Dunleavy fills important state positions from small band of cronies, even giving a $136,000 job to someone who didn't ask for work

If you are a crony of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, he’ll give you a state job without asking.

Consider the case of crony Mike Porcaro, the Dunleavy ad man and right-wing radio gabber who received a $136,000 state job without ever applying, Nat Herz reports in the Northern Journal.

Pocaro’s only qualification—obeisance to Dunleavy. That and not having your name on the Dunleavy recall petition is all that it takes to get a state job from Dunleavy.

Like Dunleavy, Porcaro claims to be in favor of eliminating government bloat.

Porcaro will be free to set his own hours and keep doing what he is doing now—talking on the radio and selling advertising, Herz said.

He will only get paid for the hours he works, fellow Commissioner Glenn Haight told the Northern Journal.

But the job is a salaried position, not an hourly position, so I don’t see how that is legitimate.

If Dunleavy believes that it is not a fulltime position and not a salaried position, he should have taken formal action to change it.

Porcarco has no fishing experience and is not qualified to be a commissioner on the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission.

The law says that a commissioner must have a “broad range of professional experience.”

He seems to want to be thanked for his service, according to what he told Herz.

“All I’m doing is trying to answer a call of service and I’m going to do the best job I can,” Porcaro told Herz. “Judge me on my performance.”

Let’s look on Porcarco’s performance and judge him on that. He has long complained about big government and the need to shrink government. He supports big budget cuts.

"Basically what I'm hearing from people is, 'Show me the cuts first'," Porcaro told the Wall Street Journal in 2015, complaining about plans for a state income tax.

Dunleavy spent state money over the last couple of years attacking legislators, promoting his ideas about the Permanent Fund and selling his campaign theme of bigger dividends. Two years ago the governor’s office directed $549,000 to Porcaro’s company in three separate deals for ads.

Porcarco has also collected from Dunleavy’s campaign and from the shadow campaign financed by Dunleavy’s rich brother Francis and Bob Penney in 2018.

In 2019, Porcaro promoted a stunt trying to get people to buy red 100 red pens and send them to the governor’s office to encourage Dunleavy to veto big chunks of state spending.

Porcarco doesn’t belong in this job and Dunleavy had no business appointing him. The Legislature should refuse to confirm him, but that can’t happen until next year. Porcaro was appointed Aug. 8 with no announcement from Dunleavy.

Here is a link to the 2022 annual report of the commission.

Nowhere within those pages is any hint that the ideal commisioner is someone with no fishing experience.

The work of the commission is to help “conserve and maintain the economic health of Alaska’s commercial fisheries by limiting the number of participating fishers. The Commission issues permits and vessel licenses to qualified individuals in both limited and unlimited fisheries, and provides due process hearings and appeal processes for disputes related to limitations on fishery participation.”

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