I’d like to see the Daily News-Miner start to use its pages to tell its real story: “Not owned by a vulture hedge fund” would be a good slogan for an ad campaign.
The best thing the newspaper has going is that it is locally owned by a nonprofit that is not trying to bleed the place dry and is focused on keeping the paper going. It deserves support.
Read MoreBorough Chief of Staff Jim Williams says there was a ”breakdown in the exercise of authority to request protestors to move” Saturday outside the Carlson Center.
City police officers, who said the were acting on behalf of Kinross, threatened a group of protesters with arrest if they did not leave the parking lot where the Kinross truck was parked.
Read MoreAttorney General Tregarrick Taylor has resurrected the mutual legal aid society that met statewide opposition on legal and ethical grounds when Dunleavy floated it during the Kevin Clarkson era of justice.
All of the public comments submitted to the state in 2019-2020 were opposed to the plan and it was never adopted.
Read MoreThere was almost no press coverage of the golden shovel ceremony in Tetlin Tuesday that brought Gov. Mike Dunleavy and top executives of Kinross and Contango ORE to mark the start of the Manh Choh mine project.
The local TV stations had a brief story, but there was nothing in the Daily News-Miner and no press release from Dunleavy, any state agency or Kinross.
Read MoreCity police officers said that Kinross, not the borough, insisted that protesters of the Kinross trucking plan be removed from the parking lot of the Carlson Center, which is public property.
“Kinross Cares” in this case means that Kinross cared to get the protesters out of the way.
Read More“It was based on the assumption that the vehicles Black Gold is proposing to use are able to stay within their lane while negotiating curves and corners as required by nationally recognized highway geometric design criteria – which DOT told me is – in fact the case. Given that assumption, what I learned from a high school Physics class and personal driving experience is that increasing the distance between the steering axle and the trailing axle reduces the tendency for the back of the trailer to ‘drift’ to the outside of a curve at any given road traction condition and vehicle,” Rep. Mike Prax writes.
Read MoreI suspect that Rep. Mike Prax was just passing along something that someone told him when he claimed to the Daily News-Miner that the safety difference between 95-foot trucks and 75-foot trucks is “statistically insignificant.”
Let’s be clear. Prax would support any Kinross trucking plan. This is a political reflex that he can’t control, as predictable as breathing.
Read MoreThe 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.
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