Anchorage Assemblyman Felix Rivera has sent a letter to the Anchorage Ethics Board, requesting proceedings begin to remove Anchorage Equal Rights Commission member Rosalina Mavaega.
Rivera said he has lost confidence in her after a news report in the Anchorage Daily News indirectly showed that he and other members of the liberal Assembly gave Mavaega a $1.6 million grant, despite serious prior fraud allegations against Mavaega.
The money given by Rivera and other members of the Assembly to Mavaega was from American Rescue Plan Act. It was funding appropriated by the Assembly for the House of Transformations, a nonprofit that said it worked on helping people find housing and get addiction treatment.
Mavaega’s grant is one of many in the $50 million that the mayor’s office quickly handed out during the Covid pandemic.
This was not Mayor Dave Bronson’s office, however, although the way the ADN reporter wrote the story makes it an attack on Bronson.
The money was given out by the interim mayoral administration of Austin Quinn-Davidson, an Anchorage Democrat and Assembly member who stepped into the mayor’s role for eight months, unelected, after former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz resigned due to scandalous behavior. Bronson was not sworn in until July of 2021. It was the Assembly’s decision to give Mavaega the money.
The ADN report said, “the state of Alaska had permanently banned the founder of the nonprofit, Rosalina Mavaega, from serving as a Medicaid provider in 2015. The punishment resulted from a medical assistance fraud investigation and remains in effect. Mavaega’s husband, Esau Fualema, who is a co-founder of House of Transformations, separately pleaded no contest to criminally negligent homicide in 2008 and failed a background check to work at Mavaega’s prior company.”
What was unsaid by the newspaper is that the liberal Assembly and unelected mayor were rushing the funds out the door to make sure that Bronson would not have anything to say about the tens of millions of Covid slush money they had control of.
“Mavaega is a political supporter of embattled Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, though the grant she received came before he took office. Bronson later appointed her to serve on the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission, which is tasked with investigating allegations of discrimination, and to serve as the business representative on the city housing and homelessness committee,” the ADN wrote.
Bronson kept Mavaega on both city commissions even after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica started hounding him about her past issues with the state; he said he had no ability to unilaterally remove her.
The IRS is seeking information about city grants awarded to Mavaega and her affiliated businesses since 2021. One Anchorage business owner contacted by investigators said officials representing the Department of Treasury and the Small Business Administration asked for information about House of Transformations, “their business dealings” and bitcoin investments.
The problem with Rivera making his letter to the Ethic Board public is that by doing so, he has weaponized the ethics process, which is supposed to be kept quiet while it’s being looked into.
In fact, the form for complaints about ethics, shown above, even says that the information must be kept confidential. Often, ethics boards will dismiss complaints that appear politicized. But this is Anchorage, so it’s uncertain how the ethics will play out.
