Borough Mayor Bryce Ward has correctly sized up the so-called “education investment reserve” as a tax increase that will do little for education in Fairbanks.

Ward vetoed the ordinance, the only sensible thing to do. “The creation of the reserve will increase taxes and will not increase education funding—it will most likely decrease education funding over the short term,” Ward wrote Tuesday.

The right-wing majority on the assembly approved the ordinance 5-4 just before the election. It was a piece of campaign fluff that sponsor Aaron Lojewski promoted as a visionary approach to education funding, claiming it would work something like the Alaska Permanent Fund in the decades to come.

Read More

Right-wing members of the borough assembly accept it as a matter of faith that they would have a better chance of winning elections if the municipal elections are moved from October to November.

But there is a good reason for keeping the schedule as it is. And it has nothing to do with theories about gaining or losing political advantage.

The local contests for assembly, school board, city council and mayor—as well as municipal initiatives and bond issuess—deserve more public attention, not less.

That takes time, which is only available with a municipal election schedule that does not have to compete with statewide issues and national elections. Those always overpower municipal contests.

Local issues are guaranteed to get less attention if local elections are held at the same time as the state and federal elections that will consume all the time, money and political oxygen.

Read More

The state press release printed in the News-Miner that appears under the name of Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson is a well-massaged committee project that conceals far more than it reveals.

Under Anderson, the transportation department has always acted like a business partner of Kinross, not an independent agency. The press release peddles the illusion of independence where there is none.

Anderson owes his job to Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who has made it clear that he doesn’t want to hear the word no about the Kinross trucking plan.

Dunleavy wants to hear yes. “There’s too much ‘no,’” Dunleavy said. “No trucks on the road from Tetlin to Fort Knox . . . “

Read More

“Damn it, Mr. President. Do your job,” Sen. Dan Sullivan said in a post on social media Sept. 28. “Secure the border. Damn it, Secretary (Alejandro) Mayorkas. Secure the border. Do your job.”

Sullivan salts his partisan pronouncements with oaths to show he’s angry.

He did it on this occasion while pointing to a story in the Louisville Courier-Journal headlined “Targeting the Last Frontier: Mexican cartels send drugs into Alaska, upping death toll.”

The fault for this lies entirely with President Joe Biden and his underlings, according to Sullivan. “Biden is allowing drug cartels to invade Alaska,” Sullivan claims.

“Alaskans and Americans are dying and you’re responsible,” he said of Biden.

But it turns out that the situation is a great deal more complicated than Sullivan says. Damn it.

Read More

The Sullivan press release is vague, perhaps deliberately so, on what Sullivan is really asking for. He is proposing a state subsidy for an amount that he failed to identify.

We need a clarification from the junior senator about whether this is a convoluted way of saying that Goldman Sachs failed to raise the $150 million needed to move the project to the next phase after which no more state subsidies will be required.

Read More

If public comments mean anything to the Dunleavy administration, the proposal to allow the governor and attorney general to approve free legal help for each other in ethics cases will die a second time.

But if public comments meant anything to the Dunleavy administration, Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor would never have resurrected this plan, which first died in 2020 during the reign of General Kevin Clarkson.

Every Alaskan who commented on the latest edition of the proposed regulations did so in opposition to the proposed Dunleavy mutual legal aid society.

Read More

Months have passed without the Dunleavy administration pressing Kinross for answers on whether its 95-foot ore-hauling trucks will be able to use the roundabout on Chena Hot Springs Road.

In theory, based on a computer model, there is just enough room to allow the trucks to squeeze by at slow speed. The theory makes no allowance for snow, ice or operator error.

Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson, a political appointee of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, should end the stonewalling on this and the other issues created by the Kinross plan.

Read More

When Gov. Mike Dunleavy launched his energy task force last spring he said he wanted to see plans by the end of this year to cut electricity prices in Alaska to 10 cents per kilowatt hour by 2030.

“Now some people will say that’s incredibly optimistic, we can’t do that, etc., etc., etc. But I’ve gotta remind you of a couple of things done in history here in the not-too-distant past. 1961, John F. Kennedy said we’re gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade,” Dunleavy told his task force.

