Hint to Permanent Fund trustees: Open Meetings Act should not be a joke

Juneau Sen. Jesse Kiehl is one of the few legislators paying close attention to what is happening with the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation.

“I’ve been very concerned with a real interest in secrecy. I think that decision about the second office appeared to have been taken between board meetings. There was open discussion of having an out-of-state meeting to avoid the Open Meetings Act,” Kiehl said Friday at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Permanent Fund.

“It’s a public fund, right? This isn’t this generation’s money. It’s our kids’ and our grandkids’ and their kids’ money. So there’s great concern about an apparent desire to reduce the transparency at the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation,” Kiehl said.

He’s right. There has been too much talk about the alleged burden of operating in public.
The trustees, probably acting with the backing of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, secretly demanded that the staff immediately announce plans to open an Anchorage office last summer. That micromanagement led to the resignation of the chief operations officer.

The discussion about the trustees meeting Outside to avoid the Open Meetings Act happened at a meeting December 13 in Juneau.

I think that trustee Jason Brune, who is obsessed with the alleged difficulties created by the Open Meetings Act, was joking when he mentioned that the trustees could meet in San Francisco and evade the law.

That Brune thinks this is a joking matter bothers me. He doesn’t understand the need for transparency and what’s at stake here.

The December discussion dealt with the upcoming Callan national conference in San Francisco in April, and using that as a potential Outside meeting site.

Brune was asking for reasons why the trustees should attend the conference and what they could get out of it.

“I mean obviously we’d love to have a board meeting there not subjected to the Alaska Open Meetings Act,” Brune said, pausing for effect and scattered laughter, “because it wouldn’t fall under Alaska law.”

There were some comments about whether the Open Meetings Act would apply.

At the Senate Finance meeting Friday, after Kiehl mentioned the out-of-state meeting jabber, Ethan Schutt, chairman of the trustees, suggested it might have been a joke.

There won’t be meetings Outside, he said. And there won’t be attempts to evade the Open Meetings Act.

“We’re not going to do that as long as I’m the chair,” said Schutt.

The antiquated structure of the state law establishing the trustees—six members all chosen by the governor with no confirmation vote by the Legislature required and no specific qualifications—is a deficiency that must be corrected by the Legislature.

Dunleavy placed Brune on the trustees when he was commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, though Brune wasn’t particularly qualified for this task. The law requires the governor to put two commissioners on the trustees, one of them the revenue commissioner.

There have often been times when the governor’s cabinet does not include people with the expertise and judgement to set policy for handling tens of billions. The problem has come up before and it will come up again until the Legislature gives us a better model.

Brune quit his state job last summer, meaning he no longer had a place on the Permanent Fund board.

Dunleavy, who did not search for candidates with strong backgrounds in finance to fill another vacant Permanent Fund seat, wasted no time in appointing Brune to one of the four so-called “public” seats on the board.

If the law required legislative confirmation of Permanent Fund trustees, Brune’s repeated complaints about the Open Meetings Act and his joke about meeting Outside to avoid the law would be something he would have to try to defend in public. He would face real opposition.

Instead, we are left with a trustee, appointed to serve four more years, who is fixated on complaining about a law that encourages transparency for the most important financial institution in Alaska.

We are long overdue for a process to select trustees for the Alaska Permanent Fund that is thorough, competitive and transparent, with specific qualifications for membership. What we have now is a process in which the governor rewards his friends.

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