Legislature needs to start oversight of Permanent Fund

The legislative response to the firing of Angela Rodell by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. trustees has been nearly unanimous: Why?

The trustees, on a 5-1 vote, removed Rodell Thursday without giving a clue that anything was amiss. This leads to natural suspicion that it was a poltical takedown engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and trustees Craig Richards, Lucinda Mahoney and Corri Feige.

Richards worked on Dunleavy’s legal fight to stop the recall, while Mahoney and Feige are employees of the governor. They were among the co-hosts of a Dunleavy campaign event this fall.

Of the other trustees, Ethan Schutt and Steve Reiger voted to remove Rodell, while Bill Moran opposed the firing.

The letter below from Kodiak Sen. Gary Stevens and Dillingham Rep. Bryce Edgmon to Richards deserves a response.

Richards et al. will stonewall this request and say it is a private matter.

Legislators should take this as a reminder that they have an oversight function that they are not performing. It’s about time they started.

Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson is considering a bill to change the way trustees are appointed so that they are not all appointed by the governor. The entire law about governing the fund needs a fresh look because the firing of Rodell has all the signs of political interference and legislators have ignored the corporation for many years.

The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee is charged with oversight of the fund, but it has done little in that regard. State law requires an annual “operational and performance evaluation of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation investments and investment programs.”

The committee website library contains no documents that I can find evaluating the operation and performance of the corporation.

If this annual report by the committee is taking place at all, where is it? There appears to be no effort at oversight, which is something that Anchorage Sen. Natasha Von Imhof, chair of the committee, should set about correcting.

Von Imhof said she wants to hear from the trustees about Rodell’s firing.

“What direction do the trustees want to take the fund?” von Imhof told KTOO. “And I think Alaskans should be given answers to these questions, particularly for such a high-profile position. And to me, it’s just so curious, especially given the tremendous performance of the fund under Ms. Rodell’s leadership.”