If the state is going to claim in a lawsuit that it is owed $24.56 billion, then the contract attorneys hired to push this case shouldn’t be admitting in the same lawsuit that the real number might be $24 billion less than that amount.
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The Alaska Permanent Fund Board of Trustees is set to meet July 24 in Fairbanks, a regular quarterly meeting at which decisions will be made and updates presented regarding the policy direction of this vital institution.
But there are only five members of the trustees at this point—two employees of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a former employee of Dunleavy’s, a contract employee of Dunleavy’s and Gabrielle Rubenstein, a political supporter of Dunleavy’s.
The chairman’s position has been vacant since July 1, when Ethan Schutt’s four-year term expired.
It’s time for Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan to be candid with Alaskans about how their flawed political process helped elevate Josh Kindred to a lifetime seat on the federal bench.
They now admit he was the wrong man for the job. They don’t admit that their secrecy and lack of transparency is part of the problem.
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After Kindred’s forced resignation, Sullivan said he will continue to work with his personal judicial council “for appointment of federal judges who understand Alaska’s unique role in our federal system. This is crucially important for our state. Federal judges have lifetime tenure—their decisions will positively or negatively impact Alaskans for decades.”
Sullivan and Murkowski boosted Kindred into a lifetime job with little public review. Their public statements this week overflowed with regret about Kindred. They said they were outraged, etc.
That’s not even close to the response this case demands.
They should learn from this debacle and their part in it. They should make the selection of federal judges a more transparent process—which would include public hearings on potential nominees and an end to the secrecy of the Dan Sullivan Alaska Federal Judicial Council.
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I spent several days traveling and away from the blog.
I want to update you on some things.
In response to reader requests, I have changed the subject line in emails sent to everyone on my mailing list to reflect the topic of the day and not just the name of this blog.
It appears, however, that this change is in some cases directing my missives out of regular inboxes and into other categories, namely “promotions.” This has happened to some readers using gmail. Please check your spam folder to see if my emails have landed there.
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Ambler Metals LLC promotes itself as an “Alaskan company with offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks.”
It is an Alaska company in the sense that it has registered with the state of Alaska as a “Foreign Limited Liability Company,” which means it is not what anyone in Alaska would consider an Alaska company.
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Ethan Schutt’s term on the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation board of trustees, one of the most important positions in Alaska, expired Monday.
There’s been no word from Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s publicity office about whether he has reappointed Schutt or replaced him.
Read More“The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” wrote Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she said.
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The most likely step now is a challenge of one or more of the school districts that are allowing public allotment money to be used to pay for private school tuition. The districts in Fairbanks, the Denali Borough and Mat-Su are among those allowing this to happen. The Alaska Supreme Court said it believes the Dunleavy administration argues that this practice is against the law.
Nothing in the Supreme Court ruling Friday can be read as an endorsement of spending public funds for private school tuition. In fact, the opposite is the case.
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The conflict of interest demonstrated by the action and inaction of the attorney general may have led to the indefensible claim by the attorney general—that an allegation of unconstitutional spending by school districts is none of his business.
The statute the state is trying to defend came under scrutiny after the attorney general’s family publicized its plan for tuition reimbursement. “Thanks to Dunleavy’s 2014 statute, private schools have been added to the list of allowable vendors for parents,” wrote Jodi Taylor, wife of the AG and a leader of the Alaska Policy Forum.
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Just one more blog post, for the moment, on the school funding appeal to be heard by the Alaska Supreme Court Thursday at 10 a.m. Gavel to Gavel plans to cover it live.
But home school parents who intervened in the case—represented by the Institute for Justice in Texas and Virginia, and former Attorney General Craig Richards—claim they have a right to receive public funds to pay tuition at private schools.
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In the myriad of conflicting and contradictory claims made by the Dunleavy administration over using public funds for private schools, one that stands out is the declaration that school districts may be violating the Alaska Constitution by allowing students to pay for private-school tuition with public money.
A violation of that nature should prompt action by the attorney general to force the school districts to stop, but AG Tregarrick Taylor has allowed it to go on. He is seriously conflicted over the issue.
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One of the arguments that the Dunleavy administration is making to the Alaska Supreme Court this week is that the state has no control over unconstitutional spending by the school districts because the law championed by Dunleavy absolves it of responsibility and bans the state from applying other rules.
Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor claims that the state education department has no control over the districts on how correspondence school allotments are used, though the education department is free “to ask the attorney general for legal advice on how student allotments may be spent,” but that school districts are “independent actors for purposes of liability under state law.”
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An educational organization is not necessarily an educational institution, according to the Dunleavy administration.
The league of state synonymists is pinning its legal hopes in the landmark school funding case on a flimsy claim that the words organization and institution are not interchangeable.
That’s relevant because the Alaska Constitution prohibits spending public funds at “any religious or private educational institution,” but it doesn’t say anything about public funds spent on religious or private organizations.
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Enough already with the hypocrisy of Sen. Dan Sullivan and fellow Trumpists on the border question.
Sullivan has one of his employees assigned to attack President Joe Biden on social media in the voice of Dan Sullivan, pushing a fictional portrayal of Donald Trump as a man with all of his faculties.
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Dave Winfield hit 465 home runs in the Major Leagues. Before he made it big, Winfield spent two summers in Fairbanks for the Alaska Goldpanners. One of his home runs may have hit the roof of the Fairbanks Curling Club. Or it may have bounced in the dirt and hit the wall of the club. It doesn’t really matter.
In the words of Lew Freedman, “any Goldpanner history talk quickly turns to Winfield. His name comes up in the first paragraph. Whether he ever hit a home run off the roof of the curling club or not.”
Read MoreIn a March legislative hearing, the Dunleavy administration reported that 14 of the 31 jobs in the “member benefits” office of the Division of Retirement and Benefits were vacant.
This was the highest vacancy rate in the division, which has a total of 129 positions.
On April 1, the state said there was a delay of 3.5 months in processing retirement applications.
On Tuesday, the Department of Administration Commissioner Paula Vrana said the delay in processing has been cut to 8-10 weeks.
After publication of my blog post on this topic, a skeptical legislator contacted me to ask about reports that the 8-10 calculation only includes applications that have been officially entered into the system. I asked her to clarify if the backlog excludes the applications received by the state that have yet to be dealt with at all.
Read MoreThe essential job of the chief executive in Alaska is to manage the daily operations of state government and keep the machinery of the bureaucracy running.
But the food stamp backlog, chronic delays in processing payroll forms, and the 15,000 people waiting for action on Medicaid applications are prime examples of how the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has stumbled over the basics.
Now add another program where the state is falling short—getting new retirees the pension payments they are owed by the state and paying survivors the death benefits they are entitled to collect.
Read MoreAs an online tool for tracking some state spending in Alaska, the new Checkbook Alaska website is an important advance over what has gone before.
But the state needs to do much more to live up to the 2022 law that says “The Alaska Online Checkbook Act shall be construed in favor of disclosure and transparency.”
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If the Alaska Supreme Court listens to what Sen. Mike Dunleavy claimed a decade ago, then Gov. Mike Dunleavy will lose his effort to funnel public funds to private schools and the Alaska Superior Court decision will be upheld.
On April 10, 2013 Sen. Mike Dunleavy said he knew it was illegal to allow public funds be used to pay tuition to allow a student to take even a single course in a private school.
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