In the myriad of conflicting and contradictory claims made by the Dunleavy administration over using public funds for private schools, one that stands out is the declaration that school districts may be violating the Alaska Constitution by allowing students to pay for private-school tuition with public money.

A violation of that nature should prompt action by the attorney general to force the school districts to stop, but AG Tregarrick Taylor has allowed it to go on. He is seriously conflicted over the issue.

Read More

One of the arguments that the Dunleavy administration is making to the Alaska Supreme Court this week is that the state has no control over unconstitutional spending by the school districts because the law championed by Dunleavy absolves it of responsibility and bans the state from applying other rules.

Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor claims that the state education department has no control over the districts on how correspondence school allotments are used, though the education department is free “to ask the attorney general for legal advice on how student allotments may be spent,” but that school districts are “independent actors for purposes of liability under state law.”

Read More

An educational organization is not necessarily an educational institution, according to the Dunleavy administration.

The league of state synonymists is pinning its legal hopes in the landmark school funding case on a flimsy claim that the words organization and institution are not interchangeable.

That’s relevant because the Alaska Constitution prohibits spending public funds at “any religious or private educational institution,” but it doesn’t say anything about public funds spent on religious or private organizations.

Read More

Enough already with the hypocrisy of Sen. Dan Sullivan and fellow Trumpists on the border question.

Sullivan has one of his employees assigned to attack President Joe Biden on social media in the voice of Dan Sullivan, pushing a fictional portrayal of Donald Trump as a man with all of his faculties.

Read More

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.”

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.”

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More