Mayor Dave Bronson announced that Chief Fiscal Officer Grant Yutrzenka submitted his resignation. Yutrzenka’s last day with the Municipality will be May 19th.
Yutrzenka served in an acting and official CFO capacity since September 2022 when Bronson appointed him to the role. Yutrzenka previously served the Municipality as the Assistant General Manager and Chief Financial Officer for the Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility.
“I have enjoyed my time as CFO and thank Mayor Bronson for his confidence in me,” said Mr. Yutrzenka. “I look forward to spending more time with my family and enjoying the great outdoors this summer.”
“Grant’s leadership skills and strong financial mind will be sorely missed in City Hall. I wish him nothing but the best going forward,” Bronson said.
The search for a replacement CFO has begun. Yutrzenka has committed to helping find a replacement and will work with the new CFO through the transition phase.
Blackrock, one of the leading investment firms pushing the climate change agenda and social goals over investment responsibilities, wants to control America’s utilities.
Alaska’s Attorney General Treg Taylor and 16 other state attorneys general filed a motion on Wednesday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, pushing back on Blackrock.
The top state law offices say that Blackrock has adopted environmental, social, and governance policies, also known as ESGs, and the company is not a passive investor.
“Maybe BlackRock was a passive investor 10 years ago, but today it’s an environmental activist,” the motion says. “Indeed, BlackRock’s own public commitments belie its representations to the commission. Pursuant to its membership in several horizontal associations, BlackRock aims to pressure or force utility companies to phase out traditional energy investment.”
Under the Federal Power Act, a public utility holding company seeking to acquire more than $10 million in voting securities in another utility must secure authorization from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Large investment management companies like BlackRock may request advance “blanket authorizations” from the commission. If the commission finds the transaction is consistent with the public interest in light of competition, rates, and regulation, it may approve a blanket authorization.
The attorneys joining Taylor in opposing blanket authorization for BlackRock explain that the company has strong ties with Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, activist groups fighting climate change through investment strategies.
Cofounder of BlackRock, Larry Fink, started focusing on Environmental, Social, Governance investment strategies after a fishing trip to Alaska in 2019. He and friends flew to a wilderness lodge on Lake Iliana, and discovered that the area was filled with smoke due to wildfires on the tundra in Siberia. That’s when he decided to focus on woke investing, where activist shareholders try to force companies to follow some climate goal strategy.
The pushback from the state attorneys general comes at a time when Anchorage residents are facing a takeover of their power company, Chugach Electric Association, by the Alaska Center for the Environment, which has been making moves to take over the boards of directors of Alaska’s independent power companies in order to shut down the use of natural gas.
Last year, and again this year Taylor joined coalitions in filing opposition to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about a proposed rule requiring retirement investment fund managerslack to consider “Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)” factors when making investment decisions.
The proposed rule, called “Enhanced Disclosures by Certain Investment Advisers and Investment Companies about Environmental, Social and Governance Investment Practices,” is an effort by the SEC to transform itself from the federal regulator of securities into a “regulator of social ills,” the coalition said.
No sooner had the Alaska Legislature voted to not confirm Bethany Marcum as a regent for the University of Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy turned around and reappointed her to the Alaska Redistricting Board.
Marcum had resigned from the redistricting board when she was named to the Board of Regents last year. She was a regent until a legislative confirmation or denial. The liberal majority of the Alaska Senate voted against her and swung the vote of a joint session on Tuesday, and she was officially off the Board of Regents.
Marcum served on the Alaska Redistricting Board during the 2021-2022 redistricting process. That’s the political process for redrawing the House and Senate political lines after every U.S. Census. Some legislators who spoke against her in the joint session of the Legislature on Tuesday said her work on the redistricting board played a big factor in their decision.
Marcum recognized that the job was to draw lines fairly for districts, but in the end the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Democrats, who accused Marcum of trying to swing districts toward Republican voters. It was the justices themselves who gerrymandered Alaska to favor the party that has only half of the registered voters that the Republican Party has.
The board is set to meet on Monday at 1 pm to go over the justices’ decisions, and to deliberate whether there is a route to push back on the judicial activism, as well as to determine the settlement amounts to the Democrat stakeholders who sued the board successfully, with the help of the Alaska Supreme Court’s liberal makeup. The board meets at the Anchorage Legislative Information Offices on Benson Blvd. at Minnesota Drive.
Marcum is the executive director of the conservative policy think tank Alaska Policy Forum.
Will Witt, the editor and publisher of The Florida Standard, is the keynote speaker for two Alaska Family Council spring dinner fundraisers this week. Thursday, he appears in Fairbanks, and Saturday he’ll be in Anchorage (where the event is sold out). Tickets are here.
Witt is a legendary figure in the new conservative media landscape. Already, he is a national bestselling author, international speaker, and a highly acclaimed digital influencer. He gained recognition in 2018 through his engaging online videos, in which he approached people on the street in “Man on the Street” interviews in collaboration with PragerU, and asked everyday Americans thoughtful questions about their core beliefs.
