The Pebble case has nothing to do with the Kuskokwim fishing case, so this should have been a separate procurement, but the Dunleavy administration prefers doing business with Consovoy McCarthy and avoiding competitive bids, so it added the Pebble mine case to an unrelated contract to keep the work with a law firm it likes.
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Former Sen. Mark Begich is among those getting paid under a no-bid statehood defense contract for the Dunleavy administration.
The contract is for $50,000 and it runs from September 11 until January 30. Had it been a $50,001 contract, the state would have had to seek some competition.
The contract is so short and so small that I suspect that the state intends to extend the duration and amount, contrary to a procurement regulation cited in the contract that allows no-bid deals only if the cost does not exceed $50,000.
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There are at least a half-dozen major legal deficiencies with one of the statehood defense contracts the Dunleavy administration has with Holland & Hart LLP, a contract under which former legislator Drue Pearce collected $450 an hour.
Last week I wrote about the $2 million contract the state has with Holland & Hart to handle legal issues for the Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority.
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Gov. Mike Dunleavy wants $2 million more from the Legislature for his statehood defense campaign over grievances real and imagined. Before this goes any farther, let’s see an accounting of the millions spent so far, starting with the illegal contract with former Attorney General Craig Richards, which has numerous legal problems.
With no public notice, the state hired Richards under a no-bid contract for $12,000 a month to be the statehood defense coordinator.
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The sentence that stands out in the state job offer is this: “There is a process which we must follow when making a hire of this senior level in state government in Alaska which includes the approval by Governor Dunleavy’s Chief of Staff.”
But there is no process like that in state law. It is a Dunleavy policy to extend his political reach throughout state government.
Read MoreSean Thomas, the executive chosen by the Alaska Aerospace Corporation board to serve as president of the state rocket company, says he believes that Gov.Mike Dunleavy intervened to deny him the job because Thomas and his wife signed the recall petition, he told the Anchorage Daily News.
Read MoreThe Dunleavy administration and its consultant tried to decide “The Way Forward” for the Transportation Advisory Committee reviewing the Kinross ore-hauling project on the afternoon of November 13.
The so-called “Way Forward” is being kept secret, as shown in the blacked out section of the email below, though other information shows the general idea was to shut down the committee as soon as possible. The committee was scheduled to meet November 16.
Read MoreAt a minimum the state should set operating conditions and specific safety rules for the Kinross operation, recognizing that the number of trucks will likely be increased after the project gets moving because this is expected to be a highly profitable venture.
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The Dunleavy administration claims that a new analysis of the Steese Expressway bridge over the Chena River has led to a reversal of its previous position—that the ore-haul trucks should not be allowed to use the downtown bridge.
There is reason to be skeptical of the timing and substance of this revelation by the Dunleavy administration.
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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 on April 25.
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In an attempt to escape an obvious legal snafu, Kinross and its trucking contractor now reveal in court documents that they will have their trucks run on the Steese Expressway instead of the route identified by the state.
But the court documents don’t say that would mean crossing the Chena River on a 46-year-old Steese Highway bridge that the chief state bridge engineer said in July should not be used by “heavy ore loads.” The state has long banned the heaviest trucks from the Steese bridge because of safety concerns.
Read MoreThe 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.
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Alaska 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.
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The 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.
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Sen. 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.
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The 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.
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House 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.
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Sen. 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.
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