Quick release of Rodell's personnel file deserves examination by lawmakers

The Permanent Fund Corporation board of trustees fired Angela Rodell Dec. 9.

On Dec. 13 at 2:50 p.m. , James Brooks of the Anchorage Daily News emailed a public records request to the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. for a copy of Rodell’s personnel file.

Brooks did this as a normal part of the news-gathering process.

But the Dunleavy administration did not handle this request in the normal manner.

I want to applaud the Dunleavy administration for disclosing the information under the timeline set out in state regulation—20 working days.

Instead of looking for excuses to delay a response for months, as often happens, the Dunleavy administration acted quickly, an indication that a political decision had been made to get Rodell’s personnel file into public circulation as soon as possible.

The speed and attention given to this by the attorney general’s office and the disclosure that the governor’s office knew in advance that the personnel file would be released Jan. 12. are prime topics for investigation by the Legislative Budget & Audit committee regarding the political aspects of Rodell’s firing.

The committee needs to find out if the Dunleavy administration and Craig Richards, chair of the trustees and a leading opponent of Rodell, agreed on a quick-release strategy to get anonymous comments made by Richards and other board members—quoted in Rodell’s evaluations—into the public arena as soon as possible.

On Jan. 5, one of the assistant attorneys general assigned to the case, Benjamin Hofmeister, wrote to Rodell’s attorney to say that the personnel file would be released on Jan. 12, “under the timelines set out in the Public Records Act . . .”

I wouldn’t be writing about this if the state made it common practice to follow the timelines set out in the regulations for the Public Records Act, especially when controversial information is involved. But bureaucratic delays are standard practice.

Hofmeister wrote to Rodell’s attorney that the Permanent Fund Corporation “recognizes the timelines mandated by the Public Records Act are less than ideal.”

The timelines may be “less than ideal,” but following them is rarely a priority.

On Monday Jan. 10, Rodell attributed her firing to “political retribution,” as she had opposed overdrawing the fund by $3 billion, the course pushed by Dunleavy, Revenue Commissioner Lucinda Mahoney and other members of the administration.

On Tuesday Jan. 11, the Anchorage Daily News quoted Jeff Turner, Dunleavy spokesman, as saying that Rodell’s personnel file would be released the following day despite Rodell’s objections.

So either the attorney general’s office let Dunleavy’s office know about the decision in advance or the governor’s office was involved in the strategy all along, knowing it would give Richards material to attack Rodell. The latter is a more likely explanation of what happened.

By Wednesday Jan. 12, the day the personnel file was released to the Anchorage Daily News, Richards had already incorporated the file into his public statements against Rodell.

He wrote, “the performance evaluations within the personnel file will indicate, as you would expect, with any employee, areas where the board believed there was room for improvement by Ms. Rodell in her role as executive director. Throughout the years, discussions with Ms. Rodell around these points were held in executive session as provided for in the Open Meetings Act.”

On Jan. 13, Richards wrote to Sen. Natasha von Imhof to defend the firing, again referring to the personnel file released a day earlier.

“Some facts related to the executive director’s separation of employment nonetheless are public pursuant to requests made by the press and this committee under a different law, the Public Records Act,” Richards said. “Ms. Rodell’s performance reviews fall into this category of disclosable information. Those reviews illuminate some of the board’s long-standing concerns regarding Ms. Rodell’s continued role as executive director.”

The personnel file is not as persuasive as Rodell’s critics believe. It has a mix of positive and negative comments from employees and not all board members participated in the opinion surveys. It’s not clear if the same anonymous board members are quoted multiple times or who collected these comments.

It would be helpful for the board members to identify their comments and end the confusion.

The Dunleavy administration took steps to release the file quickly to the Daily News and other organizations. I suspect it was grounded in trying and failing to make a political case against Rodell, not in a desire to adhere to the timelines in state regulations.

At a Jan. 17 hearing before the LB&A committee, Richards said he did not know who authorized the release of Rodell’s personnel file and didn’t agree with its distribution, but that the law required it. But he said he wanted to thank those who went over the document and give “kudos to everyone involved because this is a lot of work to get done in 20 days.”

Asked by von Imhof how Turner, the spokesman for Dunleavy, knew in advance the exact date the personnel file would be released, Richards said he did not know who Turner is and he had no idea how he found out in advance.

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