Building Alaska and the source of its money

I wrote a blog post Sunday about Building Alaska, the group founded by an Illinois man that distributed a mailer to Fairbanks voters last week, saying “help us” elect conservatives to the Fairbanks assembly.

I made an error in that post and Building Alaska made some errors in documents it filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. Let me try and clarify the situation.

I mistakenly wrote that founder Mike Baker, president of Sleep Centers of Alaska, had put $60,000 into the venture, relying on this list of search results. The list is inaccurate, in part because of entries that Building Alaska listed twice in its reports to the APOC, and in part because the APOC system does not identify duplication. Baker put $30,000 into the group, not twice that amount.

In one of the errors in the APOC filings corrected by Building Alaska Monday, the group says that one its donors, who gave $1,900 on March 22, was falsely listed as being from Oregon. The group filed a revision Monday.

With that revision, Building Alaska says that 51.66 percent of its donations are from Alaska and 48.34 percent are from Baker, the Illinois resident. The mailer went out before the revision, when slightly more than half of its $60.000 in donations was reported as being from Outside.

It’s not clear when the group, which has raised a little more than $60,000, shifted from being mainly funded by Outside money to being mainly funded with in-state money.

If the group’s numbers are correct, then it did not need to report that a majority of its contributions came from Outside because 51.66 percent came from within Alaska.

In the wake of the revisions filed Monday, search for contributions this year in the name of Mike Baker and the APOC website gives you this list.

There should be a simple way to perform this search and get one updated number as of Sept. 20, but there isn’t. The search for Baker’s contributions includes duplicates.

Not to excuse my mistake in this, but the APOC website is in need of an overhaul to make it easier to use and understand.

The agency has had its budget and staff repeatedly reduced by governors and legislators, many of whom regard the office as a nuisance they’d like to see die from neglect.

The state needs to reverse this trend and invest in improving the performance of the campaign watchdog. The APOC provides an essential service, one that must be improved.