Predictably, the Dunleavy administration is trying to direct blame everywhere except where it belongs for the state highway funding fiasco. It’s all damage control.

And the potential damage if the state cannot get the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan approved by the Federal Highway Administration by the end of March could be enormous.

The Dunleavy administration created this failure by not following specific guidelines or instructions provided by the federal agencies. There are numerous errors that should have been fixed months ago.

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The federal government, which provides most of the construction money, rejected the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan for 2024-2027, which puts the road building season in Alaska and thousands of jobs at grave risk.

This is not a case of federal overreach. The blame for this rests entirely with the Dunleavy administration.

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Blogger Matt Buxton did a good job capturing the bizarre press conference Gov. Mike Dunleavy gave last week. The news stories that treated this event like a normal presentation did not convey just how weird and disjointed it was.

The press conference, unlike the news stories that presented a few topics as if they were dealt with in a rational way, was as random as the spinning images on a slot machine. This was Dunleavy behaving like a free-lance rapper, stringing words together.

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“As a matter of fact, our charter schools are actually doing better because of kids that aren’t white,” Dunleavy said. “That’s what the research says.”

That’s not what the research says. Even if it did, a competent governor would not be making the sweeping claims about charter schools that Dunleavy is based on a single small study.

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Read the public comments submitted so far and you will see skepticism and opposition regarding: the notion of borrowing billions so that billions more can be invested to produce billions more in income; the dream of “outperformance through the generation of alpha’; the idea that the corporation needs to keep the names of applicants for its top job secret; and the wish to open satellite offices in the Lower 48 or in foreign lands.

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The Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority has become more aggressive about throwing public money at questionable enterprises. The agency needs stronger oversight and an approach to development more intelligent than the Dunleavy dictum of saying yes to everything and anything.

The Legislature can start by exerting its authority over the authority.

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Who needs a state law to infringe on constitutional rights when you have Gov. Mike Dunleavy willing to infringe to his heart’s content?

Dunleavy signed Administrative Order No. 352, which purports to enact what Vance calls the “Israel Anti-Discrimination Act.”

Rep. Sarah Vance responded on social media, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed!”

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The Dunleavy administration is putting all road construction projects at risk with its intransigence and refusal to follow federal highway planning rules on a handful of projects.

The so-called final version of the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan should be rejected by the Federal Highway Administration.

I say that because the state has refused to remove projects from the plan that can’t legally be there because they were not approved and reviewed by local planning agencies in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

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When it comes to a discussion of cold weather in Fairbanks, the topic is never complete without recognizing the enduring contributions of the great Carl Benson, who ventured into the cold in the early 1960s in Fairbanks and began to unlock the secrets of ice fog.

Benson, 96, is still pursuing his scholarly studies, thanks to a good constitution and an unending sense of curiosity about the world around him. I can’t tell you how much I admire him.

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Dunleavy, who won’t propose raising taxes, is looking at $1 billion deficits that would be covered in the next two years by spending most of the remaining contents of the Constitutional Budget Reserve on his watch.

After that, Dunleavy will be gone without having proposed any taxes or having tried to fix the state’s finances. And the Permanent Fund will be the only alternative to pay for deficits far into the future.

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The Subway manager was invited to Juneau to serve as the embodiment of a real Alaskan who wants what Dunleavy is selling—big PFDs and great services. She wants safe roads, a safe community, affordable housing and affordable childcare.

The Dunleavy text could have been created by the state Office of Pandering to the Folks.

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The Permanent Fund coroporation extended the period for public comment on the proposed strategic plan “due to popular demand.”

That’s a stretcher no doubt, but let’s not quibble. It’s a good move, instigated by trustee Jason Brune, who agreed it was sensible to keep getting comments from the public until just before the next meeting of the trustees, February 15. He and a couple of other trustees asked for the two-week extension.

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UPDATE: The comment deadline has been extended on the Permanent Fund’s strategic plan.

The Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. has not done a major promotional campaign seeking public comment on the proposed strategic plan drafted by the six trustees.

Comments on the plan opened Jan. 24 and are to close Friday at 5 p.m.

Here is the list of comments submitted as of Tuesday. Considering the important of this document and the lack of public involvement, the trustees should extend the deadline and make a real effort to get public comments from Alaskans.

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“It was the Republicans, I will remind you, that told the Democrats months ago that if you want to try to get your Ukraine funding, you're gonna have to take up the border issue. This is what we asked for,” she said. “This is what we asked Senator Lankford to negotiate. It's what he did. He did it in good faith. So let's take up what we asked for,” Sen. Lisa Murkowsi said, according to CNN reporter Manu Raju.

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In his catalog of what the late wordsmith Don Young would have called “negatism,” Dunleavy forgot a few big ones:

No to bad speeches. No to dumb ideas. No to pandering politicians who claim every choice is a simple yeah or nay. And no to a governor who continues to promise giant dividends, while failing to deliver a fiscal plan to pay for giant dividends.

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Juneau Sen. Jesse Kiehl is one of the few legislators paying close attention to what is happening with the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation.

“I’ve been very concerned with a real interest in secrecy. I think that decision about the second office appeared to have been taken between board meetings. There was open discussion of having an out-of-state meeting to avoid the Open Meetings Act,” Kiehl said Friday at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Permanent Fund.

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The Alaska Permanent Fund trustees want state law changed to allow them to keep the names of applicants secret when hiring the executive director or the chief investment officer.

The proposal is part of the strategic plan now out for public comment. Comments are due by February 2.

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The trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation want the Legislature to allow the corporation to borrow several billion dollars that it can invest with the hope of speeding up the growth of the $78 billion fund to $100 billion.

The idea to borrow 5 percent to 10 percent of the value of the fund is a key element in the proposed strategic plan that the fund has now made available for public comment.

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The federal building in Fairbanks is named for the late Rep. Don Young, who was a federal employee for a half-century.

In addition to the Don Young Federal Office Building, the 2,598-foot volcanic peak in the Aleutians formerly known as Mt. Cerberus is now “Mount Young” in his honor. And the Jobs Corps Center in Palmer is the Don Young Job Corps Center, all names created through the federal law signed by President Biden called the “Don Young Recognition Act.”

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In May 2022, the wife of Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor said she would seek $8,000 in public funds from the Family Partnership Charter School in Anchorage to subsidize two-thirds of their children’s tuition at a private school in Anchorage.

“Using public correspondence school allotments to pay most or all of a private educational institiution’s tuition is almost certainly unconstitutional,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Cori Mills, in an opinion dated July 22, 2022.

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