Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming joined the Federal Trade Commission’s federal lawsuit against the proposed Kroger acquisition of Albertsons, the company that owns Safeway and other brands.
Washington and Colorado have filed their own lawsuits.
Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor, who joins every right-wing lawsuit that aligns with his personal political views, did not join this one.
Read MoreIt is more than generous to refer to the planning on the West Susitna access road project as slipshod.
The version of the project that popped into the STIP was thrown together last summer without real analysis.
It had been a project of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, envisioned as a 110-mile access road to promote mining. Some estimates put the cost at $450 million, but the final price could be much higher because detailed engineering work has not taken place.
Last summer, the Dunleavy administration decided to disguise the cost of the project and use part of the federal windfall in highway dollars to pretend it was no longer a single road project, but two projects.
Read MoreThe mishandling of the STIP, the most serious management failure of Dunleavy’s time in office, has put hundreds of millions in federal highway funds and thousands of Alaska jobs in immediate jeopardy. The entire road-building season is at risk.
This, from the governor who complains about people who don’t say yes to every idea about using public resources for private gain. He should have said something about saying yes to getting the STIP done on time so that the road construction season is not canceled.
Read MoreWhile Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor is occupied elsewhere polishing his right-wing political image, there is an important disclosure in the Washington state lawsuit against the Kroger-Albertsons case that is relevant to Alaska.
The disclosure adds weight to the notion that pledges to keep Alaska stores open after the merger are meaningless.
Read MoreThe mishandling of the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan by the office of Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson is a real problem.
Anderson is now claiming he did not know about the rule requiring that projects in an area with a Metropolitan Planning Organization, such as Anchorage and Fairbanks, must have those projects included in the local plan to be in the state plan.
He also claims it is a new rule.
Anderson did know about this rule. And it is not a new rule.
Read MoreAlaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor has signed onto another federal court case that has nothing to do with Alaska and everything to do with bowing to Donald Trump and the Trump followers who rule the Republican Party.
Taylor used state resources to add Alaska’s name to a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting Trump’s bid to delay a federal court case against him.
Read MoreThe trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation voted 5-1 last week to release what they are calling “Trustee Paper No. 10.”
Trustee Paper No. 10 became a public document when the trustees voted February 16, but the staff of the corporation has yet to release the paper to the public.
Read MoreI found it disturbing that two trustees, Craig Richards and Gabrielle Rubenstein, were quick to claim that the fund did not want to borrow money to make investments, dressing up their comments with gibberish.
Contrary to their claims, the strategic plan memo released by the corporation to explain the plan to the public said that the borrowed money would be used for investments. Perhaps they failed to read their own report.
Read MoreLargely ignoring the substance of the public comments they received on a proposed strategic plan, the six-member Permanent Fund board of trustees pushed ahead with a proposal promoting the idea of borrowing billions to make more billions.
They did scale back the size of the proposal, however.
Read MorePredictably, 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreBlogger 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.
Read More“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.
Read MoreRead 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreWho 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!”
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreDunleavy, 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.
Read MoreThe 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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