Statehood defense spending nowhere to be found in state online checkbook
The state is dutiful about reporting certain expenses on its online checkbook, such as the $600,000 or so paid to Gorilla Fireworks LLC for right of way condemnation and relocation in the latter months of 2023.
But nearly every statehood defense industry contract is missing from the online database.
“Vendors and grantees to whom non-confidential payments were issued are provided in the reports,” the Division of Finance says about what the state chooses to release.
The payments to the consultants in the multi-million-dollar statehood defense industry should be posted for public review along with bills for travel, office equipment, meals and everything else the state spends money on.
Of the millions in statehood defense industry contracts, the only ones posted online are two relatively small contracts managed by the Department of Natural Resources,
The rest are missing, including the $12,000-a-month contract with statehood defense coordinator Craig Richards, and the contracts with Consovoy McCarthy, the Virginia law firm that represented the state in two recent losses before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The state online checkbook is overdue for improvement under a 2022 law sponsored by Sen. Bill Wielechowski and approved unanimously by the Legislature.
The law requiring the posting of state spending details says, “The Alaska Online Checkbook Act shall be construed in favor of disclosure and transparency.”
The goal is to create a site that allows a member of the public to “understand all state financial information and that allows a member of the public to view all state financial information in a centralized location.”
The existing site does not come close to that goal. And it’s not just the spending of state spending via state-owned corporations that is missing.
In response to questions from Wielechowski about why the new state financial disclosure website has not been implemented, the acting director of the Division of Finance says the state will have a new and improved website with far more information available later this year.
HALFWAY HOUSE: Schaeffer Cox, convicted of several serious crimes in 2012, has been released from federal prison and is in a halfway house somewhere, according to a December 15 blog post attributed to him on a pro-Cox website.
He continues to blame others for his legal problems and claims that “after what was done to Trump, everyone knows the FBI and DOJ are totally corrupt.” After getting to an airport, Cox wrote, he was “stunned by how soft and docile all the men were. They just sort of tottered around totally unaware of their surroundings, wide open and vulnerable to any danger that might come along.”
Cox is still rehashing his case in court before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
PERCEIVED SHIFT: Education Commissioner Deena Bishop can’t admit that she suddenly changed her position on increasing the base student allocation for Alaska schools after joining the Dunleavy administration and adopting the governor’s point of view. She refers, in a state press release, to people asking about her “perceived shift,” but no amount of political wordplay will disguise her reversal between September and December.
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