Closing the glaring Hilcorp loophole, which could be costing the state $100 million a year, is long overdue.
SB 114, introduced by the Senate Rules Committee Friday, would do that, among other things.
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At 1:58 p.m. on Monday, March 13, the Dunleavy administration posted a public notice online that the state salary commission would meet two days later in the Atwood Building.
The meeting was illegal. It should never have been scheduled or held. The law requires 20-day notice. And only one of the five commissioners who got the notice would still be on the body by the day of the meeting.
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If you haven’t done so already, please listen to the March 15 meeting of the new Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission, the meeting that followed the coup engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. It won’t take long. The corrupt process employed by Dunleavy and some legislators to rig the salary commission results is a disgrace.
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Sen. Gary Stevens is getting close to the end of a distinguished legislative career, perhaps with this term, and he shouldn’t sign off on the salary subterfuge engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Stevens should realize that denying a legislative vote on whether lawmakers and top officials in the executive branch should get raises is unethical.
Refusing to hold a legislative vote will make Stevens a partner with Dunleavy in subverting the public process.
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Tregarrick Taylor, the third attorney general under Gov. Mike Dunleavy, disputes the notion that anything he does from his state perch is motivated by personal opinion or interpretation.
“I don’t get to provide advice based on what the law could or should be; my duty is to provide advice based on what the law is,” Taylor proclaims in a stuffed-shirt document published in the Anchorage Daily News and elsewhere.
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Imagine if a fast-talking salesman tried to pay a multi-million-dollar debt by offering to unload property he didn’t want anymore and claiming the asset is worth $13.9 million.
A shell game like that wouldn’t go far before the other party would demand that the salesman produce the cash.
But the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is trying to pull a similar scam right now with its attempt to transfer a North Slope road instead of handing over $13.9 million in cash.
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The Alaska Salary Commission coup, engineered by Gov, Mike Dunleavy and legislative leaders, is a prime example of political cowardice.
The brand new members of the commission met for the first time this week and unanimously approved a pay raise for the governor and his top appointees and legislators without any work.
The pay raises will automatically take effect unless the Alaska Legislature rejects the plan, which was obviously worked out in advance in secret.
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Unless there is a change in state law, state revenue will decline by $1 billion to $1.6 billion during the development and early operational years of the Willow oil project because of a gift to the oil industry built into the state oil tax law, according to state reports from 2018 and 2023.
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Election Director Carol Beecher, who said she did not know the meaning of the group’s acronym, said there are benefits and drawbacks to ERIC. The main drawback, she said, is that it is expensive, that Alaska is a small state and she doesn’t know if the group provides a good return on the state’s investment and maybe the state can do the work more cheaply. She did not mention and she was not asked what qualifies as “expensive.”
But the membership in ERIC is not at all expensive.
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Hundreds of the best young cross-country skiers in the nation are converging on Fairbanks this weekend for the Junior National Cross-Country Ski Championships.
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Dave Stieren, $156,000-a-year mouthpiece for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, took offense when I referred to him on Twitter as the Dunleavy education expert. Reading his comment about me being a “sad relic,” I pay no heed, considering the source.
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Sen. Dan Sullivan’s oversimplified claim that multinational companies—with operations and political connections in many countries—are nationalistic instruments of U.S. foreign relations is a dangerous delusion for a U.S. senator. These are companies that want to produce profits above all else for their shareholders. That is why they exist.
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You would never guess it from reading the resolutions and declarations of support about the Willow project from Alaska politicians and businesses, but development of the oil field would cost the state hundreds of millions a year during the early years of construction and production.
That’s because it is on federal land and the state would collect no oil royalties from the field, only production taxes. Equally important, the state oil tax law allows ConocoPhillips to write off the expense of developing Willow against its other operations in Alaska immediately, reducing how much it pays in taxes for up to eight years.
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In the infamous Pebble tapes from 2020, the chief executive of the proposed mine portrayed Sen. Dan Sullivan as someone who is “gonna try to ride out the election and remain quiet.”
Tom Collier lost his job over his impolitic remarks about Sullivan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, but truer words have never been spoken about Sullivan.
The junior senator is always trying to ride out the election and duck contentious issues, clearly communicating a position only if he can pose it as an attack on Democrats or if it an issue on which he can’t possibly lose.
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Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor should be called to testify before the Alaska Legislature on why he hid a key change in state policy on civil rights in the midst of the last election.
We only know of this important change to reduce the civil rights of LGBTQ people because of excellent reporting by Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.
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Adam Crum evaded taking any responsibility for the food stamp crisis, offering bureaucratic babbling and jargon, suggesting the “limited leadership structure” was busy with higher priorities so things got out of control.
Read More“But Diggins does seem to have mastered the art of staying present in the pain. Tuesday’s race—an individual start competition, in which skiers go out on their own, at thirty-second interval—was a textbook example,” wrote Bill McKibben in the New Yorker.
Read MoreThree public comments have been submitted online to the state as of Wednesday morning on the waste management permit for the proposed open-pit Tetlin mine. Here’s how to add yours to the list.
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Kinross is telling Alaskans that it is not economical to build an ore processing facility at the high-grade gold deposit near Tetlin, so it has no choice but to use the highway system to truck ore to the Fort Knox mine for processing.
But there is good reason to dispute the claim.
Why?
Because a 2018 study of the proposed Tetlin project—before Kinross got involved—found that a mine project built at Tetlin would be an economical and profitable venture for all concerned, even with a gold price of $1,250 per ounce. Gold is now about $1,830 an ounce.
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The Dunleavy administration hadn’t planned to move ahead this soon with the replacement of five major bridges between Tetlin and the Fort Knox mine until the Kinross plan to use the highways as a haul road for mining trucks came along.
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