Dunleavy administration repeatedly extended expired statehood defense contract, violating procurement law

There are at least a half-dozen major legal deficiencies with one of the statehood defense contracts the Dunleavy administration has with Holland & Hart LLP, a contract under which former legislator Drue Pearce collected $450 an hour.

Last week I wrote about the $2 million contract the state has with Holland & Hart to handle legal issues for the Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority.

The state invited the company to claim that the per hour rate paid to former Gov. Sean Parnell and others was a trade secret. The law firm has yet to take up the state on its illegal offer, but the state redacted the information from the document released to me.

The Dunleavy administration has another contract with Holland & Hart for statehood defense, this one for “strategy advice concerning public policy and litigations related to state’s rights and natural resource extraction.”

This no-bid contract was approved February 2, 2022 for $50,000 under a portion of the procurement laws that allows no-bid contracts of up to $50,000.

Former Sen. Drue Pearce, the government affairs director for the company, was hired at $450 an hour. Partner Kyle Parker was hired at $680 an hour. I don’t know why the trade secret claim was not made about those amounts.

The $50,000 contract with Holland & Hart expired on June 30, 2022. That should have been the end of it.

Amendment No. 1 was to extend the contract to December 30, 2022. But Amendment 1 was not signed until January 12, 2023. This was after the extension period was over.

Barry Jackson, a retired state employee who worked in state procurement for decades, looked at this contract and others at my request.

He said that once the contract expired on June 30, 2022, it could not be renewed.

“The contract was expired and invalid both before and after Amendment 1 was signed,” Jackson said. “Further, the contractor did not date its signature so it is unknown when the contractor signed faulty Amendment 1.”

Amendment 2 to the contract entered the picture sometime later to give $20,000 more to Holland & Hart and extend the contract to April 30, 2023. The contract had expired the previous June so it could not be extended.

We don’t know when Amendment 2 came about because neither the state nor the contractor signed Amendment 2, “making the amendment legally ineffective, even if Amendment 1 had been legally effective, which it wasn’t,” Jackson said.

That brings us to Amendment 3, signed by both parties April 25, 2023 to increase the total contract to $100,000 and extend it to August 31, 2023.

Amendment 3 was legally invalid because Amendment 1 and Amendment 2 were legally invalid.

A big part of defending our rights as a state is making sure that the attorney general’s office follows the law.

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