Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka is complaining about the excessive costs of making public documents available to the public, portraying it as an unreasonable burden on a public official.

She claims it costs the state more than $90 an hour to produce information, with a total bill regarding recent actions of her department running to many thousands of dollars in wasted state resources.

GOP thinker Suzanne Downing accompanies Tshibaka with the weeping and gnashing of teeth, producing a mournful screed about Rep. Zack Fields as well as retired state employee Barry Jackson and yours truly. Downing’s assertion of “death by a thousand records request” is wrong by nearly a thousand.

Tshibaka, already campaigning for the next election, would be better served to figure out a way to fulfill her responsibilities at a lower cost.

The costs she quotes are inflated and unreasonable. There is no justification for a make-work process at a time when computer searches can be conducted in seconds. Anyone who claims that she can cut the state budget in half, as Tshibaka does, can surely solve a simple problem like this one.

But it is the nature of the information that has come to light in public records requests that trigger her ire. The scattershot rendition about hours and thousands spent and the need to hire a temporary employee is an attempt to change the subject.

Tshibaka should be spending her time trying to make sure that the $50 million her department is spending as fast as possible in COVID-19 bailout money is put to good use and not wasted.

For smaller amounts, fiscal conservatism and accountability begins at home. There are ways the state can save money and still allow the public to have better access to public documents.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy ran for office on a fantasy plan of eliminating 2,000 funded but unfilled jobs, not on creating new state jobs.

But when Dunleavy hired Kelly Tshibaka in 2019, he also created a brand new job for her husband, Niki Tshibaka, as “assistant commissioner” in the education department, earning $139,000. Dunleavy never explained why the new position was essential.

And the state paid $81,277 to move the Tshibaka family to Alaska in 2019 from Washington, D.C. They spent $8,731 on lodging, $1,005 on meals and $71,541 on transportation. I’m certain that move could have been accomplished at a more reasonable price.

More recently, Tshibaka could have saved a few bucks before signing off on the $4.5 million Tandem Motion contract, paying a former barista $350 an hour, a total of $358,400 for six months.

Other recent graduates with limited experience were also getting $350 an hour under the Tshibaka plan.

The public records requests that Tshibaka finds onerous were the only means of bringing the Tandem Motion deal and others to public attention. Tshibaka steered the contract to Tandem Motion for reasons that have never been explained.

After Tshibaka claimed in a press release, printed word-for-word by many Alaska newspapers, that the former barista was a “former head of operations and HR for an international corporation (who also happens to enjoy staying connected with her hometown community by serving as a barista when she visits home,)” I reported here that the commissioner was wrong.

The young woman worked at a small company for five months this year as head of operations and HR and earned a master’s degree this year. She worked full-time as a barista from July 2018 to July 2019.

Not long after that blog post, Tandem Motion dropped the former barista from the payroll, directing the $350 an hour to someone else.

The Tandem Motion contract is one of several that Tshibaka’s department has executed, part of that $50 million project, tapping into a deep well of federal COVID-19 bailout money to reshape state government.

The $50 million in contracts deserve more attention than public records requests that could be dealt with in a far more cost-efficient manner instead of inventing excuses to keep more secrets.

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