Union seeks court order to release $1 million buried state salary study
I’m glad to see the Alaska State Employees Association is taking on the Dunleavy administration for burying a state salary study purchased with nearly $1 million in state money.
ASEA filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Anchorage calling for an injunction and immediate release of the study, which will reveal how much state pay has to be adjusted to become competitive with other employers in Alaska.
The union charges in its lawsuit that the study, finished last June, found a majority of state salaries are “misaligned,” meaning they vary by 10 to 15 percent or more from the traditional benchmark.
Segal, the study contractor, consumed the $775,000 provided in its contract last summer, but the governor’s staff concealed the results and invented one excuse after another to block public access to the research.
Worst of all, the Dunleavy administration secretly established a new lower benchmark for setting the pay of many state workers and secretly extended the contract so that the final report is not due until the end of June, which will be long after money for state contracts has been appropriated.
Unhappy with the findings of the study, the Dunleavy administration added $175,000 to the contract to revise the results—pushing the total to $950,000.
The Dunleavy administration still claims on a state website that its policy is to set salaries at the 65th percentile, meaning 35 percent of employers pay more than the state.
But the state secretly ordered the contractor—after its report was finished last summer—to revise the work it had done and set salaries at the 50 percentile for many employees. Lowering the benchmark would lower the cost and widen the gap between state workers and other employees.
This deception, for that is what it is, goes against the letter and spirit of the state law requiring government transparency.
Dunleavy and Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor will claim that the state has a right to hide this information under executive privilege. But the record is clear that they are abusing the privilege. They are trying to cover their tracks with executive gibberish.
The lawsuit contains important information that adds to what I wrote about this on previous occasions, starting November 29.
“When a third-party consultant (like Segal here) is engaged to conduct an independent review of state salaries, the state—by definition—has no discretion or opportunity to deliberate on the outcomes of what is intended to be an independent study or review,” the lawsuit charges.
“Disclosure of the salary study that was completed in June 2024, as well as all communications, notes and documents associated with the department’s attempt to modify the salary study, is in the public interest.”
It is clearly of interest also to the 8,000 employees represented by ASEA and thousands of others who deserve pay rates that are in keeping with other major employers in Alaska.
On Sunday, I wrote of my belief that the governor’s staff has chosen to stall on this because the study probably reveals that the state is not paying enough to thousands of employees to be competitive. A competent governor trying to improve state services would figure out ways to raise money to pay them what they deserve. But that’s not what we have in Dunleavy.
Dunleavy has not included any real money in his proposed budget for higher wages, an irresponsible document that comes with no plans for new revenue and a growing deficit of $1.5 billion or more.
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