Dunleavy’s 'Office of Food Security’ exists in name only
A couple of months before the 2022 election, Gov. Mike Dunleavy stood in a field to record a state-funded campaign video announcing the new “Office of Food Security.”
He recited a long list of duties for the new office, which was to be led by Andrew Jensen, an employee in the governor’s publicity department and a “volunteer” on Dunleavy’s campaign.
“The Office of Food Security will unify this effort in pursuit of short-term, mid-term and long-term goals that will build a resilient food supply system in Alaska once and for all,” Dunleavy said, issuing this administrative order Sept. 16.
“The Office of Food Security is but one step, but an important one, in putting the full resources of the state of Alaska behind this effort,” Dunleavy said. “I’m looking forward to continuing the work we’ve already started and working with all Alaskans to turn this vision into reality.”
It’s not clear what the governor’s Office of Food Security has done since last September. It is an exaggeration to call whatever it is an “office.” It exists only on paper, using “existing personnel and monetary resources,” Dunleavy’s order said.
The office has no phone number, website, budget, employees, email address, physical address or office that I can find. There is no Office of Food Security listed in the state list of offices. There is no contact information for the imaginary office. There is no mention of it on the Division of Agriculture website or Facebook page.
A Dunleavy task force recently finished this 228-page report on food security, which is the kind of report that would appear on the Alaska Office of Food Security website if it had one.
There has been little from the Dunleavy publicity offices about the Office of Food Security other than the announcement last fall saying the office had been created and the claim in December that “the Governor’s Office of Food Security” somehow transferred $1 million from the fish and game department to the natural resources department to subsidize livestock feed purchases. The governor’s office has that authority, not the ghost office created last fall.
Three weeks before the September announcement, Dunleavy signed a bill approved by the Legislature creating the “Alaska Food Strategy Task Force,” which is supposed to have nearly three dozen members.
As of right now, the task force has one member, former Dunleavy aide Brandon Brefcynski, deputy director of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.
No one has been appointed by Dunleavy to 14 vacant positions on the Alaska Food Strategy Task Force. The law creating the task force called for an executive board of 9 members that will select 21 members from a variety of occupations. In addition, six leaders of state agencies are to serve.
The Alaska Food Strategy Task Force has a long list of duties that it is supposed to deal with as soon as it exists.
One of its big jobs is to follow up on the work of a separate 22-member task force announced by Dunleavy on Feb. 9, 2022 to deal with food security.
The new Food Strategy Task Force is to “continue the efforts of and review and, when applicable, implement the recommendations of the Alaska Food Security and Independence Task Force established by Administrative Order No. 331.”
Dunleavy appointed members to the older Alaska Food Security and Independence Task Force on April 26, 2022.
The group finished its final report in March, a 228-page tome that contains a smorgasbord of ideas, almost all of them difficult to accomplish. Here are the group’s recommendations. There are a lot of good ideas in the report. As I wrote last year about the group’s first draft, the members of the task force seemed to have a good grasp of the complexity of the problems.
The Dunleavy administration failed to announce or publicize the completion of the Alaska Food Security and Independence Task Force Report, which is strange, given the big deal Dunleavy made about this topic before the election.
The first group was asked “for recommendations on how to increase all types of food production and harvesting in Alaska, and to identify any statutory or regulatory barriers preventing our state from achieving greater food security.”
That’s easier said than done. We have yet to see a plan from the governor, who loves appointing task forces—he created one Thursday on child care, following others on energy, marijuana, etc.—about how to produce results.
Turning the happy talk of making Alaska “self-sufficient” into reality will require a sustained and difficult effort of the sort that Dunleavy has never made during his first four years as governor. All the task forces in the world are no substitute for executive leadership.
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