Only 3 Juneau employees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. said in a survey that within the next two years they would like to move to Anchorage, which is all the evidence needed to stop the plan by the fund to open a branch office in Anchorage in vacant floors of a state-leased building.

The corporation posted an odd five-sentence press release Thursday, the third on this topic this year. The latest one is best read as a bureaucratic edict from the trustees attempting to end all debate, while setting up a few employees in space already leased to the Department of Environmental Conservation. The office is to open “as soon as possible to support the retention and recruitment of professional staff.”

There are vacant floors the state is leasing for DEC in Anchorage at 555 Cordova St., said DEC Commissioner Jason Brune, one of two commissioners on the trustees. He said the permanent fund is welcome to use the space.

Brune said the office space is empty because he has put an emphasis on telework, meaning that employees don’t have to be in the Anchorage office and many can work anywhere in the state. He didn’t say why his department hasn’t taken steps to stop leasing excess office space.

“A stopgap measure until you find the official location here. I’ve got floors that are vacant in my building,” said Brune in July. Brune has since announced he is resigning from DEC, which means he is resigning from the APFC trustees. He has been a trustee for a year.

The Permanent Fund trustees are embarrassing themselves with the claim that the excess DEC rooms in Anchorage will be a recruiting advantage for attracting top-flight investment employees. The trustees are adding to the embarrassment by claiming the new Anchorage office is “free.”

The Anchorage trustees picked by Gov. Mike Dunleavy—Jason Brune, Adam Crum, Ethan Schutt, Steve Reiger, Gabrielle Rubenstein and Craig Richards—are also contributing to the false notion that everything and anything important to Alaska has to be in Anchorage.

The Anchorage trustees will never say they want the entire corporation moved to Anchorage. They will say they want a tiny Anchorage branch office for recruitment purposes only.

But if you believe that you will also believe the absurd claim from Ethan Schutt, chair of the Anchorage trustees, that opening a new office will not cost anything because the new office will be in space leased by DEC.

“The net cost to the state of Alaska will be zero,” Schutt told the Alaska Beacon.

“Using a rough estimate, Schutt said about 5% of current employees — the corporation is authorized for 66 — could switch from Juneau to Anchorage if offered the chance,” the Beacon said.

Three employees. When you have a tiny number, using a percentage makes it sound more significant than it is.

Schutt told the Juneau Empire in June he had no public position on the move, but “a couple of trustees feel strongly about this.”

That would be Craig Richards and Gabrielle Rubenstein.

The campaign by Richards to have an Anchorage office was one of the flash points that led to the firing of former executive director Angela Rodell in 2021. Richards remains angry that the APFC staff didn’t cooperate with him and he said he wants to make sure “that the proper fire’s lit under the donkey.”

Disagreement over this issue may be a factor in why Mike Barnhill, who was named chief operating officer of the fund in the spring, is already out. The Alaska Beacon reported that he resigned.

Barnhill is still listed, as of this writing, on the APFC staff, and it’s not clear if he walked away or was fired.

Barnhill presented a detailed report on the costs and issues related to the Anchorage move at the fund’s July meeting that trustees who want an office in Anchorage did not like.

Richards, the former attorney general under Gov. Bill Walker who was reborn as a Dunleavy cheerleader, had been the most aggressive in pushing for the Anchorage expansion.

He’s been joined in that campaign by Gabrielle Rubenstein, the daughter of billionaire David Rubenstein and Alice Rogoff, who has only been on the board for a year, but is insisting on a move to Anchorage. In a July meeting, she claimed that the professional staff has ignored the board’s orders and “I truly felt the pain of Craig more than I ever knew of . . . “

On multiple occasions, Richards has claimed that having an Anchorage office would make it easier for the corporation to hire employees. Richards, Rubenstein and Brune all repeated that claim at the July meeting.

There is a “self-selected bias in your current staff” about working in Juneau, Richards told Barnhill, in that employees were “willing to move to Juneau in the first place.”

“So of course they’re going to have an anchoring there,” said Richards.

Brune said corporation officials “may be biased toward someone who’s located in Juneau already, versus someone who’s not.”

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that you continue to get people down in Juneau and more and more people are going to want to keep more folks in Juneau,” he said.

Richards clashed with Rodell on opening an Anchorage office early during his tenure on the board. He claimed that Rodell manipulated the numbers and exaggerated the costs of the Anchorage move.

There was no evidence that Richards was correct with that claim, the attorneys who investigated Rodell’s firing wrote in a legislative report.

The investigators said that no other trustee believed Richards’s allegation, which was that Rodell went “out of her way to make it look a little more expensive and throw a little cold water on it.” Rodell said she asked fund employees to prepare a cost analysis and passed the numbers onto the trustees without changing them.

Rodell said in a deposition that she thought it would be a waste of money to have two offices in Alaska and that if a second office would be started it should be in a financial center where the fund actually makes investments, such as New York, Chicago or Toronto. But she said she did not interfere with the analysis presented to the trustees.

Rodell, not Richards, presented the more logical argument about putting an additional office in a major financial center Outside, not Anchorage, given the specialized nature of the fund’s operations.

The corporation has about five dozen employees, all based in Juneau, where it has operated since its creation more than 40 years ago.

The corporation is reviewing proposed long-term policies to allow employees to work remotely, another reason that an Anchorage office is not what the fund needs. What prospective employees want is flexibility, not the “flexibility” that comes from having to work in Anchorage.

As I wrote here in June, before spending any money or staff time on this effort, the trustees should have asked lawmakers for approval and justified the expense.

There is no evidence that putting a few staff members in Anchorage and creating a new space for the Anchorage trustees to meet in Anchorage would improve operations. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that this would make the fund less efficient and less cohesive.

Rubenstein said she knows of applicants who would have taken APFC jobs had they been in Anchorage. Rubenstein hasn’t been around very long and is no expert on the history and operation of the institution or on Alaska politics.

I repeat what I wrote here in June: Given the range of challenges facing the permanent fund, the trustees should focus on improving electronic communications statewide instead of resurrecting an old idea of planting an Anchorage office.

The trustees should cancel the plan to expand its bureaucracy to Anchorage as there is no clear strategy on the number of employees to move, the cost of relocation, the potential for remote work, the conditions under which trips to Juneau would be required and how all this is supposed to better serve Alaskans.

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