Dennis Anderson, the Frontiersman newspaper’s Publisher (who recently relocated to Colorado but still works for Wick Publishing which owns the Frontiersman), is MSB Manager Moosey’s “go to” person for Public Relations.
Mr. Anderson’s “Publisher’s Notebook” column, which runs in the Frontiersman and its sister newspaper, the Anchorage Press, often features Mr. Moosey and other MSB Directors. There is never any criticism; just lots of fawning coverage.
(Side Note: The Frontiersman has a longstanding substantial contract to publish all the MSB’s meetings and other legal notices. The MSB has full page ads in the newspaper on Wednesdays and Fridays plus lots of RFPs are published in the classified section.)
In a new two-part interview that ran this week in the Frontiersman, MSB Manager John Moosey discussed several topics with Mr. Anderson.
Moosey stated that his (non public; non Assembly-approved; non Port Commission disclosed) $103,500 consulting contract with former Governor Sean Parnell was not a secret.
https://www.frontiersman.com/news/port-mac-talkeetna-taxes-and-transparency-continuing-the-conversation-with/article_4d5f49cc-948b-11e9-afeb-4f02d8d7e1aa.html?fbclid=IwAR0YM4loGDd9fkITVHaVSjfgfB7sM-WWvQMPhBl5yH5HOxnQ6FoQS7EIxzY
“If people come talk to me, I’ll tell them. None of this is a secret.”
Is this really true?
I discovered the Sean Parnell contract only because of my ongoing efforts to obtain Public Records from the MSB. (And FYI – the Frontiersman didn’t discover or do any reporting on the Parnell contract.)
I sent an email to the MSB Manager and Mayor and a couple of Assembly members on January 16, 2019, asking a lot of follow up questions about this contract.
Hello all,
The Manager and the Mayor did not respond to my email. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.
I had to send a series of follow up emails and Public Records Requests to the Public Records Clerk (who is the Mayor’s secretary) in order to seek out any “work product” to figure out what former Gov. Parnell actually did for the MSB.
I was finally told by Public Records Clerk that there was no written work product.
So, this contract (which was over the 100K limit and thus should have been approved by the Assembly at a public meeting), was secretive.
Also – the MSB didn’t bother to inform its Port Commission that it had hired Sean Parnell to help market the Port. (I called a Port Commissioner in January who confirmed this to me.)
Thus, the MSB had a lot of explaining to do at the Spring Port Commission meetings:
The current Manager is the highest paid manager in borough history. His starting salary was $165k his predecessor ended his career at $136k. He current makes over $200k.
What do we get for $200k? His signature?
He stated the money “funds” that built the new Talkeetna EMS building came from “scraps” 1.3 Million dollars of scraps left over from other projects.
How do we have “scraps”? Why is the money not being put back into the general fund or used to pay the source of the funding “debt” back?
It would be interesting to see the full general ledger on this project.
What other “scraps” does the Manager move around? How much scrap do we have? Is this a second set of accounting kept?
A properly functioning financial Manager shouldn’t have 1.3 million dollars in tax payer money available in “scraps”?
His new comment”scraps” from KTVA further proves his mismanagement of money.
He supports a sales tax but has access to scrap funds to use. How is this legal?
Just like the purchase of the Tommy Moe building. Nothing is as it seems with this guy he continues to operate however he sees fit! The assembly no longer has control of his abuse of power!
An Alaskan of 56 years.