Donald Handeland’s willing participation and leading role as chairman of Dunleavy’s compensation commission coup is reason enough for the Legislature to refuse to confirm Handeland to the latest important position he has been granted by Dunleavy, membership on the State of Alaska Personnel Board, arbiter of state ethics for the executive branch.

Dunleavy appointed Handeland to the personnel board on September 18 last year, filling a vacancy created when Craig Johnson was elected to the Legislature a year earlier.

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None of the four Regulatory Commission of Alaska commissioners attended an important hearing in Juneau on increasing funding levels for the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.

The commissioners should have been there to defend the request for additional funds, explain why one-third of the agency’s staff positions are vacant, answer questions on internal operations, respond to questions on complex rate cases and talk about what the RCA needs.

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The Senate Resources Committee announced a confirmation hearing on right-wing talk show host Mike Porcaro for his fisheries job Wednesday, but it was canceled before the hearing.

I’m waiting to hear back from legislators on when the hearing will be rescheduled.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy gave Porcaro a $136,000 state job on the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission last year, though even Porcaro says he never applied for the job, he knows nothing about fish and there aren’t enough hours in the day for the state to get its money’s worth out of him.

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The House Finance Committee took tentative steps to reduce forward funding for Outside attorneys for the statehood defense industry and cut two of the three new employees Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor wants to hire to handle investigative grand juries.

The decisions on amendments by Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson, both approved 6-5, would save the state $1.8 million.

House Republicans, who wrap themselves in the state flag and are guaranteed to support any lawsuit against the federal government, will try to restore $300,000 for grand jury staff and $1.5 million in statehood defense money, even though it will not be needed in the next fiscal year.

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Barbara Tyndall, named by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to the Alaska State Board of Education, was asked at a confirmation hearing March 20 if she agreed with the three-sentence provision in the Alaska Constitution that sets the standards for public schools.

Tyndall, who taught for 20 years at North Pole Christian School, said she went to a public school, graduating in Valdez in 1967. Her five kids went to public schools and she home-schooled them at times. She said she realizes public schools are secular.

“So yeah, I agree with that,” she said to Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson about the language in the Constitution. “For now.”

“For now,” Gray-Jackson said.

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There are not thousands of students on waiting lists in Alaska trying to get into charter schools, contrary to claims by the Dunleavy administration.

Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, who calls herself a “data nerd,” testified Wednesday that she believed there are about 2,000 students in Anchorage alone on waiting lists to get into charter schools. The real number is about 350.

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The Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority has developed the bad budget habit of bypassing the public and the legislative authorization process required by the Alaska Constitution and state law for capital projects.

AIDEA has done this routinely under Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who treats the corporation like a private development bank that answers only to him, operating with no oversight from the Legislature. State law says it’s not supposed to be that way.

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“I think the educational discussion is over and we got to move into energy,” Dunleavy said.

The lethargy conveyed in that sentence stands in contrast to the urgency of the situation in Alaska’s schools.

The state employee hired to lead the education department, Deena Bishop, is the model of lethargy when it comes to answering questions about what Dunleavy claimed was his priority before he moved onto energy.

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Sens. Robert Myers, Mike Shower and Reps. Frank Tomaszewski, Mike Cronk, Kevin McCabe, Mike Prax and Will Stapp said Brandy Harty no longer deserves to be school board president in Fairbanks.

Nonsense.

The politicians have yet to accept their share of the responsibility for the budget crisis facing Alaska schools. They are desperate to change the subject.

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The revised contract with Craig Richards as statehood defense coordinator for the Dunleavy administration expires at the end of May, but the agreement does not authorize enough money to pay him until then.

I’ve asked the attorney general’s office for an explanation on the discrepancy between the promise to pay Richards $12,000 a month until May 31 and a contract that is tens of thousands short.

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The $700 billion claim is bogus, about as reliable as the press release from Taylor’s office—which remains uncorrected on the AG’s website—that the state government created the $700 billion guess and that the federal government has violated the “statehood act of 1953.”

Perhaps the attorney general doesn’t know as much about the statehood defense industry as he lets on.

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Wealthy hunters, both in Alaska and Outside, bestowed hunting gifts worth $55,000 or more on Gov. Mike Dunleavy last year, equal to more than one-third of his salary.

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As I wrote here last summer, nothing that John Espindola did during his years of working for the state as a “personal assistant” and policy analyst for Gov. Mike Dunleavy qualifies him to serve on the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.

And it is doubtful that the work Espindola did in New Mexico in the years before he hired on with Dunleavy in 2018 meet the minimum educational and professional requirements spelled out in state law about the people entrusted to regulate Alaska’s utilities.

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More and more, the agency is becoming the most powerful branch of the governor’s office, one that operates with little or no legislative oversight.

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A patsy parade of 20 Republican legislators sided with Gov. Mike Dunleavy in blocking the bipartisan education bill that most of the 20 voted for last month.

Nearly two-thirds of the Legislature voted to override the veto of the bipartisan education bill, one vote shy of the margin needed to enact the measure into law. The vote was 23-16 in the House and 16-4 in the Senate.

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Erin McKittrick of the Alaska Energy Blog convincingly dismantles the recent report by Frank Paskvan, who has a contract with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, that claims a new coal-fired power plant is a surefire solution to many of our energy woes:

“These days in Alaska, it’s fashionable to claim any project you want to build will solve both the Cook Inlet Gas crisis and climate change. The West Susitna coal plant idea claims to do both, and would actually do neither,” she writes.

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In November, before Gov. Mike Dunleavy concluded that the state school board should be allowed to authorize charter schools, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop praised the current system in which school districts are central to the process.

One of Dunleavy’s major complaints about the bipartisan education bill he vetoed is that it did not allow the state school board—whose members serve at the pleasure of the governor—to create charter schools in local districts.

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Ranting and raving at another unhinged press conference, Gov. Mike Dunleavy aired his usual grievances about legislators, school board members, PTAs, superintendents and teachers who supported the education bill he vetoed.

Every legislator except for Reps. Mike Prax and David Eastman and Sen. Shelley Hughes supported the bill. Legislators will consider an override Monday. At least some of the Dunleavy Republicans in the House will go along with the veto.

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With no public notice and little discussion, Republican legislators who identify themselves as conservatives slipped $300 million in borrowing authority for AIDEA and $58 million in borrowing authority for the Alaska Railroad into a bill.

The $358 million in borrowing authority was added to a bill that would also allow the railroad to borrow $90 million more to rebuild the Seward passenger dock and terminal. It is House Bill 122.

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Regarding the Cook Inlet natural gas situation, they suggest that conserving natural gas with more efficient use of natural gas would be simple and effective and they provide this clear-headed statement about the way forward:

“Don’t panic, build an import facility, move forward with renewable projects already in the pipeline, and make our homes and businesses more efficient.”

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