Dunleavy ducks challenge of leadership by calling for conversation

The latest press release from the office of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, published in the Anchorage Daily News, carried the headline, “Time for a conversation about the Alaska we want.”

The plea to parley is a delaying tactic and an attempt to transfer the entire budget blame game to the Legislature, while trying to defang the recall movement. The political strategy is to try to set things up so that Dunleavy doesn’t have to make difficult decisions. He’ll leave that to the Legislature.

Our state Constitution established the governor’s voice to be as strong as any chief executive in the United States. The Legislature, by comparison, features 60 competing vocalists. As an institution, the Legislature is far less equipped to lead the way out of difficult circumstances. The system won’t work when the governor is AWOL.

A more accurate headline for the Daily News, requiring a more accurate press release, would be “No more time for Dunleavy to dither.”

Last February, Dunleavy announced that he was going to cut the state budget by hundreds of millions, but don’t worry—he would have lots of conversation.

“We have to preserve our savings. We have to recalibrate Alaska. We have to get back our essential services and we have to have a robust discussion – which I’m looking forward to – as to what are our needs and what are our wants? What are the needs that impact the majority of Alaskans? And how do we want to pay for this moving forward? This is going to be the discussion over the next several months. I look forward to it. I believe Alaskans look forward to it. I look forward to working with the Legislature on this issue. But it has to be fixed this year. My administration is determined to fix this issue this year,” Dunleavy said last year.

The Dunleavy/Koch Network gab sessions that followed did much to cement opposition to Dunleavy’s approach. With the recall movement rolling at full strength in late summer, Dunleavy claimed that his rule-by-veto regime was all about starting a conversation.

"You don't get to this point unless you veto," Dunleavy said Aug. 13 after he reversed some of his vetoes. “You don’t get the conversations that we’ve had . . . unless you veto.”

The 2020 plan for palaver will never lead to a miraculous moment when Alaskans speak with a unified voice about state services, taxes, the Permanent Fund Dividend or anything else.

We will reach the end of the 90-day or 120-day session and there will be differences of opinion. And Dunleavy will be calling for conversation.

When Dunleavy ran for governor in 2018, he peddled a fiscal fantasy that had no connection to reality, promising easy solutions to the budget challenge, such as cutting $200 million worth of imaginary unfilled state jobs that he claimed to have discovered.

His budget a year ago was a fiscal fantasy of a different sort, one that the public opposed and a majority of the Legislature rejected twice. Now he is on the third edition of the fiscal fantasy tour.

The proposed budget he introduced last month would exhaust all state savings except for the Permanent Fund by the fall of 2021.

Dunleavy doesn’t want to propose cutting more state services or cutting the size of the dividend. He doesn’t want to talk about taxes. He doesn’t want to lead, which makes the job of the 2020 Legislature impossible.

While Dunleavy converses, the Legislature will fight over the limited options that Alaskans have been debating for years. The solutions are obvious: hold down the budget, reduce the dividend, limit withdrawals from the Permanent Fund and raise taxes. All will be unpopular to some degree.

But the backlash will be much greater in time if the governor tries to save his administration by stalling. He is on track now to become famous for sending Alaska off the fiscal cliff, calling all the while for conversation.

Whoever wrote the press release for Dunleavy included this sentence: “The upcoming year represents the final time we can rely on budget reserves to make ends meet, meaning hard decisions must be made.”

Only the last six words are true. The “final time” has already passed. The Legislature realizes that emptying the Constitutional Budget Reserve, as proposed by Dunleavy, would be irresponsible.

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