One year later, Tshibaka's inflated savings claims from her state job remain unexamined

Kelly Tshibaka resigned from her state job without notice a year ago Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

She quit shortly after Sen. Dan Sullivan told a TV interviewer in Washington that he would support Sen. Lisa Murkowski if she ran for reelection and that “we make a good team for Alaska.” That was not what Tshibaka wanted to hear.

Tshibaka, who lived in Alaska as a child, spent her entire working career in Washington, D.C. She moved back to Alaska in 2019 when Gov. Mike Dunleavy hired her and created a new $139,000-per-year state job for her husband.

When Tshibaka resigned, she delivered an 11-page resignation letter to Gov. Mike Dunleavy in which she exaggerated how much she had saved the state during her time as administration commissioner.

As I wrote here a year ago, the wildest exaggeration in her resignation letter is her bold-faced claim at the start that the savings could be from $266.5 million to $399.2 million in “realized or potential financial results.”

From $189 million to $321 million of the alleged savings were “projected, documented, future potential cost savings,” meaning that the real number is anyone’s guess.

Tshibaka’s financial claims deserve real analysis as part of the coverage of her Senate campaign. In particular, Alaskans deserve to know whatever happened to the “Alaska Administrative Productivity and Excellence” project and whether the millions spent on that project were worth it.

Tshibaka’s excellence project remains on this state website, where a letter from Tshibaka is the only “news” item posted, so it’s not clear what the status of this effort is today.

The state procurement consolidation plan, part of the excellence project that Tshibaka included among her achievements a year ago, is hard to get a handle on.

The excellence report found that decentralized procurement “resulted in inefficiencies and operational issues.”

Shortly before Tshibaka left her state job in March 2021, she took part in a legislative hearing about the consolidation of procurement, which included this slide. It mentions transferring 44 procurement positions into the administration department in January 2021.

PCN means position control number and every state job has a unique PCN.

The goal of the procurement consolidation was to eliminate, through attrition, 15 to 25 procurement positions, as shown in the slide below. This slide was created by contractor Alvarez & Marsal, the company Tshibaka hired as part of the excellence project.

As to where this effort stands today, the Dunleavy administration said in February that 3 positions had been transferred, not 44, as shown on the slide below.

“That seems like kind of a low number,” Fairbanks Rep. Adam Wool said at a Feb. 3 budget session.

The state wants to try to “avoid big mistakes,” Thor Vue, chief procurement officer, replied. The process requires preparation and groundwork, he said. The state has to be sure that removing a position from a department does not leave a gap in state services.