Alaska state finance experts take a long, hard look at AIDEA and find it failing
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is doing a great job, has always done a great job and will always do a great job.
Just ask AIDEA. The agency can be counted on to make the same self-serving pitch to the Legislature and the public regardless of results.
The story has been the same for years because no one has done the independent examination necessary to confirm or contradict many of the claims made by the agency, which keeps a lot of its work out of public view..
But if reform is to happen let’s hope it begins with a new report by Milt Barker and Gregg Erickson that describes some of what has gone wrong and why. Their report paints a devastating portrait of AIDEA’s financial performance, where politics has almost always trumped economics.
In terms of getting trustworthy researchers with institutional knowledge and history of Alaska state government and state finances to carry out this work, it would be impossible to find a better pair of experts than Barker and Erickson. They know state government and how it works.
Alan Weitzner, the executive director of AIDEA, hasn’t been in Alaska that long and may not know their track record. He’s already made some foolish and inaccurate claims about the report and its authors.
If the claim reported by KTUU that he was blindsided by the report is accurate, Weitzner has no one to blame but himself. There’s a clear record going back more than a year of AIDEA officials having had the chance to review Erickson’s economic analysis and declined to do so.
This makes his claim to the Juneau Empire and KTUU that he would have welcomed collaboration impossible to believe.
Weitzner trotted out his own set of statistics and claimed to the Anchorage Daily News that AIDEA is doing a great job, has always done a great job and will always do a great job. No surprises there.
There will be a lot to say about this report, but I think the recommendation for independent audits to get a better handle on AIDEA’s situation is essential. So is the recommendation for the Legislature to follow the law and either provide AIDEA oversight or change the law to make sure there is no oversight.
AIDEA claims it already has audits and oversight, but those efforts deal only with the math questions, not with the essential policy questions about value to Alaskans that have not been addressed in the past four decades.
Among the recommendations in the Barker-Erickson report is a call for more analysis and information to better understand what AIDEA is doing with public money.