“People laughed at him, nobody can go the moon. That’s impossible. It can’t be done.”

“We went to the moon,” said Dunleavy.

Read More

The Fairbanks borough assembly and school board elections turned into a rout, with right-wing candidates losing by margins of about 500 to 1,800 votes with all 32 precincts counted.

It was a clean sweep for supporters of education and public services and a rejection of the culture war claims the Republican Party injected into local politics.

Read More

The giant Kinross ore trucks will have to make three 90-degree turns to get from the Johansen Expressway to the Steese Expressway during the two years or more that the existing intersection will be closed for construction.

Will the trucks be able to make the turn? How many lanes will they take up when doing so? What is the added cost for building the temporary road to make it strong enough and wide enough to handle the 164,000-pound trucks? How much will the need to accommodate the Kinross trucks add to the cost of the temporary road?

The Dunleavy administration, which is acting like a business partner of Kinross, has yet to answer these and other important questions.

Read More

Assembly candidate Jimi Cash claims in a campaign flyer that the so-called “education investment reserve” approved last week by the assembly on a 5-4 vote will bring “long-term stability to education funding.”

It will do nothing of the kind.

The so-called reserve is an obvious campaign gimmick by Aaron Lojewski and Cash, created to allow right-wing candidates to claim they are all in favor of funding education 30 or 40 years from now and have found a painless way to do it—divert money that would be used for borough operations into a slush fund.

Read More

On Feb. 13, 2019, with lots of fanfare, Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed an executive order to consolidate the procurement functions of state government in a single office.

He said that about 100 non-construction procurement staff in various state agencies were to be transferred to the Department of Administration and he created the new Office of Procurement and Property Managment.

It would save money, lead to staff reductions, streamline ordering, make state government more efficient, end redundant purchases, and make it easier to enforce procurement policies, he said in Administrative Order No. 304.

On July 17, 2023, with no fanfare, Dunleavy signed an administrative order saying never mind.

The new order revoked Administrative Order No. 304, declaring an end to statewide procurement consolidation.

Read More

For the second straight year, Permanent Fund investment advisor John Skjervem denounced ESG and fossil-fuel divestment in the presentation prepared for the Alaska Permanent Fund trustees annual meeting. Skjervem is repeating many of the same points he made to the trustees a year ago.

Read More

Far too much power to control Alaska’s most important financial institution is vested in one individual, the governor.

When the governor chooses trustees from a small circle of supporters, as Dunleavy does, the risk of concentrated power in the handling of tens of billions is far too great to be ignored.

Read More

Alaska news organizations have still not reported on the bureaucratic machinations that led the Alaska Permanent Fund’s chief operating officer to quit his job without notice just as the fund announced plans to open a new office in Anchorage.

This story by the Alaska Beacon treats the decision to open an Anchorage office as normal state business, buried in two paragraphs at the bottom of this financial update.

Read More

The Legislature was never going to call a special session to deal with a fiscal plan.

That’s because 40 members would have to agree to it and we don’t have a legislative supermajority on any contentious topic.

So it’s not because of the Legislature that there won’t be a special session, but because of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the only single person with the ability to make something happen .

Read More

What we need in a school board member is someone with sound judgment, a person grounded in reality who can accurately interpret what is going on around them.

We don’t have that with April Smith, the incumbent running for reelection against challenger Bobby Burgess.

She has a tendency to misinterpret what is going on around her, whipping up hysteria at every opportunity.

In a textbook case exposing Smith’s abysmal judgement a few days ago, she defamed longtime Fairbanks writer David James on Facebook, accusing him of being a criminal, which he is not.

Read More

Sen. Dan Sullivan wants to remake the federal judiciary in Alaska in his own image.

He doesn’t want any of the Alaskans who applied months ago to reach the federal bench and wants to recruit people more to his liking.

A true test of character for the nine people who are taking part in his partisan stunt is whether they will now withdraw from the Dan Sullivan Council Charade. He is using all nine for political cover.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More