A dangerous practice

What is the difference between VECO continuing to pay Ben Stevens $50,000 a year in consulting fees after he was elected and another employer paying the same old salary to a newly elected employee?

There isn’t any. Unfortunately, two Alaska companies and one union still don’t get it.

ConocoPhillips, Peninsula Airways and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers each still pay legislators who once did jobs for them — jobs that would be impossible to continue while simultaneously serving in the regular sessions of the Legislature, its many special sessions or the hundreds of hours of required meetings while not in session.

I posed this dilemma to someone connected to one of the above employers and the reply was, “Yes, but what if some of his legislative work was also for us?”

I replied, “Then that work done for you would violate Alaska’s bribery law.”

Would you think it OK if a majority of both sides of the Legislature were on the payrolls of VECO and/or Alaska’s major oil companies? What if one of them was fired shortly after voting to tax Alaska’s oil as much as other countries tax theirs?

Republicans and Democrats both need to end this practice.

Ray Metcalfe

Anchorage