The Kinross ore hauling operation has landed in court, as expected.
A new nonprofit, Alaska Committee for Safe Communities, filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking a court order to force the state to follow a variety of laws and regulations the group says have been ignored by the Dunleavy administration.
The state should be “enjoined from permitting the ore haul operation to proceed,” the lawsuit claims.
Read MoreThe Transportation Advisory Committee examining the Kinross ore hauling plan voted 5-4 Thursday to ask the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to pause the ore haul until the state has implemented safety recommendations.
In another motion, the committee voted 7-2 to ask the transportation department who approved having Kinross start its ore haul work before the advisory committee work is completed
Read MoreMunicipal elections in Fairbanks will remain in October.
The lame duck assembly did the sensible thing Thursday, killing Tammie Wilson’s plan to move the municipal elections to November Thursday on a 4-4 vote.
Read MoreThe editorial “we” of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner concludes that it’s a great idea to end the tradition of holding municipal elections for local government in October and move them to November.
It’s a bad idea for many reasons, as I wrote here last week.
Read MoreAt a minimum, state transportation officials could have directly answered the simple question asked Tuesday by Patricia MacDonald, a former truck driver and a member of the committee analyzing the highway corridor on which fully loaded Kinross ore haul trucks will start running this month.
Some of the 95-foot Kinross trucks are already running from Tetlin now, but they are not loaded with 50 tons of rock. The plan is to transport about 10 million pounds of rock daily.
Read MoreAttorney General Tregarrick Taylor has signed off on the disputed plan to allow him to provide free legal help to the governor and lieutenant governor in ethics cases, while allowing the governor to do the same for the attorney general.
All of the public comments were against the proposed regulation, which Taylor had resurrected after it was first proposed and rejected in the face of unanimous public opposition in 2020, when former AG Kevin Clarkson pushed the proposal.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy has already used state funds to build a website—one that the public was never allowed to see—that opposes abortion, encourages people to have children and portrays his vision of Alaska as the most pro-life state in the nation.
The imaginary “Alaska Office of Family & Life” that Dunleavy promoted last spring —before dropping all mention of it in the wake of the Jeremy Cubas debacle—may be reborn as a new website, “Strong Families—Strong Alaskans.”
Read MoreThere is a lot of good background information in the report by James Brooks republished below from the Alaska Beacon about an inherent problem within the Alaska Permanent Fund—the antiquated structure set up by a 1976 constitutional amendment that envisioned an interest-bearing savings account with predictable and guaranteed returns.
The Alaska Constitution requires a split between an unspendable principal and earnings, a theoretical division that doesn’t match the diverse mix of worldwide investments today.
Read MoreThe Legislative Budget & Audit Committee voted Aug. 30 to move ahead with a third audit, though some legislators said they wanted a stronger response, given the clear language in state law that the Permanent Fund should be handling investments for the trust.
The memo mentions allegations “that the commercial real estate properties are not subject to independent audits, and it has been alleged that related financial information is not accurate.”
Read MoreBorough 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 MoreRight-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 MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreIf 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 MoreMonths 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 MoreWhen 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 MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreAssembly 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.
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