Dave Winfield hit 465 home runs in the Major Leagues. Before he made it big, Winfield spent two summers in Fairbanks for the Alaska Goldpanners. One of his home runs may have hit the roof of the Fairbanks Curling Club. Or it may have bounced in the dirt and hit the wall of the club. It doesn’t really matter.

In the words of Lew Freedman, “any Goldpanner history talk quickly turns to Winfield. His name comes up in the first paragraph. Whether he ever hit a home run off the roof of the curling club or not.”

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In a March legislative hearing, the Dunleavy administration reported that 14 of the 31 jobs in the “member benefits” office of the Division of Retirement and Benefits were vacant.

This was the highest vacancy rate in the division, which has a total of 129 positions.

On April 1, the state said there was a delay of 3.5 months in processing retirement applications.

On Tuesday, the Department of Administration Commissioner Paula Vrana said the delay in processing has been cut to 8-10 weeks.

After publication of my blog post on this topic, a skeptical legislator contacted me to ask about reports that the 8-10 calculation only includes applications that have been officially entered into the system. I asked her to clarify if the backlog excludes the applications received by the state that have yet to be dealt with at all.

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The essential job of the chief executive in Alaska is to manage the daily operations of state government and keep the machinery of the bureaucracy running.

But the food stamp backlog, chronic delays in processing payroll forms, and the 15,000 people waiting for action on Medicaid applications are prime examples of how the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has stumbled over the basics.

Now add another program where the state is falling short—getting new retirees the pension payments they are owed by the state and paying survivors the death benefits they are entitled to collect.

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As an online tool for tracking some state spending in Alaska, the new Checkbook Alaska website is an important advance over what has gone before.

But the state needs to do much more to live up to the 2022 law that says “The Alaska Online Checkbook Act shall be construed in favor of disclosure and transparency.”

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If the Alaska Supreme Court listens to what Sen. Mike Dunleavy claimed a decade ago, then Gov. Mike Dunleavy will lose his effort to funnel public funds to private schools and the Alaska Superior Court decision will be upheld.

On April 10, 2013 Sen. Mike Dunleavy said he knew it was illegal to allow public funds be used to pay tuition to allow a student to take even a single course in a private school.

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While Sen. Dan Sullivan stood in a room with other obsequious Republican senators, competing to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces, Sen. Lisa Murkowski found something better to do—have lunch with friends.

“I haven’t gotten any cards saying we wish you were there,” Murkowski told reporters, the Washington Post said.

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The governor’s office has yet to explain why it falsely claimed to be gathering signatures for education petitions.

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This is a reminder that Gov. Mike Dunleavy continues to pay Virginia publicist Mary Vought $5,000 a month for public relations work in Washington, D.C. under a questionable no-bid contract that has been extended or amended eight times without public justification or discussion.

Her husband is former federal bureaucrat Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist radical who is central to the Trump 2025 drive to remake the federal government and cater to Trump’s dictatorial whims. “Post-constitutional” is the euphemism in which Russell cloaks his scheme.

In a speech that didn’t get enough attention last year, Russell attacked legal immigrants to the United States, claiming that they refuse to assimilate. I suspect his real targets are not all legal immigrants, just those from what Trump calls “shithole countries.”

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The Dunleavy administration is trying a new tactic on its state-funded data mining operation to promote non-existent “petitions” to boost Dunleavy’s efforts to direct more public money to private schools.

In 2019, Dunleavy claimed he was gathering signatures on a petition to submit to legislators to support a Permanent Fund Dividend of $3,000. He also claimed he had a petition to cap government spending. And a petition to pay back PFDs.

But there were no petitions. He was simply collecting names and addresses of people who could be called upon for political support, disguising the nature of the exercise by calling them “petitions.”

He’s doing the same thing again.

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A Fairbanks high school math teacher and mother of two has begun to fill in the gap for those who have asked for analysis of the recent charter school study touted endlessly by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop and many Republican legislators.

West Valley High School teacher Beth Zirbes, who has master’s degrees in math and statistics from UAF, makes a clear case that the situation is far more complex than the simplistic portrayal by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop and many Republican legislators.

I commend Zirbes for devoting many hours of her own time to try and put this study in context, showing its strengths and weaknesses and why more work needs to be done. This should not be the end of the analysis, but the beginning.

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