The nine friendly people chosen by Sen. Dan Sullivan to serve on his so-called “Alaska Federal Judiciary Council” won’t speak with one voice. Some of them will even disagree with him on major issues.

But the alleged council might as well be a product of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping School of Law for all the credibility it starts off with, which is zero.

Whatever this group is, it doesn’t warrant a trumped-up name like “Alaska Federal Judiciary Council.” The group is to give advice to Sullivan on names of potential judges. Sullivan will be free to do whatever he wants with the advice.

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Gov. Mike Dunleavy has increased the monthly payments he is making to Washington, D.C. publicist Mary Vought, under what started as a no-bid state contract at the height of the recall drive nearly four years ago. The total cost is nearing $185,000.

In August alone, Dunleavy paid Vought’s company $5,000 on Aug. 23 and $5,000 on Aug. 24, according to the state’s online checkbook. On July 17, she received $5,000.

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Unable to criticize his performance, the Republican party has decided to go after Tim Doran by claiming that six years of public service on the school board should disqualify him from serving three years more.

Doran is one of the best Fairbanks school board members of all time, an even-tempered leader with experience, knowledge and good judgement. He is a retired principal who has spent his career doing all he can to improve education. He is one of those rare individuals who knows how to get people of different points of view to work together.

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Sen. Dan Sullivan won’t stop blustering that Democrats and Republicans like Sen. Lisa Murkowski have to surrender to the whims of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the guy who likes to be addressed as “Coach.”

True to style, Sullivan won’t use the right word, however, calling for “compromise” with
Tuberville, a former gym major who moved to Alabama to run for the U.S. Senate.

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The Anchorage Daily News has started to kick the tires on the Kinross ore hauling plan, asking at least some of the right questions about what’s legal and what’s fair in what looks like a “classic case of corporate welfare.”

The unanswered questions point to failures by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

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A spectacular section of the Alaska Railroad in the Healy Canyon near Denali National Park, where trains are limited to 15 mph, needs serious repairs.

“The area has a long history of slope stability problems in the form of deep-seated landslides, rapid slope movement, washouts, and rockfall issues, which all affect operations and safety in the Healy Canyon,” a 2022 report by Michael Baker International said.

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One of the biggest puzzles of the Trump administration was why there was no lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during the years that Trump was in charge.

It was only after he lost the election in November 2020 that the Interior Department hurriedly threw a sale together for Jan. 6, 2021, a day that will be long remembered only for the riot in the Capitol, not for the ANWR lease sale flop.

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The Tetlin Native Corporation has posted a press release on its website making serious allegations about parties involved in the mineral lease that underlies the Kinross plan to truck ore to Fairbanks.

The many legal issues will be sorted out if and when the dispute over the mining lease ever goes to court.

As for the political and ethical issues, the court of public opinion will come into play.

One of the central issues, it seems to me, is whether the people of Tetlin were treated fairly in this matter from the start. There is reason to believe they were not, having entered negotiations with an experienced Texas promoter at a serious disadvantage.

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Enstar, a company owned by Canadian public pension investment funds, is trying to take over efforts to build a small diamater in-state natural gas pipeline that could require an Alaska state subsidy of $8 billion or more to keep Anchorage heating costs about the same.

Nat Herz of the Northern Journal has the story. Herz is doing a lot of good work on energy and politics. I suggest you read this one thoroughly.

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The oil tax for Cook Inlet is permanently capped at $1 a barrel. The natural gas tax for Cook Inlet is permanently capped at 18 cents per thousand cubic feet.

The miniscule state taxes are supposed to be an economic incentive to drill for more gas in Cook Inlet.

With the looming natural gas shortage and the prospect of importing natural gas to supply Alaska utilities, some Republican leaders say the obvious solution is to make the taxes more miniscule or eliminate them altogether.

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The department has ensnared itself in a bureaucratic knot, fully aware that Dunleavy wants to say “Yes” to anything and everything Kinross wants.

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The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation’s makeshift plan for a temporary new 1,200-square-foot office in Anchorage is what happens when bloated political egos get in the way of what should be the only priority of the trustees—overseeing the management of a $75 billion fund.

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The trustees, meeting this week in Juneau, need to explain to Alaskans exactly how and why they gave a policy directive to the staff—one that directly led to Chief Operating Officer Mike Barnhill quitting his job—a month after they met in public and declined to take that step.

I suspect that Gov. Mike Dunleavy inserted himself into the process and orchestrated events that led to the bizarre Permanent Fund press release on Aug. 10, the one that promised the fund will "open a satellite office in Anchorage as soon as possible to support the retention and recruitment of professional staff.”

The governor may have intervened on his own or at the request of one or more of the trustees who called him in for political muscle to demand instant action.

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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.

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Borough 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.

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Attorney 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.

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There 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.

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City 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.

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“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.

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I 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.

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