Legislature needs to confront the corrupt process of the salary sham, instead of making excuses

If you haven’t done so already, please listen to the March 15 meeting of the new Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission, the meeting that followed the coup engineered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

It will only take 15 minutes.

The corrupt process employed by Dunleavy and some legislators to rig the salary commission results is a disgrace.

The five members, just appointed to the commission by Dunleavy, should be ashamed of themselves for taking part in this sham.

Miles Baker, Duff Mitchell, Larry LeDoux, Jomo Stewart and Donald Handeland went along with the Dunleavy subterfuge.

The new Dunleavy commission had no agenda, no documents for the public to review and no plan to follow the law that requires 20-day notice before meeting.

All they had was a secret and prearranged plan by Dunleavy’s three appointees—Baker, Mitchell and Handeland—to raise the pay of legislators by 67 percent, greasing the skids for Dunleavy and his top staff to also get pay raises.

LeDoux and Stewart—appointed by the Senate president and House speaker respectively—told the Anchorage Daily News they didn’t know that a plan had been cooked up in advance, but they voted for it anyway.

Handeland said two Dunleavy administration officials, including the key staff member for the commission, had told him before the meeting what the proposal would be—raising legislative pay to $84,000.

Mitchell told the Daily News the $84,000 idea came from legislators and he may have mentioned it when he was interviewed by Dunleavy’s office to be on the commission.

Baker and Mitchell, who led the $84,000 maneuver, were appointed to the commission on the day of the meeting. So were LeDoux and Stewart.

This week the Legislature refused to hold a special session to vote on overriding the action by Dunleavy, meaning that the pay raises are set to go forward as of now.

Dunleavy claims everything he did was legitimate. He’s wrong.

The only option left now is for legislators to come up with a new bill to reject the raises and clean up this mess. Three Democrats in the House minority already say they plan to do that, while Sens. Shelley Hughes and Robb Myers introduced a bill in the Senate, SB 111.

A bill to halt the salary commission fraud just might pass the House, but the Senate will try to kill it in committee. Too many senators are willing to accept Dunleavy’s corrupt process because they really want the pay raise. And they don’t want a vote as that could be used against them in the next campaign.

The Senate majority is in the wrong. Its members would rather that this all fade away. I don’t think it will.

(As I have written here, I think legislators should get a pay raise. But that end does not justify these means.)

It’s not a “flawed” or “clumsy” process, as those in the excuse business are claiming. It’s a corrupt process that should be condemned, not accepted as normal behavior.

Listen to the meeting below. I’ll have more to say about this in the days ahead.

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