Read MoreAs I wrote here last summer, nothing that John Espindola did during his years of working for the state as a “personal assistant” and policy analyst for Gov. Mike Dunleavy qualifies him to serve on the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.
And it is doubtful that the work Espindola did in New Mexico in the years before he hired on with Dunleavy in 2018 meet the minimum educational and professional requirements spelled out in state law about the people entrusted to regulate Alaska’s utilities.
Read MoreMore and more, the agency is becoming the most powerful branch of the governor’s office, one that operates with little or no legislative oversight.
Read MoreA patsy parade of 20 Republican legislators sided with Gov. Mike Dunleavy in blocking the bipartisan education bill that most of the 20 voted for last month.
Nearly two-thirds of the Legislature voted to override the veto of the bipartisan education bill, one vote shy of the margin needed to enact the measure into law. The vote was 23-16 in the House and 16-4 in the Senate.
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Erin McKittrick of the Alaska Energy Blog convincingly dismantles the recent report by Frank Paskvan, who has a contract with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, that claims a new coal-fired power plant is a surefire solution to many of our energy woes:
“These days in Alaska, it’s fashionable to claim any project you want to build will solve both the Cook Inlet Gas crisis and climate change. The West Susitna coal plant idea claims to do both, and would actually do neither,” she writes.
Read MoreIn November, before Gov. Mike Dunleavy concluded that the state school board should be allowed to authorize charter schools, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop praised the current system in which school districts are central to the process.
One of Dunleavy’s major complaints about the bipartisan education bill he vetoed is that it did not allow the state school board—whose members serve at the pleasure of the governor—to create charter schools in local districts.
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