The Senate Resources Committee has set a confirmation hearing for radio talk show host and adman Mike Porcaro Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. Porcaro, who has no experience in fisheries, was granted a state job as a fisheries commissioner on the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Porcaro, who is in his mid 70s, has said he did not ask for the $136,000-a-year job, and that he would continue to run his business and do his talk show while working full time for the state. “And the first question that people ask is ‘Well you don’t know anything about fish.’ Well, apparently that’s ..read more

“Bach's Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was brought by Princess Daazhraii Johnson,” says Yo-Yo Ma, who traveled to Fairbanks last summer. KUAC had this coverage at the time ..read more

The contradictions and hypocrisy of the Dunleavy administration on charter schools are embodied in the political statements and opinions of Alaska Airlines pilot Bob Griffin, the longtime Dunleavy ally who is up for legislative confirmation for a second five-year term on the state school board. Griffin claims he supports local control of charter schools by locally elected school boards. “Local control is paramount,” he said about charter schools during a confirmation hearing April 17. Then he contradicted himself by supporting the Dunleavy vision to give the state school board the power to cre ..read more

The Alaska attorney general and his wife were involved in changing the policy of a former Anchorage charter school to pay for private school tuition in ways that haven’t been fully disclosed or examined. Attorney general Tregarrick Taylor’s recusal on May 21, 2022 from the topic occurred many months after the Taylor lobbying campaign began. When Taylor recused himself, he created the impression that a column his wife had posted on May 16, 2022 was the first sign of her active engagement in pushing for public funds to be spent on private schools. But on September 13, 2021, Jodi Taylor was one o ..read more

When Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor said that an outside attorney has cleared him of any potential conflict of interest in the landmark private school funding case, he refused to provide details, claiming those are secrets under the attorney-client privilege. He did say that “the situation with my kids schooling has changed significantly.” Perhaps the most significant change in the past two years is that that the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School that his family planned to get $8,000 from no longer exists. And public money from the Anchorage School District is no longer available ..read more

Alaska school districts did not call it a voucher system for private schools, but that’s what some of them have created, using a system that a state judge has declared unconstitutional. Few of the districts have spelled out the working details so clearly as the CyberLynx Homeschool & Correspondence Program based in Nenana and largely state funded. It had about 1,500 students statewide in 2022-2023, according to the Alaska Policy Forum, which promotes using state funds for private tuition. The school provides a $2,700 allotment for every student. In a staff memo two years ago, after the wif ..read more

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