Dunleavy and Legislature stage salary commission coup to give themselves big pay raises

The Alaska Salary Commission coup, engineered by Gov, Mike Dunleavy and legislative leaders, is a prime example of political cowardice from both branches.

The brand new members of the commission met for the first time this week and unanimously approved a pay raise for the governor and his top appointees and legislators without any work. They ignored a rule that requires giving the public 20-days notice of a meeting.

The pay raises will automatically take effect unless the Alaska Legislature rejects the plan, which was obviously worked out in advance and in secret.

As of today, no member of the Legislature has introduced a bill to overturn the big pay raises.

Anchorage Daily News reporters Sean Maguire and Iris Samuels have good coverage of this debacle.

Senate President Gary Stevens told the newspaper he didn’t know about the coup and the idea to adopt a new plan with new commissioners in 15 minutes. He only knew that Dunleavy told him a change was in the works.

“He said, ‘I’m gonna do something about that.’ And he did. But I had nothing to do with what happened,” Stevens told the Daily News.

I expect more from Stevens. He needs to get a bill to overturn this mess on the floor of the Senate right away.

Dunleavy, legislators and the new members of the salary commission combined to subvert the public process.

One of the unanswered questions is exactly how and why one of the former commissioners—Lee Cruise—the man mainly responsible for the failure of the former commission, was rewarded with a new state job last week in the revenue department.

Cruise was an employee of the Dunleavy reelection campaign last year. He is now a “policy analyst” for the state, occupying a position that didn’t need to be filled.

Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum should be required to explain the hiring of Cruise before the Legislature considers whether Crum deserves to be confirmed as revenue commissioner. Crum also needs to be held accountable for the food stamp fiasco in Alaska, which I have written about here.

By giving a state job to Cruise, he was automatically removed from the commission. This allowed Dunleavy to replace Cruise without firing him.

Cruise, a Republican Party activist, has a bachelor’s degree in business from UAA, which he finished in 2016, and a master’s in finance from APU, which he completed in 2020. Cruise and his new boss, Crum, were among 31 deputy treasurers for the Dunleavy campaign.

In 2019, Dunleay named Cruise to the Alaska Royalty Oil and Gas Development Board.

In a 2021 meeting of the salary commission, Cruise complained about legislators and said they should get paid less.

“What I’m saying is we do not need these people to live well, we need them to live. The general public lives, they don’t live well,” he said.

Dunleavy appointed Cruise to the commission in 2020. Cruise said in 2021 he wanted to cut pay for legislators to punish them for “ineffective behavior.”

The Legislature should get to work today on reversing the salary commission coup.

I believe that legislators deserve a raise. Likewise, we need to raise the salaries of the governor, lieutenant governor and cabinet members. But this is the wrong way to do it.

Dunleavy and legislative leaders need to come clean and do this out in the open, not with a backdoor plan in which every elected official can play Pontius Pilate and wash their hands of responsibility.

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