u/HALNinerZeroZero

By Anchorage Daily News editorial board

George Martinez should not be casually removed from the Anchorage Assembly.

That is not a defense of what he did, nor is it a dismissal of findings from the Alaska Public Offices Commission. It is not a shrug at campaign money, airline miles or the public’s right to expect better from elected officials.

What it is, however, is recognition that overturning the will of voters is a serious step, one that should be rare. Doing so should require more than outrage, more than bad optics and more than the frustration of political opponents. And let’s be clear: This is a very bad look for Assembly member Martinez.

Earlier this month, APOC fined the East Anchorage Assembly member after regulators found that he improperly used campaign funds for personal benefit. The complaint centered on a $1,255 round-trip Alaska Airlines flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in late December, paid for with campaign money. He also spent another $1,000 in campaign funds on carbon offsets connected to the flight.

APOC staff found that the spending was not reasonably related to his municipal reelection campaign. They also found that Martinez gained a large sum of status points on his personal Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan account through the carbon offset purchase.
Martinez said the trip was a solo “strategic planning retreat” conducted aboard the flights to and from Florida, and that the carbon offset was consistent with his green travel campaign pledge. APOC, as would anyone with an ounce of common sense, did not buy it. The commission called the violations “particularly egregious” and imposed the maximum penalty allowed, ordering a $3,050 fine on top of reimbursement to his campaign account. APOC also described Martinez’s testimony at a June 3 hearing as “formulaic and evasive” as he answered questions with minimal effort.

Now, plenty of Alaskans understand airline status and mileage runs. In a state where air travel is practically a utility and airline miles are a second currency, nobody needs a long explanation as to why someone might want to rack up status points before the end of the year.

That is exactly why Martinez’s explanation — hey, this was a solo strategic planning retreat! — is an evasion so idiotic and offensive that it should cause his constituents to question his fitness for office. If he honestly thought it was a productive use of campaign funds to buy a $2,255 ticket to Florida, spend an hour on the ground and then fly back to Alaska for the purpose of making a strategic plan in his own head, then he has the judgment of a traffic cone and is not qualified to serve on the Assembly.

Or he’s lying.

Had he simply said, “I made a serious mistake. I used campaign money for a trip that benefited me personally. I should not have done it. I am paying it back, apologizing to my donors and apologizing to the public,” it would still be a problem, but at least he wouldn’t be insulting our collective intelligence.
Instead, Martinez insisted he did nothing wrong, describing the trip to Fort Lauderdale as campaign-related. During the APOC hearing, he appeared virtually with his camera off, repeatedly leaned on prior written submissions and refused to answer questions about whether the rewards points he received resulted in a status upgrade.

That is how a campaign finance violation becomes something bigger. It’s worthy of the old adage, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”

And now the fire has more fuel.
Assembly members Donald Handeland and Jared Goecker released municipal travel records Thursday that they say raise new questions about a taxpayer-funded trip Martinez took to Puerto Rico last year. Those records, as described by the two Assembly members, show Martinez traveled to attend the 2025 SOMOS El Futuro Conference, which ran from Nov. 5 to Nov. 9, while his municipal travel authorization covered Nov. 3 through Nov. 12. The authorization reportedly listed no personal or nonbusiness days, and expense records showed taxpayer-funded per diem throughout the authorized travel period.

These are allegations and questions, not findings of wrongdoing, but they certainly make this whole thing stink worse. Coming on the heels of APOC’s findings about campaign funds, airline status points and evasive testimony, the Puerto Rico records raise the same basic question: When Martinez travels on someone else’s dime, whether donors’ or taxpayers’, is the public getting a clear explanation of the public purpose?

Handeland and Goecker have called on Martinez to resign. If he does not, they say they will seek to remove him through a process outlined in municipal code. That process would require either a majority vote of the Assembly or a referral from the municipal Board of Ethics to move forward. Removal would ultimately require support from two-thirds of the 12-member Assembly.

Handeland and Goecker are right to be angry, and they are correct when they say elected officials must be held to a higher standard. They are right that public trust matters. But the Assembly should be careful about turning this into a fight to remove a member before exhausting less drastic accountability measures.

The voters of East Anchorage chose Martinez. His donors chose to give money to his campaign. That does not make him immune from consequences, but it does mean the Assembly should be cautious in substituting its judgment for that of the voters. If he is to be removed from office, it should be through a recall. He should face the constituents and donors whose trust he violated.
Campaign funds are not personal checking accounts or travel accounts. They are not tools for preserving airline status. They are money given for a specific civic purpose by donors who trust candidates to follow the rules.
Taxpayer funds deserve the same respect. If the Puerto Rico trip was legitimate public business, Martinez should explain exactly what Anchorage received for it, why the full travel period was necessary and whether the per diem matched the public purpose of the trip. If there is a simple explanation, now would be an excellent time to provide it.

