Time to abolish State Officers Compensation Commission

The Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission is to meet Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Anchorage.

Where is Elon Musk when you need to identify the most useless body in state government?

It’s time to put this commission out of its misery.

The only thing that should emerge from the meeting is a recommendation that the Legislature abolish the Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission in early 2025.

The information about participating in the Wednesday meeting is below. The state has published no agenda, so it’s not clear if the commission will be open to public testimony on why it ought to be abolished.

If the compensation commission ever served a valuable public policy function, that moment ended with the shabby commission actions that took place on March 15, 2023.

In the minutes of the only meeting that has been held since then, on November 14 this year, Commissioner Larry LeDoux “explained that he was uncomfortable with how they quickly made pay raises at the last meeting and the Commission agreed that the process should be open and transparent.”

LeDoux’s second guessing was one year and eight months too late. The process was not open and transparent. It was a con job, engineered by Dunleavy with the assistance of legislators.

The commission, created by a state law to allow legislators to avoid having to vote for pay raises for themselves, is supposed to “review the salaries, benefits and allowances of members of the legislature, the governor, the lieutenant governor, and each principal executive department head.”

The law is set up so that raises approved by the commission automatically go into effect unless a new law is enacted to overturn the commission’s decision. Because of that high hurdle, it’s not a typical advisory board, but one of the most powerful groups in state government.

In March 2023, Dunleavy got rid of the old salary commission members because the group refused to endorse pay raises for legislators, only for top executive branch officials, which guaranteed the 2023 Legislature would kill the raises Dunleavy wanted for himself and his staff.

Dunleavy lined up new salary commission members and pushed a prearranged plan for a 67 percent raise for legislators and a 20 percent boost for key executive branch personnel.

The new commission approved the plan with no real debate and a unanimous vote, violating a law that requires 20-day public notice of commission meetings. The raises went into effect.

No one is ever going to take this compensation commission seriously again. With good reason.

Let’s review what happened.

At 1:58 p.m. on Monday, March 13, 2023, the Dunleavy administration posted a public notice online that the state salary commission would meet two days later in the Atwood Building.

The next day, March 14, 2023, Gov. Mike Dunleavy sent letters to Larry Persily and two other members of the commission—Carrigan Grigsby and Arnye Randall—to say he was firing them from their volunteer positions.

Two other members of the commission, those aligned with Dunleavy, quit. Former Rep. Kurt Olson resigned on March 13, while commissioner Lee Cruise, who had worked on the Dunleavy campaign, had to leave the commission earlier in the month because he was given a state job.

During his time on the commission, Cruise had claimed that legislative pay should be reduced, not raised. This made him the chief roadblock to a pay raise for Dunleavy and the heads of state agencies. The roadblock was removed when Cruise became a state employee for Dunleavy.

On March 10, Dunleavy appointed Republican activist Donald Handeland, another co-treasurer of the Dunleavy campaign, to replace Cruise.

Dunleavy appointed four other brand new members—Duff Mitchell, Miles Baker, Larry LeDoux and Jomo Stewart—to the commission on March 15, the same day they were to meet and decide on pay raises.

LeDoux’s name had been offered from a list presented by Senate President Gary Stevens, while Stewart’s name came from a list presented to Dunleavy by House Speaker Cathy Tilton. Mitchell, Baker and Handeland were Dunleavy’s picks.

The group of five met for the first and only time on March 15.

Dunleavy opposed the commission report submitted to the Legislature January 24, 2023, a document that said there should be no raises for legislators, only for the governor and the agency heads.

The commission’s refusal to back a salary increase for legislators led the Legislature to unanimously reject the January 2023 commission report—meaning no raises for the governor or his top staff or the Legislature.

Dunleavy responded by doing away with the message and the messenger. He subverted the process in state law to overturn the commission’s action.

Dunleavy had five new commission members who met for 15 minutes and signed off on raises all around.

Legislative salaries rose to $84,000 per year, which is half as much as the new higher pay for leaders of state agencies—$168,000. Legislators also qualified for about $37,000 in per diem payments for the regular session.

After the new commission members exchanged introductions at their only meeting, they elected new commissioner Handeland as chair—with no debate. The only discussion before the vote was the comment by Handeland, “Yeah, I’d be honored to serve.”

The first order of business was to try to make the meeting legal.

“Is there a motion to waive the ratification notice?” Handeland asked.

He meant notification.

New commissioner Duff Mitchell spoke up: “Mr. Chairman, I move that we ratify the commission, that the commission has waived the 20-day notice to the commission members in AS 39.23.500 (c).”

New commissioner Miles Baker, a former Dunleavy employee, seconded the motion. There was no discussion. The new commissioners voted 5-0 to waive the 20-day public notice requirement, never explaining to the public why the law had not been followed.

Kate Sheehan, the state director of personnel and labor relations, claimed that by attending the meeting, the five new members had automatically legalized the meeting

There is no provision in AS 39.23.500 that allows a waiver of the 20-day notice requirement, which is as much a safeguard for the public as well as for the commission members.

While there was no agenda for the meeting, Handeland announced “there is an understanding that a member” is going to propose raising legislative salaries to $84,000.

New commissioner Handeland had met Sheehan and a Department of Law employee earlier in the day and was told to expect a motion from another new commissioner to set pay rates for legislators at $84,000, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

It was Mitchell, managing director at Juneau Hydropower, who made the motion in the 15-minute meeting to raise salaries to $84,000.

In short, there was a prearranged plan among Dunleavy’s three appointees—Baker, Mitchell and Handeland—to raise the pay of legislators by 67 percent to $84,000, greasing the skids for Dunleavy and his top staff to also get pay raises.

LeDoux and Stewart—nominated by the Senate president and House speaker respectively—told the Anchorage Daily News they didn’t know that a plan had been cooked up in advance, but they voted for it anyway.

Dunleavy rewarded Handeland with a seat on the State Personnel Board, arbiter of state ethics for the executive branch. The Legislature confirmed his appointment.

Earlier this year, I predicted in this space that the story of how legislators and the governor engineered big pay raises for themselves would be a 2024 campaign issue. I was wrong. It didn’t come up at all. I also said that I agreed with the idea of raises for legislators, but it should never have been done this way.

Legislators and the governor avoided an open and transparent discussion about how the public process was subverted in 2023 to get pay raises, but the issue will not go away. The State Officers Compensation Commission, which has no credibility, can do the right thing and recommend that it be terminated.

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