Dunleavy claimed to have plan for hiring 17 new Troopers, but budgeted $0 to pay them

Alaska newspapers ran a campaign press release by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his public safety commissioner in January in which they claimed to have a budget plan to hire 17 new Troopers.

What Dunleavy and James Cockrell, the public safety commissioner, didn’t reveal in the press release, printed as an opinion column, was that the proposed Dunleavy budget includes no money to hire the 12 Troopers, 2 technicians and 3 wildlife safety officers.

And they didn’t say that they want to add five Troopers in Wasilla, five Troopers in Palmer, one in Anchorage, one in Tok and two technicians in Juneau and Soldotna. A backup budget document claims the new positions were part of “additional efforts” to add staffing in rural Alaska.

The positions were not in the proposed Dunleavy budget, but that didn’t stop Dunleavy and Cockrell from misleading Alaskans and suggesting otherwise.

“In the fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, the Alaska Department of Public Safety would see a significant increase in funding to address crime across the state. The department will be able to hire 14 additional Alaska State Troopers and three Alaska Wildlife Troopers for both urban and rural Alaska,” Dunleavy and Cockrell claimed in their press release, printed in full by the Anchorage Daily News on Jan. 1.

Dunleavy and Cockrell claimed the 2023 budget is evidence of their commitment to public safety.

But they left out the $5.1 million to pay to hire the new employees.

In a Dec. 15 press release, Dunleavy’s office said 15 new Troopers would be hired under his budget, and “appropriation will be worked out with lawmakers during the 2022 session.”

The takeaway from this is that Dunleavy wanted to to generate campaign publicity for himself about hiring new Troopers without actually adding more positions.

Asked at a Jan. 25 budget hearing if the department plans to absorb the cost of hiring 17 new positions, Cockrell said no. He said Dunleavy’s budget office told him that “if we could show that we can hire more Troopers,” the governor plans to ask the Legislature for a supplemental budget increase to pay for the new positions.

He didn’t say why the governor had refused to include the money in the proposed budget.

“We’ve been told that our ability or inability to fully hire our vacant positions has created some issues when we ask for more positions,” Deputy Commissioner Leon Morgan told legislators. “So what we’re asking is to have the positions and then when we can prove up that we have filled these positions through our recruitment efforts we’ll come back for supplementals or another funding mechanism as determined by the Legislature.”

About financing public safety, Cockrell told the Daily News in December that urban areas that can afford to do so should help pay for Alaska State Trooper coverage.

“I think Mat-Su Borough, Fairbanks and Kenai Peninsula should pay us something. We’re providing services for, essentially for free, to areas of the state that could afford to pay for it,” Cockrell said.

The counter argument is that the state should kick in tens of millions more for public safety and draw on statewide revenue sources because the boroughs haven’t given themselves public safety powers and their residents oppose higher taxes.

But either way, something has to change to get the Alaska State Troopers up to speed.

“This state cannot continue to fund the troopers at the level they’re at and expect the services that we expect from our Troopers,” Cockrell told a finance subcommittee. “We’re burning them out just because of the amount of calls that they’re handling statewide and we’re not adequately covering rural Alaska.”

Cockrell figures they need 100 more officers statewide, which would probably mean $30 million added to the budget, a hard sell for all of the right-size-government faithful.

In 2021, the Troopers hired 41 new officers, while 41 officers retired, quit or were fired. There are about 43 vacancies right now.

Dunleavy, asked in December at a press conference if he agreed with Cockrell about getting boroughs to chip in for Trooper coverage, ducked the question.

“Well, that’s a discussion that the commissioner and I have to have,” candidate Dunleavy said.

“We’ll have discussions involving anything and everything that’s going to make sure that whatever we put in place is genuine, real and has outcomes.”

In other words, he won’t discuss Cockrell’s idea of getting urban areas to help pay for Trooper coverage.

But since he wants to be genuine, real and have outcomes, Dunleavy should start by discussing why he proposed adding 17 ghost positions to the Troopers without budgeting any money to pay them.

There are very few empty Trooper positions in Mat-Su now, but the caseload is a heavy one and they need help, Cockrell said, which is why he wants 10 new Troopers there.

“Most of the time we have three to five troopers patrolling that whole area,” Cockrell said. “And we’re burning our Troopers out. This is a way to protect our Troopers and keep them from leaving the department because the case load is too high.”

The Dunleavy plan is to hire the new Troopers and figure out later how to pay for them.

If Dunleavy is serious, put the money in the budget, which already includes big increases for many department functions and relies on $90 million in one-time-only federal money.

Dunleavy, who says he opposes “job-killing new taxes,” has not presented a sustainable plan, but a reelection plan.

During the 2018 campaign, I wrote the following: ‘We need to hear from the candidates for governor and Legislature about the lack of Trooper coverage statewide, the abysmal traffic enforcement and what they plan to do about it. We also need to know how they plan to pay for it.”

The issues haven’t changed. We need to hear from the candidates about this in 2022.