This story was republished from www.dermotcole.com with permission.
The former temporary budget director for Gov. Mike Dunleavy is back, hired by Rep. Ben Carpenter, the right-wing Kenai Republican who leads the committee that will allegedly figure out the future of state finances.
Donna Arduin is making $45 an hour, Sabine Poux of KDLL reports. That puts the Florida visitor to Juneau on the upper end of the legislative pay scale.
What did we do to deserve this?
It’s brought to you by a guy who began his legislative career in 2019 with an embarrassing display in which he elevated himself to an imaginary committee chairmanship.
Carpenter is wasting $45 an hour in state money that could be used elsewhere—to deal with the food stamp crisis or get more attorneys for people who need legal help, for example.
Carpenter said he has made Arduin a state employee again so she can help decide Alaska’s fiscal future. Spoiler alert: Her advice will be to cut this, that and the other thing.
It appears that Chair Carpenter wasn’t paying attention in 2019 when Dunleavy did a Joe Hazelwood and left Arduin at the controls for the entire Donna Debacle.
Arduin tried to eliminate the state ferry system, dismantle the University of Alaska, cut K-12 schools by $330 million and confiscate hundreds of millions in tax revenue from local governments. She also wanted to cut health care for poor people by hundreds of millions, eliminate the Power Cost Equalizations endowment, end the WWAMI program to train medical students and stop college scholarships.
“And she is going to help me look at long-term fiscal policy planning from a fiscal conservative point of view,” Carpenter claims to KDLL in Kenai.
Carpenter’s previous greatest hits include purveying false claims about the 2020 election, making false allegations about state health officials and the spread of COVID-19 and comparing wearing a mask to being forced to wear the Star of David. He also compared the events of Jan. 6 to the entry of the U.S. into World War II.
He couldn’t find anyone in Alaska to give him the advice he craves on state finances.
“She brings the experience I lack in some of the specifics of fiscal policy,” Carpenter told the reporter.
Arduin is now going by Donna Kauranen, the married name she didn’t use during her brief and disastrous tenure as the Dunleavy budget director in 2019. After she was removed by Dunleavy, the governor claimed she did a great job.
The legacy of her 2018 visit to Alaska was that she did more than any other single individual in nearly getting Dunleavy removed from office via the recall. Fifty thousand Alaskans couldn’t wait to sign the recall petition and did so as soon as it was available, thanks to Arduin.
She was also crowned as the “sharpest dresser” in Juneau by the state’s leading hat expert, who loved the Arduin animal skin collar.
Before the 2018 election, Dunleavy told the Ketchikan Daily News, “There is no plan to hack, cut or destroy the marine highway system.”
After the election, he began to hack, cut and destroy the ferry system with Arduin’s guidance.
He stood silently by Arduin, the budget mastermind, complained about the cost of moving cars on highways compared to ferries, never correcting her to mention the lack of highways in most places served by the ferry system.
Dunleavy and Arduin talked of selling ferries, abandoning routes, reducing the number of sailings and cutting the ferry budget by 75 percent.
Arduin and Dunleavy fought hard to get rid of the Power Cost Equalization endowment, a campaign that continued for years after she returned to Florida.
“We began on Day 1 of the administration. We started with eliminating budget silos, tearing down those silos,” Arduin told legislators on Jan. 23, 2019.
One of the budget “silos” that Arduin and Dunleavy sought to tear down was the $1 billion Power Cost Equalization endowment, created by the Legislature to provide a regular revenue source to pay for the rural electric subsidies, estimated at $32 million a year.
“All spending is state spending so all programs should compete for available dollars. So let’s scrutinize those programs that are funded with designated general funds—cuz all money is green,” Arduin said in one of her lectures.
Three months after Arduin declared that all money is green, Dunleavy proposed a bill to get rid of the PCE endowment, which was the prime target of their green campaign.
When Arduin was dispatched to Florida, Dunleavy focused his administration on retreating from almost everything she proposed, while distancing himself from every difficult question and deflecting blame onto someone else whenever possible.
Arduin didn’t belong on the state payroll in 2019. And she doesn’t belong on it now.
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