Growing incompetence—Dunleavy's agriculture scheme will sprout a lawsuit

The Alaska Legislature rejected an executive order from Gov. Mike Dunleavy to create a Department of Agriculture in a 32-28 vote in March.

One reason it failed is that the Dunleavy administration claimed it could create a new department at no cost.

Even the dimmest bulb in Dunleavyland interpreted that dream as a fantasy.

Dunleavy tried to recycle his failed executive order for the special session, a Saturday gathering highlighted by the Legislature’s decision to override his education veto and his veto of a bill that required oil tax numbers to be presented in a clear format.

Legislative leaders said he didn’t have the authority to recycle the ag department order and they encouraged him to submit a real plan with a real budget for a new department for the 2026 legislative session.

But proving one again that he doesn’t have a clue about how to work with people, Dunleavy chose to pick a needless fight with the Legislature instead of creating a workable plan.

He claimed that unless the Legislature actually votes down his recycled order this month, he will act as if the Department of Agriculture has been created because he has so ordered.

“The Legislature’s dubious tactic will only manufacture an unnecessary legal dispute between the branches of government that will waste time and scarce public resources,” he said in an angry letter to Senate President Gary Stevens and House Speaker Bryce Edgmon.

It is Dunleavy who is manufacturing an unnecessary legal dispute with a tactic that is not dubious, just plain dumb. This is a good way to make it harder to create a real department.

There are bills to create an agriculture department in the works. The Legislature is poised to create a new department, but a real plan is needed.

Dunleavy has no plan.

A legislative task force concluded last year that the added cost of an ag department would be more than $20 million, but it remains to be seen how much more.

Rather than work with this estimate, the Dunleavy administration claimed at first that the current ag division could be transformed into a department for only $2.7 million more.

There are 37 employees now in the Division of Agriculture. The new Department of Agriculture would have a total of 50.

Dunleavy said the department would require these new employees at a cost of $2.1 million—commissioner, special assistant to the commissioner, executive secretary, director, two accountants, one accounting technician, administrative operations manager, budget analyst, human resources consultant, data processing manager, analyst programmer, computer technician.

Note that the 13 proposed new employees would have all worked in administration. There was no plan to add employees who would actually work in agriculture.

There is no point in creating a new department just to swell the bureaucracy.

Then the governor worked his budget magic—he said the new department would not cost any more than the current division, about $7 million a year. The staff would not be increased.

The executive order died on the vine. Neglected.

It has long been obvious that Dunleavy does not have a coherent agriculture policy, going back to his 2019 vetoes and the layoffs of 20 employees.

As is his wont, Dunleavy has refused to take responsibility for a failed policy, offering a strawman argument instead:

“And if the Legislature feels that everything is fine, we can feed ourselves, we have nothing to worry about, if they forget about what happened during COVID or if they forget about the supply chain issues, we’re gonna put ourselves in a tough spot, I think,” he said about opponents of his executive order in March.

No one thinks everything is fine, that we can feed ourselves or that we have nothing to worry about. No one has forgotten about COVID or supply chain issues.

The issue is that Dunleavy has not produced a plan to do anything or pay for anything that needs to be done. All we have is a bumper crop of his weasel words.

In his March monologue about agriculture and his desire to create a new department, Dunleavy was vague and completely unrealistic about the future of agriculture.

Here is some of what he said:

“We’ve had a division for some time and here’s where we’re at with agriculture. So if we really want to change this, if we really want to be feeding ourselves in 10, 15 years, without having to import all this food, now’s the time to start. The other thing that agriculture will do, is in most cases, underneath agriculture is also silvaculture.”

“What is silvaculture? That’s the growing and treating of forests and trees, almost as a crop, from the standpoint of making sure your forests are healthy, making sure the wildfires are abated the right way, thinning when you have to to make sure dead trees are knocked down. All of this is going to make Alaska a stronger state, a much more independent state and in many cases a wealthy state if we can grow this sector.”

“Government should provide basic services, roads, police, schools. And you should be able, you should be able to feed yourself. I mean agriculture is at the base of any civilization. It’s at a the base of any functioning state. You know for the countries, some of them in the Middle East because of the dry climate, some small city states like Singapore with large populations, they have to rely on others. And again after going through what happened with COVID and then supply chain disruptions, people going to the shelves and there’s products that aren’t there that they always relied on.”

“You have to ask yourself as Alaskans, do you want to, do you want to basically have an insurance policy which is a growing robust strong agricultural sector or do you want to continue to hope we can get products here, hope we can get products here on time, hope we can get products here the price that we want them, you know, that are reasonable? Or do we take the bull by the horns?”

“I would say this, there are a lot of things we can DOGE. There are a lot of expenditures in the state of Alaska that we have looked at, will continue to look at. And we can find savings. But if you can’t feed yourself, you don’t have a roof over your head, if you don’t have public safety, you don’t have much of the state to be honest with you. We’re too reliant on other states. It’d be different if Alaska was placed in the middle of the country where you had Iowa on its border and Indiana on its border and Oklahoma on its border, within a few minutes you’ve got trucks coming across the border to feed Alaska. We’re at the top of the world. We have to be able to take care of ourselves.”

“For those that fear this is going to cost an extraordinary amount of money we’re basically going to move the division into its own department, stand it up and then put the focus on what is needed to make sure that that department works well for farmers.”

“And then be able to grow that sector where you eventually, hopefully sooner than later, some of the proceeds from what the farmers are growing begins to help pay for that department.”

When a right-wing blog accused him of trying to raise taxes, he claimed he wasn’t talking about taxes with the reference to proceeds, only land sales by the state.

This sham is a fitting sequel to the imaginary Office of Food Security that Dunleavy established in the governor’s office during his 2022 reelection campaign.

The 2022 order creating the food office was larded up with platitudes, buzzwords and jargon and called for immediate action to figure out what needs to be done to grow more food in Alaska.

Standing in a green field for the state-funded video, which looked exactly like a campaign ad, Dunleavy made big promises and bold pledges, saying that state corporations and state agencies would work together with the University of Alaska, farmers, tribes, nonprofit groups, etc.

“The Office of Food Security will unify this effort in pursuit of short-term, mid-term and long-term goals that will build a resilient food supply system in Alaska once and for all,” Dunleavy said two-and-a-half years ago.

“Building secure food systems here in Alaska will also help diversify our economy and create new opportunities that take advantage of our abundance of clean air, water and land.”

“The Office of Food Security is but one step, but an important one in putting the full resources of the State of Alaska behind this effort. I’m looking forward to continuing the work we’ve already started and working with all Alaskans to turn this vision into reality,” he said.

There was a lot of empty talk and almost no action, the problem that plagues his Department of Agriculture campaign.

His new pointless fight with the Legislature may sprout a wasteful lawsuit, but it won’t do a thing to promote agriculture.

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