Nothing in Angela Rodell's state personnel file justified her termination

I’ve gone through Angela Rodell’s state personnel file, all 296 pages of it.

There is nothing in it that paints her as a candidate for termination.

On the contrary, the Alaska Permanent Fund board of trustees hired her in 2015 and bestowed merit pay increases in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.

In 2021, the trustees fired her.

While there are some negative comments in the evaluations contained in the file, there are also positive remarks by some permanent fund employees portraying her as the boss of the year.

Rodell believes her termination last month was political retribution by the Dunleavy administration. No information has come to light to suggest she is wrong.

Even the letter by board chair Craig Richards makes her case stronger. Richards is the former attorney general under Bill Walker who resurfaced as an ally of Dunleavy, pushing losing legal arguments about the Dunleavy recall and now promoting Dunleavy’s reelection campaign.

Richards, probably assisted by the legal staff of the permanent fund, successfully filled five-and-a-half pages on this issue without conveying any real information about Rodell’s departure.

The Richards letter, bloated with platitudinous blather, claims that Rodell’s firing “was not based on political or other outside considerations.”

He didn’t mention the Dunleavy plan to withdraw an extra $3 billion from the fund to disguise future deficits. There is no reason to believe that political and financial discipline would triumph after the $3 billion is gone.

Rodell’s termination was a product of the politics of the Dunleavy administration and her refusal to support the excess withdrawals from the fund championed by the governor and his revenue commissioner, trustee Lucinda Mahoney.

Richards claimed Rodell’s “termination was the result of preexisting concerns raised in prior performance reviews.”

If that is so, the trustees should explain why they thought so highly of Rodell that they gave her merit raises in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Either Richards and his fellow trustees acted incompetently in 2017-2020 in rewarding Rodell or they acted incompetently in 2021 in firing her. The Legislature needs to address this at the Monday hearing of the Legislative Budget & Audit Committee at 2 p.m.

The evaluation the trustees made of Rodell and the grade they assigned her is suspect because only four of the six members participated in the survey.

Mahoney wrote on Dec. 7 that “I don’t know who responded and who didn't.. . .” As one of the six trustees, Mahoney certainly knew if Mahoney responded.

The weighted averages of the board member responses were also skewed because some members answered some questions with “not applicable.”

“Therefore the voice of the few that did respond carried more weight,” Mahoney said, which makes the statistical claims put forward by the trustees regarding Rodell’s evaluation worthless.

The faulty weighted average for Rodell from the board was 2.6, about midway between “meets some expectations” and “meets most expectations.” Among Rodell’s lowest scores from the four trustees who responded were those on questions about internal management, which Mahoney admitted were “somewhat skewed.”

This slipshod work by Mahoney is hardly a professional or defensible presentation upon which to base the firing or evaluation of any state employee.

Rodell started in October 2015 at the fund. In the letter offering her the job , Chairman Bill Moran said her performance would be evaluated based on these five items.

She had worked as an investment banker, a state revenue commissioner and a consultant, starting her career in 1990 as finance director of the Kentucky Housing Corp. She has a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Kentucky.

The comments provided by staff members and trustees in her file combine high praise and condemnation.

“I admire Angela’s ability to think on her feet. I see this frequently in interviews or legislative committee meetings where she may not know what question she’ll be asked. She’s always able to maintain decorum and provide thoughtful responses. She allows staff to make mistakes and learn from them. I’ve observed her grace and forgiveness when I’ve made mistakes that didn’t cause personal or irreversible loss in the organization but were embarrassing for me,” one person wrote.

“She allowed me to work through those situations and encouraged me to keep trying or politely suggested alternative ways I could get to solutions. I appreciate here knowledge of trends around political, social and economic development. She is well informed and smart as a whip.”

On the other hand, there is this: “On most topics CEO exhibits poor judgement, so that is the most challenging aspect of problem solving abilities.”

There is nothing in her personnel file about her 2021 evaluation that warranted an immediate dismissal.

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