Permanent Fund wants to perform job evaluation of CEO by putting nothing in writing

The trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund want the annual evaluation of the fund’s executive director to be conducted in an executive session with nothing in writing.

The idea is to avoid creating a paper trail that would become a public document. There will be no written negative remarks about the executive director or written negative remarks by the trustees or the staff, the trustees informally agreed in a Nov. 29 committee meeting.

Executive director Deven Mitchell will be able to write a positive statement about his performance, a document that will be a public record, while the trustees would reserve all critical remarks—if there are any—for a secret meeting.

Craig Richards, Ethan Schutt, Adam Crum, Jason Brune and Gabrielle Rubenstein gave tentative approval to this plan. The only trustee missing was Ryan Anderson, the transportation commissioner. The plan will be up for an official vote at a meeting Dec. 13-14.

After the trustees fired former Executive Director Angela Rodell two years ago this week, the Department of Law concluded that the personnel files of people in such positions are public documents under state law.

The personnel files of some top state officials in the category of “exempt” employees are public records, the Department of Law concluded in early 2022. Disclosure would be decided on a case-by-case basis.

This means that the personnel records of many of the leading figures in the Dunleavy administration are public records. As far as I know, Alaska news organizations have not requested the release of documents for top state officials.

All of the employees of the Permanent Fund are exempt employees. Under this case-by-case approach, some of their personnel files would be public under current law.

Personnel files of state employees who are not exempt employees are confidential.

Rodell’s 296-page personnel file was released to the public two years ago. The trustees hired her in 2015 and bestowed merit pay increases in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. They fired her in 2021, claiming that despite the merit raises, they had problems with her performance.

The release of Rodell’s personnel file was embarrassing to the trustees who had fired her.

To keep future personnel evaluations from becoming public, either the state law has to change or the Permanent Fund can revise its practices.

In the Nov. 29 committee meeting, Trustee Jason Brune said Gov. Mike Dunleavy won’t introduce a bill to change the law for exempt employees because this issue is not deemed important enough by the governor’s office. Trustee Gabrielle Rubenstein had asked Brune to comment on his discussion with a Dunleavy employee about how the governor would not oppose the bill if someone else led the charge.

Chris Poag, the Permanent Fund attorney, said there is a “chilling effect” that comes with public disclosure of personnel records that may “cause the board members to not want to memorialize those comments in a public writing.”

Executive Director and CEO Deven Mitchell said a consultant and board members concluded that the possibility of public disclosure “inhibits the ability of the board to provide constructive feedback and review to the executive director position and there should be attempts to fix that.”

He said one way to do this is to have no written report and to do it all by talking in executive session, with no records. The job review would not be written down.

It would be “a verbal process that the board would have in executive session in which they would have a conversation with the executive director and provide feedback verbally that then would be the basis of the annual review process.”

The trustees want the Dunleavy administration and the Legislature to change state law to specifically make the personnel files of exempt employees secret.

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