Permanent Fund trustees ignore public comments opposing plan to borrow billions

Largely ignoring the substance of the public comments they received on a proposed strategic plan, the six-member Permanent Fund board of trustees pushed ahead with a proposal promoting the idea of borrowing billions to make more billions.

They did scale back the size of the proposal, however.

Still, the Legislature is unlikely to approve the revised goal adopted as part of the Permanent Fund strategic plan. The scaled-back version would allow the corporation to borrow up to $4 billion if and when it decides the time is right to put that money at risk.

The trustees had proposed asking for the ability to borrow 5 percent or 10 percent of the value of the fund—which would be upwards of $8 billion with the current value of the fund.

Here is the press release from the corporation about the latest actions by the trustees.

Here are the 64 pages of public comments the corporation received on its plan. A lot of the comments are good ones and contain information and observations that should be part of a statewide public discussion.

The detailed strategic plan received little press coverage and the corporation did not do much to publicize the process.

I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks ahead.

The strategic plan does not recognize what I believe is the great challenge facing the Permanent Fund—modernizing the management structure so that it is not controlled by one person, the governor.

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