Porcaro preaches about budget discipline without mentioning his do-little $136,000 state job
Mike Porcaro, the Anchorage adman and talk show host, likes to claim that the Anchorage school board and assembly don’t understand economics.
He’s not talking about the economics of Porcaro getting a cushy $136,000 state fisheries job from Gov. Mike Dunleavy without applying, without knowing anything about fish and without moving to Juneau. The work should take less than 15 hours a week, a 2015 audit said.
No, Porcaro is talking about the lack of budget discipline he sees everywhere else in government.
He went on the radio Wednesday to pooh-pooh the pending $98 million deficit confronting Anchorage schools and ridicule this resolution approved by the board and the assembly.
It was clear that he had not read the resolution, which contains specifics on how the state has not increased the education formula to keep up with inflation since 2016.
The budget gap is such that 650 teachers and support staff will have to be laid off unless the Legislature acts by mid-February to increase school funding. This is a serious matter.
Rather than deal with facts, Porcaro pontificated, stringing words and imaginary inflation numbers together with complete confidence.
“I look at the school board and I say, well, guess what? Most people’s budgets are flat and they’re not keeping up with inflation. What cost you $72 this year, cost you $40 last year. And cost you a who lot less the year before. But I guess maybe that’s part of the equation they don’t understand. Most of us have to live on a budget,” he said.
“I at the end of the month have to make sure that my expenses don’t exceed my income. And if that happens, it’s a win. Now in order to do that it’s a dynamic situation. I have to monitor it and I have to cut things,” said Porcaro.
“I know everybody out there is on a budget and they have to do this. If you find that things are starting to get too expensive, you have to cut them out of your budget,” said Porcaro.
What Porcaro doesn’t mention when he boasts about his personal budget discipline and self-sufficiency as a model for others is how much state government is now subsidizing his lifestyle.
The subsidy is in the form of a state job that requires little work and should have been turned into a part-time job years ago, as recommended in this 2015 audit.
The 2015 audit said that the commissioners of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission had to work less than 15 hours a week and shouldn’t be collecting benefits.
Commissioner Porcaro, who never stops attacking government waste, may have the lightest workload of any government employee in Alaska.
In addition to running his advertising business, radio show and collecting Social Security—which combined gave him a 2022 income of from $150,000 to $300,000—he become a fulltime salaried state bureaucrat this year.
Porcaro collects $5,513.25 every two weeks for the fisheries job bestowed upon him by a grateful governor.
Porcaro has found it pays to be a leader of the Dunleavy praise team on right-wing radio.
When Dunleavy quietly put Porcaro on the state payroll in August, the claim was made that Porcaro would only get paid for the hours he worked, even though it was a salaried full-time job. I think this was to try to appease those who would rightly ask how many full-time jobs can one 75-year-old man have?
“Porcaro’s new job would pay $136,000 a year if he works full time, but he may work less than that and will only be compensated for the hours he reports having worked, said Glenn Haight, CFEC’s other commissioner,” wrote Nat Herz of the Northern Journal, who first wrote about this.
Not to worry. Porcaro has been collecting his full state salary in addition to the full-time work he was doing before.
You won’t hear him complaining about the full-time commissioner’s job that should be a part-time commissioner’s job, at best, and how this is an outrageous government handout.
Porcaro admits that he knows nothing about fish and says he did not seek the job, but it was offered to him by the governor. He didn’t reveal his state job to his radio audience when it happened.
“And the first question that people ask is ‘Well you don’t know anything about fish.’ Well, apparently that’s not what they were looking for, somebody who knows about fish,” Porcaro said on his radio show after Herz broke the news.
“Now it doesn’t affect my radio show. It doesn’t affect my other business. I just need to make sure that when I do what I do I’m not impinging on state time, which I wouldn’t do anyway because it’s not right. If the state of Alaska is paying me to do something then they have free call on what I do, After I’m done, however, I have free call on what I do.”
The Legislature has a chance to trim the budget by refusing to confirm Porcaro next year and cutting the job to less than 15 hours a week with no benefits. All in the interest of budget discipline.
IN ADDITION:
Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor wastes time and state money seeking publicity on partisan political battles that have nothing to do with his job and don’t help Alaska. The latest example: Taylor signed the Republican AG chain letter submitted to the Supreme Court in support of Donald Trump, who doesn’t want a speedy trial. It seems the right-wing generals across the land are ever eager to do Trump’s bidding and fall in line.
I thought that the collapse of one roof on a Spenard Builders Supply store in Fairbanks in 2021 would lead the company to check every roof on every store across the state. It’s not a good look for a company that sells roof trusses to have this happen. It doesn’t build confidence with customers. I thought the same thing about a roof check after a Spenard roof in Soldotna collapsed in 2022. It’s hard to believe, but a third company store had a roof collapse Wednesday in Anchorage. Spenard Builders is now owned by the national chain Builders FirstSource. The company is lucky no one has been killed. This time it will check every roof.
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