Martinez has damaged public trust. It’s up to the voters in his district to decide whether it can be repaired.
The best path forward is not continued evasion by Martinez, nor is it pretending that the issue is merely two Assembly members who have differing opinions. The best path forward is accountability. Martinez should come clean, apologize publicly, repay the campaign money and accept that he has badly damaged his credibility. If he cannot do that, then the case for stronger Assembly action becomes much more compelling. At the very least, he should face a voter recall.

For now, the Assembly should not rush to remove him. His constituents should have the final say at the ballot box unless his dishonesty continues to rise to a level that clearly makes continued service impossible.

Campaign money is not a personal rewards program, taxpayer money is not a travel slush fund and broken public trust is not restored by reading formulaic written statements with your Zoom camera turned off. An elected office is not a place to hide from accountability.
George Martinez should stop digging and make this right through the simplest measure available: facing his constituents and owning his mistake.

Anchorage Daily News editorial board

Some things I miss.

I miss the Keyboard Lounge.

I miss Blues Central.

I miss the old Spenard, Whitekeys, PJ’s and Hogg Bros. Okay, Hogg Brothers wasn’t that great. I digress.

One thing I won’t miss is hearing this woman on the radio every morning.

I used to listen to her, just to keep tabs on what kind of nonsense that she was spewing. I had to stop, she is easily the most un-interesting and boring “personality” that I’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to.

And her voice…..I’m sorry, but she just does not have a voice for radio. She might be good at something, I’m not sure what it is, but radio is not her jam.

Now she’s relegated to an even shittier AM radio station on the far end of the dial that I’m sure nobody listens to, or are even aware that it exists.

50,000 Watts of pure blow torch power, what a waste of fucking electricity.

I snapped this pic this morning whilst walking the dog. The salmon are running and the days are glorious.

If anyone is in the area today, there’s some trash that needs to be picked up. Thank you kindly in advance

I went to grab the wheelbarrow, Blanca said, “Come back later”

I found these guys getting busy on a leaf of rhubarb today

If so, they might be in Spenard (W 32nd & Cope)

The committee record is still open.

Go to akleg.gov. Find your senator and representative. Every member has a public email address.

The questions in this piece every one of them are drawn directly from the public record, from Fulford’s testimony, from the DOR fiscal model, from the Legislative Legal Services memo, from the IRS statute.

They are not hostile.

They are not anti-development.

They are the bare minimum that any legislature working for the people who own the resources should have on the record before locking in permanent terms.
Copy them. Paste them into an email. Subject line: SB 2001 – Questions for the Record.

Send it before the session ends. You don’t need to be a lawyer or an energy economist. You need to decide whether your legislators should have these answers before they vote.

We don’t have to choose between development and sovereignty. We never did.

Build it the wrong way…. With rushed tax breaks, no in-state supply commitments at fair prices, an AVT structure that captures a fraction of the value while the operator banks $2 billion a year in federal credits, equity dilution risks on our 25% stake, school funding formulas rewritten while classrooms empty — and we become the resource colony.

Jobs on paper.

Sovereignty eroded.

Ratepayers subsidizing Asia while future generations inherit the geological liability and the fiscal hole.

Don’t build it at all, and we miss the construction jobs, the revenue, the energy security, the domestic supply that keeps the lights on in the dark of January.

That failure is real too.

But the crossroads we’re standing at right now early June has 2026, thirty-day clock, the project’s own adviser calling the cost number wishful thinking, the IRS 45V deadline ticking nineteen months away while nobody in the Governor’s office mentions it publicly, schools closing from Mat-Su to Ketchikan, this is exactly the moment where getting it right is still possible.

Not easy. Not inevitable. But possible.

The Constitution says maximum benefit for the people.

Not maximum benefit for Glenfarne.

Not maximum benefit for Tokyo Gas.

Not maximum benefit for whoever ends up holding the 45V credits when the ammonia ships clear Cook Inlet.

Maximum benefit for the Alaskans who own the gas, who live on top of the geology, who send their kids to the schools that are closing while this deal gets rushed through a thirty-day session on assumptions the developer’s own guy won’t stand behind.

Alaska first doesn’t mean build anything at any cost. It means build it right, so the people who actually own this resource finally get the maximum benefit the Constitution has always promised them.

Every other version of this story is lose-lose. We’ve seen enough of those.

Let’s not write another one.

https://open.substack.com/pub/alaskanrants/p/bad-either-way-why-alaskas-lng-pipeline?r=3iu1e&utm\\\\\\\_medium=ios