:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/adn/HUZJITNB2NHFDA74ASXCAW47FQ.jpeg)
Let’s face a dismal fact: There are enough dumb ideas — incontrovertibly dumb ideas — roaming loose in Alaska government to give any normal person heebie-jeebies, and those dumb ideas blossom in secrecy.
The latest such brainstorm is detailed in an Alaska Beacon story reprinted in the Anchorage Daily News, headlined: “Alaska Permanent Fund leaders consider seeking exemption from open-government law.”
Such an exemption would be breathtakingly bad. Why? The Permanent Fund’s ins and outs remain a mystery to most Alaskans; its financial announcements just so much button-down gobbledygook. Oh, there are little dabs of information on the fund’s website and we are told how it is doing and the dividend amount this year, but not much else.
Little generally is known about the real nuts and bolts, the hedge funds involved or their attendant costs or who really is steering the boat. We do not know who is spending how much or even much about the trustees’ ill-fated investments plan in Alaska. We know little about who makes the real money from the fund, the unseen fingers in the pie.
The public knows far less about the machinations of the Permanent Fund Corp. or its governor-appointed six-member Board of Trustees — which chugs along with no legislative oversight — than it really should. That is frightening. After all, paraphrasing bank robber Willie Sutton, that’s where the money is.
The state-owned fund, established by voters in a 1976 state constitutional amendment, was at least partially — and understandably — aimed at protecting Alaska’s oil wealth from spend-crazy politicians. It was to help pay for government when the gush of North Slope oil revenue dried up. Nowadays, the fund — its corpus still untouchable — has grown to $74.9 billion and oil revenue has slowed to a dribble. Its Earnings Reserve Account, which can be spent by the Legislature, underwrites more than half the state’s general fund revenue and also pays for the annual Permanent Fund dividend for every Alaskan.
After enduring a few tough investment years and rapacious, higher-than-expected inflation, the corporation’s top brass are looking to boost the fund to $100 billion in a bid to generate more earnings reserve income to feed an ever-growing appetite for state spending and fat dividends. The problem? The Earnings Reserve Account is drying up because the fund is earning less than what is being transferred to the state treasury to run government.
Well, by golly, what could make the task of bulking up the fund easier? What would give trustees more flexibility? Some trustees apparently believe supporting legislation exempting the board from the pesky Alaska Public Meetings Act that requires advance public notice when multiple board members huddle up might just do the trick. Add to that an additional exemption from the state’s procurement code and shielding personnel records from public scrutiny, and life could get easier.
At least that is how Jason Brune sees it. He is a former Alaska Department of Environmental commissioner tapped in August by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to fill one of four public seats on the Board of Trustees. An exemption would facilitate those “‘fast-moving discussions and decisions’ on investments …,” he is quoted in the Beacon article as saying.
Not everybody, thankfully, feels that way. Trustee and former board chairman Craig Richards and board chairman Ethan Schutt reportedly oppose the idea, saying, correctly, the board’s credibility would be on the line. None of this, sadly, is groundbreaking. The Legislature in 1994 exempted itself from the Open Meetings Act. The state Supreme Court already had ruled courts could not enforce the act on lawmakers because of the constitutional separation of powers. The body also is exempt from some aspects of the state’s procurement code.
Having no legal requirement to involve the public makes life easier for bureaucrats, but it is lousy public policy that undermines trust and confidence in government, something we can ill afford nowadays.
Mind you, this is not the Board of Trustees’ first dumb idea. The notion of opening its first satellite office in Anchorage for a handful of workers on the thinnest of justifications, a move that carries a hefty price tag, has been yakked about for years. It is well underway, despite touching off a regional political firestorm.
Perhaps the Permanent Fund Board of Trustees could busy itself attending to the fund in these trying financial times that find Alaska’s nest egg losing value rather than wasting effort and resources on office space in Anchorage — and working to keep the public at bay. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 1936 case, Grosjean v. Am. Press Co., said this: “An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.” It was true then; it is true now.
Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.
The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.