Ghost State Troopers in Dunleavy budget won't add to public safety

Department of Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell told the Anchorage Daily News in December that urban areas that can afford to do so should help pay for Alaska State Trooper coverage.

“I think Mat-Su Borough, Fairbanks and Kenai Peninsula should pay us something. We’re providing services for, essentially for free, to areas of the state that could afford to pay for it,” Cockrell said.

The counter argument is that the state should kick in tens of millions more for public safety and draw on statewide revenue sources because the boroughs haven’t given themselves public safety powers and their residents oppose higher taxes.

But either way, something has to change to get the Alaska State Troopers up to speed.

“This state cannot continue to fund the troopers at the level they’re at and expect the services that we expect from our Troopers,” Cockrell told a finance subcommittee. “We’re burning them out just because of the amount of calls that they’re handling statewide and we’re not adequately covering rural Alaska.”

Cockrell figures they need 100 more officers statewide, which would probably mean $30 million added to the budget, a hard sell for all of the right-size-government faithful.

In 2021, the Troopers hired 41 new officers, while 41 officers retired, quit or were fired. There are about 43 vacancies right now.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, asked in December at a press conference if he agreed with Cockrell about getting boroughs to chip in for Trooper coverage, ducked the question.

“Well, that’s a discussion that the commissioner and I have to have,” candidate Dunleavy said.

“We’ll have discussions involving anything and everything that’s going to make sure that whatever we put in place is genuine, real and has outcomes.”

In other words, he won’t discuss Cockrell’s idea of getting urban areas to help pay for Trooper coverage.

But since he wants to be genuine, real and have outcomes, Dunleavy should start by discussing why he proposed adding 17 ghost positions to the Troopers without budgeting any money to pay them.

This allowed him to claim in press releases that 17 new positions are in his budget, including 10 Troopers for Palmer and Wasilla.

There are very few empty Trooper positions in Mat-Su now, but the caseload is a heavy one and they need help, Cockrell said.

“Most of the time we have three to five troopers patrolling that whole area,” Cockrell said. “And we’re burning our Troopers out. This is a way to protect our Troopers and keep them from leaving the department because the case load is too high.”

The Dunleavy plan is to hire the new Troopers and figure out later how to pay for them.

If Dunleavy is serious, put the money in the budget, which already includes big increases for many department functions and relies on $90 million in one-time-only federal money.

Dunleavy, who says he opposes “job-killing new taxes,” has not presented a sustainable plan, but a reelection plan.

In finance subcommittee meetings on the Department of Public Safety budget, Fairbanks Rep. Bart LeBon asked administration officials if they planned to hire the 17 new people with money already in the budget.

“Right now we have no funding attached to these positions,” deputy commissioner Leon Morgan said. It would take $5.1 million to make the positions real.

”We’ve been told that our ability or inability to fully hire our vacant positions has created some issues when we ask for more positions. So what we’re asking is to have the positions and then when we can prove up that we have filled these positions through our recruitment efforts we’ll come back for supplementals or another funding mechanism as determined by the Legislature.”

During the 2018 campaign, I wrote the following: ‘We need to hear from the candidates for governor and Legislature about the lack of Trooper coverage statewide, the abysmal traffic enforcement and what they plan to do about it. We also need to know how they plan to pay for it.”

The issues haven’t changed. We need to hear from the candidates about this in 2022.

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