Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor reinserted himself into the debate over using public funds for private schools, almost two years after his wife announced plans for she and her husband to seek $8,000 in state funds to pay most of the cost of private school tuition for two of their children. He says his conflict of interest no longer exists, hinting that it is because his family is not longer seeking public funds to pay for private school tuition in Anchorage. Two years ago, his wife, Jodi Taylor, a right-wing activist and chair of the Alaska Policy Forum board, wrote: “My two youngest school ..read more

On Monday, the parents and teachers who won the landmark correspondence school case took a big step toward ending the immediate uncertainty over the future of the programs by asking the court for a limited stay. They asked that the ruling declaring the allotment law unconstitutional be delayed until June 30, the end of the state fiscal year, which would allow the school year to end without interruption, said Scott Kendall, the attorney for the plaintiffs. This would help parents who relied on the law as it was at the start of the school year, Kendall said. The Outside group called the Institut ..read more

An Anchorage Superior Court judge struck down a plan championed by Sen. Mike Dunleavy in 2014 to spend public money to benefit private schools, declaring it is clearly unconstitutional. The Alaska Constitution prohibits spending public money on private schools. Judge Adolf Zeman said there “is no workable way to construe the statutes to allow only constitutional spending and AS 14.03.300-310 must be struck down as unconstitutional in their entirety.” I wrote about Dunleavy’s push for a new charter school authorization plan that would lead to private school vouchers the other day. His voucher v ..read more

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority didn’t bother to read the three new reports by respected Alaska economists Gregg Erickson and Milt Barker before denouncing the documents as inaccurate. Legislators need to ask why the state-owned development bank is so quick to try to direct attention away from the poor financial returns and the opaque operations of AIDEA described in detail in the Erickson/Barker reports. "AIDEA has never produced even the simplest accounting of full-time-equivalent jobs that it claims to generate, let alone a rigorous economic analysis of its direct, in ..read more

In September 2022, Alaska economists Gregg Erickson and Milt Barker, two of the leading experts on the history of Alaska’s state government, did a financial analysis of the Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority. As I wrote at the time, their review paints a paints a devastating portrait of AIDEA’s financial performance, where politics has almost always trumped economics. In terms of getting trustworthy researchers with the institutional knowledge of state finances to carry out this work, it would be impossible to find a better pair of experts than Barker and Erickson. They know ..read more

Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, self-professed “data nerd,” has yet to correct her false claim on March 27 that 2,000 students are on waiting lists in Anchorage for charter schools. The real number is about 200. Include neighborhood schools and the number is about 350. The continuing refusal by Bishop and others to provide accurate data on charter schools is clearly intentional on the part of the Dunleavy administration, part of the campaign to divert more public education funds into private schools. For more than a decade as a legislator and governor, Dunleavy has wanted to create ..read more

There is one important lesson to draw from Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s demand to give his political allies on the state school board the power to create charter schools and override local school boards—this is his path to creating private school vouchers in Alaska. The Alaska Constitution bans the use of public money for private schools, but Dunleavy has long tried to circumvent that provision or amend it out of existence. In 2013, he proposed a constitutional amendment to allow private school vouchers and a bill that would set up a financial transfer that would accomplish the same thing under a diff ..read more

Despite unanimous public opposition, the Dunleavy administration adopted regulations in late 2023 to allow the governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor to get free legal help from the Department of Law when ethics violations are alleged. This is a new benefit, one that is denied to other state employees. Smart lawyers say it is unconstitutional and that the governor and AG Tregarrick Taylor do not have the power to give each other the gift of free legal help. Other state employees are expected to pay for their own defense in ethics cases and qualify for reimbursement from the state w ..read more

Donald Handeland, a young Republican engineer loyal to Gov. Mike Dunleavy, did not sign the recall petition, making him eligible for any number of positions within the Dunleavy administration. Handeland was a campaign volunteer for Dunleavy in 2018 and an assistant campaign treasurer on the Dunleavy 2022 campaign. A resident of Eagle River, he is a former treasurer of the Republican Party and a regular small donor to Republicans. Handeland, a 2011 Mount Edgecumbe graduate who is now a civil engineer, claims that he was a volunteer on the Ted Stevens campaign in 2002, the Frank Murkowski campai ..read more

None of the four Regulatory Commission of Alaska commissioners employed by the state attended an important hearing in Juneau on increasing funding levels for the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. Instead, two managers of the RCA were asked to make the case for more funding to the House Labor & Commerce Committee. Some or all of the RCA commissioners, who are full-time state employees making about $116,000 a year, should have been there. They are in charge of the agency, which regulates utilities and pipelines and approves rates. The work is highly complex. Here is the March 25 meeting the c ..read more