Witt was not confrontational in his approach in the street interview project, but combined his own brand of irony, political comedy, cultural insights, and made the interviews into short documentaries. His videos have amassed 700 million views.
He has been featured at Fox News, The New York Times, Newsmax, Daily Wire, One America News Network, The Blaze, and numerous other news platforms.
The Thursday night event is at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge in Fairbanks, and Saturday’s event in Anchorage, which has just sold out, will be held at Cornerstone Church.
Alaska is America’s Saudi Arabia when it comes to bountiful energy resources, but thanks to Biden’s anti- drilling and anti-mining policies, energy production in the state is way down.
And because more than two-thirds of the state’s tax revenues come from the oil and gas industry, revenues are down and the state is facing an enormous budget deficit. Now this red state is considering the worst possible fix: enacting one of the biggest tax increases ever seen in Juneau.
Remember, this is a state that has been so overflowing with oil and gas revenues that each year it pays a “dividend” check of several thousand dollars to each Alaska resident.
The tax increases under discussion include a new income tax, a new sales tax and a 40 percent rise in the fees charged to oil and gas producers. Somehow, the political class seems to think that Alaska can tax itself back to prosperity.
An income tax would be a killer for Alaska, as it is one of nine states today that imposes no tax on personal income. Adding one would shred one of its greatest economic advantages over other parts of the country.
An equally bad idea would be to impose new steeper taxes on the energy industry. Oil and gas producers are the state’s goose that lays the golden eggs. Oil and gas production account for almost half of all state GDP and tens of thousands of high-paying jobs. Moreover, the energy industry also foots most of the bill for the state’s 9% corporate tax.
Introducing a new oil and gas tax would be like Nebraska putting a new tax on corn or Idaho trying to pay its bills with a special levy on potatoes.
Some analysts say that the days of wine and roses in Alaska from the state’s oil and gas bonanza are long gone. Nonsense. Alaska has only skimmed the surface of its vast pools of energy. Oil drilling projects Willow and Pikka on the North Slope have bountiful resources and are critical for Alaska’s economy and America’s energy security. Half of the nation’s coal reserves are also way up north.
Any new tax on energy production would only discourage more drilling and mining and thus dilute the reserves in the dividend fund. This means that if Alaskans want those dividend checks to keep arriving every year – and they’ve become a very politically popular fringe benefit in Alaska – the state needs pro-drilling policies not an agenda that chases the industry out of the state.
Meanwhile, the fiscal problem in Alaska is on the spending side of the ledger. Amazingly, Alaska had the highest per capita state and local spending in 2020 at $17,374, followed by Wyoming ($15,641) and New York ($15,373).
You have to be a real champion big spender to take on more per capita expenditures than even New York. Alaska’s per capita local and state spending is twice as high as Florida‘s – and the services are no better in Anchorage than in Tampa.
The solution to Alaska’s fiscal woes is a constitutional spending cap. Put state government on a diet. HJR2 is a proposal that would limit government spending to a fixed percentage of Alaska’s private sector output. It would have to be approved by voters next November.
The alternative for Governor Mike Dunleavy and most Republicans in the legislature is to raise taxes – which they campaigned against. This would be a “read my lips”-style betrayal to the voters – aside from being harmful to the economy.
The strategy needs to be to grow the private sector, encourage more oil and gas drilling, and shrink the burden of a state government that like the Energizer Bunny – keeps growing and growing.
The Anchorage Assembly leftist majority has such a strong dislike of Deputy Library Director Judy Eledge that it voted 9-2 to recommend her resignation.
Members who voted in favor of the resolution were metaphorically kicking Eledge in the teeth, since she had announced her retirement early this morning and the resolution was therefore moot.
Eledge was one of Mayor Dave Bronson’s first hires when he took office in 2021, and she was assigned the head librarian, with the hopes that she would put an end to things like Drag Queen Story Hour, and make the library a safe place for children and families. The Assembly would not confirm her, and so she dropped back in to the Deputy Librarian position, which needed no confirmation.
The Assembly majority already had the resolution to disparage Eledge on the meeting agenda for Tuesday night, and therefore discussed whether they should go ahead and vote on the already-meaningless resolution or just take a pass.
Assemblyman Felix Rivera said that because Eledge is the state’s representative to a national education board, he still wants to send a strong message that Anchorage doesn’t care for her conservative viewpoint.
Eledge had been secretly taped by another employee of the library saying things that, when taken out of context, could sound harsh. Leftists called her racist and bigoted.
Assemblywoman Karen Bronga said she thought the resolution should pass, if only because Mayor Dave Bronson had read a statement talking about what a great job Eledge had done at the library. She would be among the “do pass” votes.
Kevin Cross said that although Eledge’s comments were controversial, “when someone willingly leaves, you don’t slam the door behind them. I would prefer to move on.”
Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel, who was chairing the meeting, said “I think if we don’t take action on this resolution, we’re ally give a pass to bad behavior.” She didn’t seem to think that by taking action, the Assembly may be giving employees a pass to start taping each other and using tapes to drive people out of their jobs.
