There are a whole lot of people associated with State government who are cutting themselves a fat hog. This wretched excess at our small and generally mediocre at best university system is just the one that has garnered the most attention. The UA has been used to provide sinecures for failed or retired Democrat politicians for years. I dont think that now 12 years of Republican governors appointing BoR members has done much to change the generally leftist bent of the UA, but it has provided some sinecures for people with Republican rather than Democrat cronies. Since the 90s salaries in the quasi-governmentals have skyrocketed. The quasi-governmentals are exempt from the Executive Branchs State Personnel Act and State Pay Plan and many of them are governed by an appointed board. The boards themselves dont pay well if at all other than expense allowances and such, maybe a per diem for meetings but they do offer board members all sorts of travel, perks, and contacts. There has evolved the same sort of relationship between the executive heads of the quasi-governmentals that exists in the management of private sector corporations; all the executive head has to do is keep the board happy, as in personally happy and doing well, and they will give the executive head and his/her staff just about anything they want. Ive seen plenty of ranting and raging here about what Executive Branch directors and commissioners get paid, none of whom make over $150K last I looked. Go take a look at what executives and staff are being paid at the Aerospace agency, KABATA, AHFC, Post-secondary Education, and the plethora of other exempt agencies that administratively reside in the Executive Branch but are free from the surly bonds of the bulk of the Executive Branchs rules and restrictions on hiring and competition. Unfortunately the disease once mostly limited to the quasis, has been allowed to creep into the regular Executive Branch. There had long been a provision in the State Personnel Act that allowed a governor at his/her discretion to appoint someone to perform a temporary or special inquiry on the Governors behalf. Since such an appointment under AS 39.25.110(9) is definitionally a temporary appointment and temporary appointments are not eligible for leave, benefits, or retirement credit, such appointments were rare and truly temporary. Then, Knowles first director of personnel, Bev Reaume or someone working for her decided that some temporary exempts really werent temporary because their temporary or special inquiry might go on for a long time, so some temporary employees could be treated like permanent employees and get all the benefits of permanent employees but without all those troublesome restrictions on hiring and pay that you have in the classified and partially-exempt services. Once you could have the benefits and get paid anything you could get somebody to pay you, the floodgates opened; you could hire anybody you wanted without regard to qualifications and without competition and pay them whatever you wanted to pay them. All you needed was a friend in high places and the OK of the Governors Office. Some of us whod been around the government for awhile tried to prevail on Murkowski and Clark to put a stop to it but too many already had their hooves in the trough so it has continued pretty much unabated. I put some pressure on division of personnel to give me an accurate list of all the .110(9) appointments and their pay when I represented one of the unions in an unfair labor practice complaint against the State over bargaining retirement benefits, but they stonewalled me. I got some of the information by other means, but there are limits to how you can use that sort of information. The States response is that theyve stopped designating the authority for an appointment, so youd have to hand-search all the personnel records to find who was a temporary receiving permanent benefits and then try to pry out of the State what they were paying them because somewhere along the line somebody discovered something called exception pay, so when you call or write and ask somebodys salary, theyll tell you s/he is a Range 26, Step E, but they dont tell you that theyre actually paying that person some other salary as exception pay. The only authority I ever saw for conferring benefits on temporary employees was Reaumes email to the Human Resources Managers. Ive never seen any authority for exception pay. As far as I know, nobody ever asked for an AGs Opinion on either and the general attitude has been an unwillingness to talk about it and stonewalling anyone who asked. I can understand the media not being interested if it were Democrats doing it, but now there are Republicans playing with the Democrat toy.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 19:05:51 +0000
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