The office of Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor is waiting to hear from the Holland & Hart law firm about whether the company wants to help hide public information about how much the state paid per hour for legal services from former Gov. Sean Parnell and others.
This is rich. The information is not a trade secret. And having the attorney general invite private contractors to define public information as a trade secret is going to fail.
Read MoreAlaska law says the director of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska or a designee has a place on the board of the state-owned Alaska Aerospace Corporation.
The corporation board is meeting today in Anchorage, but Robert McCoy, the director of the GI and a longtime board member, is no longer listed as a board member or as chairman of the board.
Read MoreThe fear that Dunleavy will refuse to ask the Legislature for the $23 million matching grant to replace the Tustumena is real enough that Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote him this week with a reminder that Dunleavy has already promised to come up with the cash to qualify for a $92.8 million federal grant.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan gives himself some of the credit for getting Alabama Sen. Tommy “Coach” Tuberville to drop his obstruction of hundreds of military promotions, releasing a statement in which Sullivan didn’t mention the guy who created the mess.
Sullivan tried to blur the picture of what Tuberville did.
Read MoreThe trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund want the annual evaluation of the fund’s executive director to be conducted in an executive session with nothing in writing. The idea is to avoid creating a paper trail that would become a public document, according to the trustees.
Read MoreHouse Speaker Mike Johnson is to speak Tuesday before a convention of Christian nationalists at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
Homer Rep. Sarah Vance is a charter member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group that promotes the creation of a theocracy in the United States.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan’s office won’t say how many people have applied to the new secret Sullivan federal judge selection committee, chaired by his friend and former employer, Sean Parnell.
Judge applications to the secret committee were due by November 20, but Sullivan spokeswoman Amanda Coyne has declined to respond to several requests about how many people have applied and when their names will be released. Perhaps they will never be released.
Read MoreThe attorney general’s office asked those assembled at the statehood defense trough if they wanted to keep their hourly rates secret. Great idea, said three law firms.
Read MoreThe Dunleavy administration continues to create new jobs in the statehood defense industry, most of them with lawyers Outside earning several hundred dollars an hour by promoting the political opinions of Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor.
There is no evidence that before signing contracts to create statehood defense jobs—spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions in the process—that anyone in state government investigates the chances of success or whether the money might be better spent elsewhere.
Read MoreThe most comprehensive news article written so far on the Tetlin gold mine and the Kinross ore-hauling plan comes from a freelance reporter for Grist, a nonprofit news site. I recommend it to anyone who wants to be informed about the matter.
Read MoreThe Dunleavy administration’s $12,000-a-month statehood defense contract with former Attorney General Craig Richards is not authorized by state regulations and should be revoked.
The contract says Richards will be paid for seven months, but it only includes $50,000 to pay him, which is $34,000 short. This is not an accident.
Read MoreWith no public announcement, the state hired Dunleavy ally Craig Richards, a trustee of the Alaska Permanent Fund, to serve as “statehood defense coordinator” under a no-bid seven-month contract that pays Richards $12,000 a month for part-time work.
This is in contrast to the big public show Dunleavy made on July 9, 2021 when he hired former employee Brett Huber to perform the statehood posturing exercises that are part of Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor’s daily workout.
Read MoreRick Van Nieuwenhuyse, who makes about $2 million a year from Contango ORE for developing the Manh Choh and other Alaska mining ventures, says that a future project near Willow may one day lead to ore hauling on the Parks Highway from Hatcher Pass to Fort Knox.
Read MoreI want to thank everyone who reads this blog all the time or just once in a while. It means a great deal to me. I take it as a compliment that you spend time reading what I have to say, whether you agree or disagree with the contents.
Read MoreBob Ballinger of Arkansas and Rep. Sarah Vance share a connection though the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, “godly leaders” who want to impose their interpretation of the Bible on all levels of government in the United States. Vance has given Ballinger, who lives in Arkansas, a state job.
Read MoreAlaska Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson called a halt to the Transportation Advisory Committee meetings as of Thursday, a surprise announcement at the end of a four-hour meeting.
Now we know why the state had planned a “virtual only” meeting of the group until community pushback caused the department to reverse its ban on in-person participation.
The commissioner instructed the consultant to have the committee studying the Kinross ore-hauling project end its meetings and finish its work by email and phone calls, assembling a final report with no meeting to vote on a draft or even a final report.
Read MoreI don’t know how it happened, but the Dunleavy administration reversed itself on the Transportation Advisory Committee meeting plan, dropping the ban on in-person participation.
The meeting is set for Thursday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Key Bank Building at 100 Cushman Street in downtown Fairbanks.
This was the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do was the earlier decision by Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson to ban in-person participation to better control the group.
Read MoreDepartment of Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson still has time to correct the blunder he made by ordering that a Thursday meeting of the committee reviewing the Kinross ore-hauling plan will be “virtual only.”
The meeting of the Transportation Advisory Committee is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday is a crucial one for preparing its final report. It needs to be held in person. Those who can’t make it in person can use the online approach.
Read MoreI think I made it clear in a series of blog posts over the last two months that the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund were on the wrong track with their strategic plan because they failed to include the public and the Legislature.
In the end, they did the right thing and followed the advice of financial experts by pulling back. What I don’t understand is why they waited so long to ask for advice. Or why they aren’t making a concerted effort to ask Alaskans what the strategic plan should include.
Read MoreMary Vought’s contract to burnish the national image of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been extended eight times over nearly four years, a textbook case of ignoring the state procurement law that requires competitive bidding. Two more contract extensions are already in the works.
The Vought contract, which could cost nearly $400,000 by the end of 2026, does not match up with any of the nine examples mentioned in state regulations about instances in which sole-source contracts might be appropriate.
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