Don't worry about the $50 million, Crum says

Former Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum claims to be amused that legislators are demanding details on the $50 million long-term investment he made with short-term public money right before he quit his state job to run for governor.

The amusement extends to the governor’s alleged investigation of Crum’s actions, which Crum says is a Dunleavy fence-mending operation with legislators because the governor knew all about what Crum had done.

The state Department of Revenue has long had this graphic posted on its website, showing 100 percent of the Constitutional Budget Reseve Fund invested in cash or the equivalent of cash, such as U.S. treasuries. Former Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum abandoned this target by putting $50 million into a limited partnership with DigitalBridge.

What I find amusing is that he said the following words to Eric Stone, the Alaska public radio reporter covering state politics: “If we are actually at the point to where we are arguing over our last $50 million as a state, then we are already completely done.”

There’s a joke here and something is done, but it’s not what candidate Crum thinks.

Here is Stone’s news story. I highly recommend it.

We are arguing over this $50 million because Crum ignored a long-standing asset allocation goal for the Constitutional Budget Reserve, which is to have 100 percent of its assets in cash or bonds that are the equivalent of cash.

The chart on the state website says the investment goal of the CBR is to have all of it available when needed. The latest monthly report from the revenue department, which can be found here, says that 100 percent of the assets are in cash or cash equivalents. The next one will show that $50 million is no longer immediately available.

The financial path we have traveled under Dunleavy and Crum makes it highly likely that all $2.94 billion of the fund will be needed in the next couple of years, so it was irresponsible to abandon the 100 percent cash model.

And we are arguing over this $50 million because the alleged Dunleavy investigation is not about mending fences with the Legislature, but a CYA operation to blame the guy who has left the building, allowing Dunleavy to avoid responsibility. Crum is the fall guy.

Crum told Stone that the attorney general’s office and the governor’s office knew all about the $50 million limited partnership with DigitalBridge. He said he had been working on it for a year and that he delayed his resignation so he could finish it.

“The Department of Law sign-off, the governor’s office sign-off, all of that was there throughout. So this was not something that was done by fiat,” Crum says.

No doubt he is right about this. The attorney general’s office and Dunleavy must have known all about what Crum was doing, but they are stalling on the release of the July 28 deal signed by Crum to keep the amusement from spreading.

Crum, who knows more about truck driving than investments, said the goal with DigitalBridge was to invest in modern technology for the long term.

“The idea behind this was to put it into things that we know that there’s going to be more of. These are companies that buy, they own cell phone towers, digital assets, AI data centers. And as the world’s growing that direction, seemed like an opportunity to actually get the state to invest in that,” he told Stone.

Crum was also a trustee of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, which already invests in those things.

Alaskans need to know how and why Crum decided a year ago that DigitalBridge was the perfect investment choice and why the Dunleavy administration decided to abandon the asset allocation model for the CBR without telling the public.

In June, a DigitalBridge executive who is in charge of “public investor relations,” gave a presentation on “The Intersection of Data and Demand” at Dunleavy’s so-called sustainable energy conference. The state was preparing to join a limited partnership, the details of which remain hidden from the public.

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