Dunleavy hires MacKinnon for tasks already assigned to revenue commissioner

Any fan of shrinking the big government footprint can tell that the new state job created by the Dunleavy administration for former Sen. Anna MacKinnon is a make-work position that the state doesn’t need.

Because a job shouldn’t exist if the state can’t explain how the newly hired employee is going to occupy her working hours.

“Deputy Commissioner Mike Barnhill said they’re looking for projects that fit her areas of expertise — likely in the treasury and tax divisions,” Alaska’s Energy Desk reported on MacKinnon’s ill-defined role in the revenue department.

While Barnhill looks, MacKinnon is to be paid $135,168, a little less than her husband, John MacKinnon, makes as commissioner of the transportation department.

She is being called a “special assistant,” but she is being about what a deputy commissioner would get, an unauthorized position. To be a real special assistant, she should be paid about $35,000 less.

What’s worse is that the one task the state has found for her to do is already the responsibility of another state employee—Revenue Commissioner Lucinda Mahoney.

Barnhill said MacKinnon will be a board member of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. That’s not quite correct.

Under state law, MacKinnon’s boss, the revenue commissioner, serves as a board member of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and the Alaska Energy Authority. The AIDEA board is the same as the AEA board.

The law says if the commissioner “is unable to attend a meeting of the authority, the commissioner may, by an instrument in writing filed with the authority, designate a deputy or assistant to act in the commissioner’s place as a member at the meeting.”

The law names the revenue and commerce commissioners as board members, except when they have to miss a meeting. It doesn’t envision them missing each and every meeting.

Over the years, the state has ignored the spirit and letter of the law, allowing commissioners to designate a deputy or assistant to attend every meeting, instead of just those that the bosses miss.

If it is true that Mahoney can never attend AIDEA and AEA meetings, Barnhill should be assigned to act in her place. There is no need to swell the government payroll by hiring MacKinnon to handle this task.

When she left the Legislature in 2018, MacKinnon said she wanted to spend more time with her family.

Two weeks before the election of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, she wrote a press release in Alaska newspapers that seemed like a job application for herself or her husband. It was also a plea for smaller government.

MacKinnon wrote that Dunleavy was realistic about state finances and she complained about “super-sized government.”

“Mike Dunleavy and I had the same vision about the need to reduce spending to a sustainable level,” she said. “The governor and the Legislature must work together to deliver a more efficient and smaller government.”

“Call me naive, but I don't think it's ‘unrealistic’ to fight for a government that spends less and taxes as the last option,'“ she said.

She’s not naive. She’s just the latest in a long line of cut-the-budget appointees to the Dunleavy administration who say one thing and do another.

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