Porcaro confirmation hearing set for Wednesday afternoon
The Senate Resources Committee has set a confirmation hearing for radio talk show host and adman Mike Porcaro Wednesday at 3:30 p.m.
Porcaro, who has no experience in fisheries, was granted a state job as a fisheries commissioner on the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
Porcaro, who is in his mid 70s, has said he did not ask for the $136,000-a-year job, and that he would continue to run his business and do his talk show while working full time for the state.
“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 last summer.
This is what he provided as a resume.
Porcaro has been ill and an earlier confirmation hearing was canceled in early April.
Porcaro is a frequent critic of what he claims is government waste.
A legislative audit in 2015 said there was not enough work for the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission commissioners to justify having them on the state payroll as full-time employees.
A former employee of the commission agrees that there is not enough work for the commissioners.
“Put simply, CFEC commissioners have effectively worked themselves out of a job. The direct public service responsibilities of CFEC are currently carried out by a professional staff and are supervised by an executive director. The remaining duties of the commissioners are minimal,” Kurt Iverson, a former employee of the commission, wrote legislators.
He said the money spent on full-time commissioners could be better spent elsewhere to improve fisheries management and research.
Porcaro should not be confirmed and the job should be eliminated.