Dunleavy hides details of $58 million plan to reorganize state government
There are 21 people on the state payroll employed as deputy commissioners.
Most state departments have one or two deputies. Even the health department, largest of state agencies, has only two deputies.
The one department with three deputies is administration—former legislator Dave Donley, longtime state official Amanda Holland and Paula Vrana.
The department would add a fourth deputy administration commissioner to the state payroll under the proposed budget by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka, the latter setting herself up to run for office in 2022.
The new deputy commissioner would be one of 20 new full-time employees in Tshibaka’s department. There are also plans for 8 new part-time workers.
The Dunleavy administration and Tshibaka have not explained their plan to reorganize state government, a $58.2 million project being carried out under the guise of the pandemic, but the proposed Fiscal Year 2022 budget has some clues. Missing from the documents released to the public is any sense of the big picture and the goals of the effort.
One part of the Tshibaka plan is to transfer about 45 procurement positions from other state departments to administration, according to a review of documents released with the Dunleavy budget.
Seventeen positions would be transferred from the contracting and property office to administration. Ten accounting technicians are to go from full-time to part-time work, while 10 vacant accounting technician positions will be changed to part-time jobs.
The department would add two research analysts in “data mining and analytics.” It plans to close the Division of Motor Vehicles offices in Eagle River, Tok, Valdez, Homer, Haines and Delta Junction, cutting six jobs.
Tshibaka’s department hid these closures in this document. It failed to mention the closures in this document, the one that features a written summary of its goals for the next fiscal year.
About a dozen administration jobs in lease and facilities administration are to be transferred to transportation. Meanwhile, about 100 jobs in the state Division of Public Assistance would be cut through telework and advancing technology, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
The reorganization efforts have received almost no news coverage or scrutiny. This Anchorage Daily News story is a start.
The fourth deputy administration commissioner is needed, according to Tshibaka’s department, “for improved oversight of the department and implementation of statewide centralization initiatives.”
In 2013, the department had two deputies, Mike Barnhill, now deputy commissioner in the revenue department, and Curtis Thayer, now head of the state energy authority. In 2019, there were still two positions, then held by Donley and Vrana, before Holland was moved into a new deputy position.
The state is shifting procurement into the administration department and promising great things, as summarized in these two sentences the department has inflicted on Alaskans—an insult to anyone who tries to communicate in English.
“Duplication of spend and the reduction of personnel resources allotted to duplicating comparable Requests for Proposals and solicitations will be minimized resulting in both hard and soft savings to the state’s holistic purchasing power to obtain best value for common supplies and services. OPPM will take a leadership role to leverage department spend and look for sources to meet the State’s need at the lowest cost coupled with the best services and/or supplies.”
Whoever wrote those lines should not be allowed near a keyboard.
The state is looking to permanently move people to telework, which is the first step toward outsourcing and privatizing many tasks so that they can be performed anywhere in the world, reducing the number of state employees in the process.
“Telework will be robust. By developing and maintaining a well-developed and strong telework infrastructure, in FY2022 departments can assess their use of space, determine how to reduce office use and determine if there are leases they can terminate as a result of telework,” the department says.
The state will claim, I expect, that my interpretation of the Dunleavy budget plan is flawed. It would help if the Dunleavy publicity department would explain the state reorganization plan to the public instead of hiding it with gibberish.
One final point. Tshibaka wants her department to launch a charm offensive with a new contract state employee who will be charged with communicating with Alaskans starting next month. The request for proposals fails to mention how much the communications specialist is going to cost.
The proposal should be stopped by Dunleavy in the interests of right-sized government.
Tshibaka has claimed she can cut the state budget by 50 percent, but hasn’t provided details. Perhaps she was just kidding when she made the statement this fall, explaining her opposition to the oil tax ballot measure.
“It wasn’t that long ago that our state operated on about half the budget it has now, for the same amount of population we have today. I think we can do that again,” Tshibaka said before the election.
Part of the job for her new PR person is to write talking points, press releases, deal with the public and “create a strategy for social media presence and develop DOA's brand.”
“The Department of Administration, Office of the Commissioner, is soliciting proposals for communications services to assist the commissioner’s office with the development of a communication strategy for messaging DOA’s goals and objectives,” the request for proposals says.
The contract would run for six months with a six-month renewal possible.
Instead of wasting an unknown sum on this contract, one or more members of the existing and high-paid Dunleavy publicity brigade should tell Alaskans what Tshibaka and Dunleavy have in mind as they reorganize state government with $58 million in federal COVID-19 bailout money.
The publicity brigade and the governor can start by telling the Legislature.