Thoughts on Alaska Oil & Gas

Last year (2012), on the afternoon of July 27, I had a meeting at my request with UAA Chancellor Tom Case, primarily to discuss the recent hiring of then-UAA Women’s Basketball Coach Nate Altenhofen.

The University had announced the hiring of Altenhofen in late May, as the successor to highly successful Coach Tim Moser.

During the intervening two months I had come to develop deep concerns about Altenhofen based on his prior record and discussions with others Outside involved in women’s basketball.  As politely stated as I can, Altenhofen had developed a reputation of becoming involved with his players and staff in inappropriate ways, not something you want especially in a women’s basketball coach.  He had left his prior position as an assistant at Indiana University amidst rumors after only a year there, and had been out of college basketball entirely (i.e., no one would take a chance on him) in the year preceding his hiring by UAA. Continue reading →

Two seemingly unrelated events came together this past week to bring the emerging condition of Alaska social policy into stark relief.

The first event occurred Monday, with the release by the federal Energy Information Agency (EIA) of its most recent Short Term Energy Outlook (STEO).  Published monthly, the STEO is a look at the year ahead based on the then-best information.    In my experience, Continue reading →

At one point in college I took a writing class. (I know what the readers of this blog are thinking at this point, “he should have taken more!!” But that’s not the point of this piece.)

The professor had a particular point of view that he hammered in class after class. Writing, particularly fiction but also sometimes non-fiction writing, he argued, is really about conveying “subtext.” The story on the surface is never the real story; the real story is always in the “subtext.” Continue reading →

Yesterday afternoon I understand an Alaska Republican Party official used a meeting I regularly attend — but did not yesterday — to go negative about me.

Not that he was very creative in doing so.  Claiming to have done “opposition research,” he appears simply to have duplicated the same script that already had been offered about a month ago to Amanda Coyne, probably the best of Alaska’s political columnists.

Here was her response: Continue reading →

Click on graph to enlarge.

Let me be absolutely crystal clear about one thing.  The budgets which Sean Parnell has proposed, the legislature has passed and Sean Parnell has signed over the last three years, combined with what he has said on the record about the budgets he intends to propose over the next five years are leading inevitably to one thing:  statewide income or sales taxes, if not both, and use for government spending of a portion of the earnings of the Permanent Fund.  Period, end of sentence.

As far back as 2011, the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) had this to say about Alaska’s fiscal future:
Continue reading →

Yesterday I had a discussion about Alaska fiscal policy that brought into the open something that I only had heard murmured about before.  It epitomizes the warped thinking that underlies recent Alaska budgets and explains why this generation of Alaska budget-makers increasingly is likely to be viewed as among the worst in the state’s history by those that will follow, beginning as soon as ten years from now.

The discussion was around the justification for the out-of-control spending Continue reading →