The job Mike Porcaro is filling is the essence of waste, fraud and abuse. The job should have been eliminated long ago, following a 2015 audit that said there is so little work to do that full-time commissioners are not needed. The audit said the commission is ineffective and inefficient.
Read MoreThe 165,000-lb. Kinross mining trucks will carry a weight that is legal in Alaska and illegal in every other state.
The reason the proposed Kinross loads are legal in Alaska is that almost any load is legal in Alaska no matter how heavy, if there are enough axles on the truck to reduce the per-axle weight. That’s why the trucks have 16 axles.
Read MoreIf you are a crony of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, he’ll give you a state job without asking.
Dunleavy hired advertising man Mike Porcaro for a fulltime $136,000 fisheries job, one that Porcaro is not qualified to hold. The job is to run the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission.
And Porcarco, 75, didn’t even ask for a state job, Nat Herz reports in the Northern Journal.
Read MoreThe turns at Peger Road, the Johansen Expressway and the Steese Highway bypass at Chena Hot Springs Road need to be checked. In addition, Kinross should demonstrate how its trucks will turn off Farmers Loop and onto the Steese Highway during the years when the Steese-Johansen intersection will be closed for construction.
The state plans to build a temporary bypass from the Johansen through the bog up to Farmers Loop, so the trucks will have to use the Farmers Loop intersection to get back on the Steese.
Read MoreThe latest Republican chain letter signed by Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor takes aim at a federal proposal to limit plastic pollution, claiming, among other things, that the EPA is blind to the immense benefits of plastic bags.
The generals say that “reusable shopping bags are rife with harmful bacteria” and are far worse for the environment than the plastic variety.
Read MoreThough the answers came in the form of noncommittal bureaucratese, state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities officials did not dispute they failed to follow federal law in selecting some projects for the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program and will have to backtrack in the months ahead.
They said this is all part of the process, it’s normal, mistakes happen, conversations are taking place, etc.
Read MoreIt’s no surprise that the Dunleavy PR squad did nothing to inform the public that the department in charge of getting state employees paid on time is not getting its work done and needs emergency help from a private contractor in Alabama. Forty-six percent of state payroll jobs are vacant. The private workers will get twice as much per hour as starting state workers.
Read MoreThe Department of Transportation and Public Facilities says comments on the draft plan can be made online at www.dot.alaska.gov/stip, via text message at 855-925-2801, or voice mail at 855-925-2801, enter Pin 2191, and leave a message.
Read MoreThe "top down” state list of highway projects from the Dunleavy administration violates federal law and regulation because the state failed to consult with long-established planning authorities in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
The proposed new bridges at the Chena Lakes Flood Control project and over Chena Hot Springs Road to help the Kinross ore hauling project did not undergo local review before State Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson ordered them placed in the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program late last year.
Read MoreThis is not about getting a well-earned “bite at the federal apple,” but of grasping for a federal handout, while complaining about socialism and the evils of “federal overreach.”
Read MoreTo demonstrate that the work of the Transportation Advisory Committee is more than a bureaucratic placebo, the Dunleavy administration should wait to see what the committee comes up with before deciding on projects that are likely to cost well more than $300 million to support the mining operation.
Read MoreWhile the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. are distracted with the bubble-headed Anchorage office sideshow, they really should be doing more to explain to Alaskans what risks they are taking on our behalf with the investments in the $78 billion account.
I wrote here in June about the new book by veteran reporter Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner that should be required reading for Alaskans: “These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America.”
Add another book to the reading list, “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America,” by Brendan Ballou.
Read MoreOnly 3 Juneau employees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. said in a survey that within the next two years they would like to move to Anchorage, which is all the evidence needed to stop the plan by the fund to open a branch office in Anchorage in space leased to the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Read MoreOne of the looming safety and traffic hazards for the Kinross mine ore trucking plan is the proposal to use the Chena Hot Springs Road roundabout.
It may work in theory, but not in the winter. The trailers are not here yet, so this maneuver has not been road tested.
Read MoreState engineers did indeed tell Kinross that a 1 percent cut in the weight of their mining trucks is all the company needs to meet the load limits on the Richardson Highway bridge in North Pole over the Chena River floodway.
One percent hardly seems to provide a sufficient margin of safety, seeing as how the trucks could well gain more than that amount on a winter’s day from ice picked up on the drive from Tetlin.
Read MoreThe Steese Highway bridge over Chena Hot Springs Road and the Richardson Highway bridge over the Chena flood control area in North Pole don’t have the capacity to handle the Kinross mining trucks with full loads.
The Dunleavy administration, headed by the guy who wants Alaskans to “say yes to everything”—has been grossly negligent in withholding this information from the public until now.
As recently as mid-summer, the state claimed on its website that the bridges could handle the trucks proposed for the Tetlin-Fort Knox route.
Read MoreIt’s no surprise that the new report from the 36-member “Alaska Food Strategy Task Force” covers much of the same ground as the report released last spring from the now-defunct 22-member “Alaska Food Security and Independence Task Force.”
The new task force, headed by Sen. Shelley Hughes, threw this report together in a rush, but the most important lesson to be understood is that it will take work, money and leadership if Alaskans want to do more about food security than keep talking about it.
Read MoreSens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan made exaggerated claims about the exact location of the 11 military vessels from China and Russia tracked in the north Pacific last week, then launched into their standard refrain about why the U.S, needs to spend a lot more money in Alaska on the military.
Their standard refrain never includes any suggestion about how they intend to pay for what they want.
Read MoreRarely have we seen a clearer example of the state misusing state law about public records than the clumsy effort to cover Curtis Thayer’s tracks in the firing of University of Alaska researcher Gwen Holdmann from the Dunleavy energy task force.
Holdmann is the founding director of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. She was vice chair of the task force, appointed by Dunleavy March 22, a perfect choice for that volunteer position.
Read MoreDunleavy administration recycles flawed plan to allow governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general to approve free legal aid for each other. The proposal does not mention that when this idea last surfaced four years ago, all of the public comments were negative.
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