Alaska needs a governor, not a General or a Wizard

Amid the potpourri of platitudes in his State of the State speech, Gov. Mike Dunleavy called for creating a new state office, expanding the big government footprint.

“We’ll also be proposing legislation creating an Inspector General for the state of Alaska who will promote accountability, integrity, and efficiency in government by investigating careless and fraudulent spending across all programs and services,” he said.

Dunleavy did not say how much the new Alaska General would cost or why the lieutenants of the Dunleavy administration are not already identifying careless and fraudulent spending. No-bid contracts with relatives of donors come to mind.

It’s impossible to tell if Dunleavy really believes in the General or if that line was slipped into this speech to fill time, part of the effort to avoid talking about any solutions to Alaska finances.

It sounds like an idea he lifted from Sen. Shelley Hughes, who wrote this bizarre column that ran in the Anchorage Daily News Dec. 6.

Hughes compared Alaska’s budget woes to a tug-of-war played out before a giant and divided crowd. She said the cut-the-budget team featured “a tall player with scissors in his pocket,” who “checks the tension on the rope as teammates, also carrying scissors, rotate to give a good, strong tug.”

Hughes, a member of the scissors squad, wants to create a new state office that would give marching orders to her, other legislators and the tall player.

It would be led by a mythical creature with more answers than the Wizard of Oz and more power than a Jedi plugged into the Force.

“We don’t need political responses. We need apolitical, unbiased answers,” says Hughes.

She might as well have said that we need a single pronunciation of tomato.

We operate in a political system in which any important question requires value judgements and compromises among competing interests. There are no apolitical, unbiased answers.

“What Alaska needs now is a state auditor who is independent and objective, neither beholden to the Legislature nor to the governor, but is accountable to the people,” said Hughes.

No, what Alaska needs now is a governor and 60 legislators.

Tall player, as well as all the smaller players, should forget about the General, the Wizard and the false hope of a bureaucratic miracle worker.

And by the way, the Legislature already has a Division of Legislative Audit, which has served an important function in Alaska government since 1955: “The Division of Legislative Audit serves as one of the Legislature’s most significant ‘checks’ in the balance of powers with the executive and judicial branches of government. The Division’s primary responsibility is to hold government agencies accountable to the laws enacted by the legislature,” its website says.

The Alaska Constitution established the audit office, to perform some of the tasks that Hughes and Dunleavy are talking about.

“The legislature shall appoint an auditor to serve at its pleasure. He shall be a certified public accountant. The Auditor shall conduct post-audits as prescribed by law and shall report to the legislature and to the governor,” the Constitution says.

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