Assemblyman George Martinez said he was uncomfortable about setting precedence in singling out individual employees, something he has an aversion to. But he ultimately voted in favor of the resolution.
In the vote, only Assemblymen Randy Sulte and Kevin Cross voted against the resolution.
Tucker Carlson walked away from $25 million left on his contract with Fox News, which was tied to a noncompete clause that would have kept him out of the news and analysis business until January 2024. Instead, the former host of Tucker Carlson Tonight at Fox News will broadcast directly from Twitter, with the blessing of Twitter majority owner Elon Musk and with some of his former staffers, who are coming with him.
Carlson made the announcement today on Twitter in a video announcement that was viewed over 5 million times in its first four hours.
Fox fired Carlson two weeks ago, and on Tuesday, Carlson sent a letter to Fox saying the company had breached his contract.
Axios has reported that Carlson and Musk are also in talks about creating a new media platform. He has turned several offers worth millions of dollars over the past week, instead opting for the free speech platform at Twitter.
Twitter has 450 million active users, and Carlson has 7 million followers. Carlson, who lives in Maine and had been hosting his nightly brand of conservative analysis from his home, is said to be worth $30 million.
The New York Times speculated that the video posted by Carlson could be a violation of his contract with Fox.
“Mr. Carlson’s remarks on Tuesday, posted on Twitter — a platform run by Elon Musk, a provocateur in a similar mold as the combative, contrarian host — consisted of a three-minute monologue delivered directly to the camera. The video could violate the terms of his contract with Fox, which prevent Mr. Carlson from hosting a show on an alternate network,” the newspaper speculated.
Suzanne LaFrance, who served on the Anchorage Assembly until declining to run for reelection in April, filed a letter of intent to run against Mayor Dave Bronson for mayor. That makes two in the race, for now. The election will take place next March-April.
LaFrance has led the leftist opposition to Bronson and has taken every opportunity to criticize him during her Assembly chairwoman’s report every other week. Although she aligns with the hard left, she is a registered nonpartisan.
She was defeated by Rep. James Kaufman for the Alaska Legislature in 2020. After growing up in Palmer, she attended the University of Portland and Purdue University. She was politically involved with the radical Great Alaska Schools Anchorage group, which advocated for more school spending. She and her husband have three children.
A character assassination on University of Alaska Board of Regents nominee Bethany Marcum by Democrat Sen. Jesse Kiehl of Juneau was the low point in the deliberations about whether Marcum, executive director of the conservative Alaska Policy Forum, would be added as a regent.
Marcum’s confirmation failed, closely, in a joint session of the Alaska Legislature. Democrats and liberal Republicans voted against her.
All other nominees by the governor to various boards and commissions were accepted, but leftists in the Legislature spoke passionately against Marcum, characterizing her policy positions as anti-education, and saying that all she wants to do is cut the budget for the university.
The dirtiest attack came when Sen. Kiehl said Marcum came into his office once as an advocate on an education issue and told him that she was “just a mom” who didn’t know how things work around here, and then tearfully beseeched him to see her point of view on education. At the time, he was taking the meeting as a legislative aide on behalf of the late Sen. Dennis Egan, his predecessor.
Kiehl said later he found out that she had been a legislative aide, and in his mind this contradicted her statement of being a mom who didn’t know how things worked. He challenged her integrity.
It was very much reminiscent of what former Rep. Ivy Spohnholz did during the confirmation of Karl Johnstone to the Board of Fish in 2019, when she stood on the floor of the session and accused Johnstone of sexual harassment of someone — relaying a third-hand story she had heard, which she told without disclosing the source of the accusation. It was at the height of the “me too” craze, and Spohnholz used an anonymous attack a man who had served as a judge in Alaska for many years, and who was not able to stand up and refute her attacks.
As for the Keihl attack on Marcum, she told Must Read Alaska that it’s astounding since “I’ve never been a mom and certainly have never told anyone that I am.”
Several Republicans defended Marcum on Tuesday. Rep. David Eastman said it was inappropriate for Kiehl to attack the character of a nominee in that manner.
Especially effective was Sen. Shelley Hughes, who stood up and began by stating, “I’m just a mom and sometimes I don’t know how things work around here.” Hughes is in the super-minority in the Senate, banished from all committee assignments by the liberal majority.
Hughes said that accusing Marcum of lacking integrity was unfair and pointed out that, not only does Marcum have a bachelor’s and master’s degree, she has had additional education in Japan and Hungary, and she has spent years studying and publishing important information about education in Alaska. Hughes and other Republicans said that it’s important to have a diversity of opinion on the Board of Regents, and not every regent needs to be rah-rah for the University of Alaska system, which has plenty of critics around the state for quality and performance.
Rep. Dan Saddler also spoke to the importance of the diversity of opinion, and reminded the body that there are other people (Sen. Patty Murray of Washington State) who say they are just “moms in tennis shoes.” It’s an idiom that should not be considered an absolute when weighing someone’s integrity.
Marcum, who was out of state when the vote occurred, said it went about as she expected.
Clearly, as expressed by several Democrats, her role as a strong advocate on the Redistricting Board set Democrats and people like Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel against her.
