Gov Cited Jobs in Oil Tax Relief, Now Cuts Job Preference For Alaskans

From the Anchorage Daily News:

The Parnell administration, in an unprecedented move, has ruled that Alaska hire requirements for state and local public works contracts won't apply to the entire state but only to limited, mainly rural areas.
No longer covered as of Friday: Anchorage, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su, Juneau and the Kenai Peninsula.

The Juneau Empire reported a Parnell speech in June where he defended HB 21 which cut oil taxes drastically:

“If we can garner more investment from the tax changes we made with the More Alaska Production Act,” Parnell said, “Alaskans will benefit immensely from the jobs and opportunities that are created.”

But with this new policy change it's clear that the Governor doesn't care all that much if those jobs go to Alaskans.  And anyone who has flown to Anchorage regularly notices the planes have a lot of folks flying in from Outside for their shift on the North Slope.

Parnell talks about jobs and benefits to Alaskans, but the record seems to indicate that his true purpose is benefit to large corporations such as the oil company he lobbied for before becoming Lt. Governor and then Governor when Palin resigned. 

While his administration argues that DC doesn't understand Alaska's problems and thus shouldn't have power over the state, they see no reason why local governments and communities or the general Alaska public should have any say over what the State does.  They overturned the guts of the people's initiative to regulate the cruise industry and they destroyed the state's Coastal Zone Management structure making Alaska the only coastal state in the country without a Coastal Zone Management program.  Despite the fact that our coast is larger than all the others.

The purpose of all this?  The pattern we see would appear to give large corporations (as well as smaller businesses) free run in the state of Alaska with little or no interference from the Federal government, from the State government, from local governments, or from Alaskan people in general.  People's rights to protect their own communities have been cut drastically by Parnell's administration in moves like the gutting of the Coastal Zone Management program. 

Federal Overreach is a buzz ward in the Parnell Administration.  But not State Overreach. 

The language may be about "Alaska's economy" and "jobs"  but behind the facade is the real purpose:  making life easier for large corporations and business in general.  No one should hold up their projects for any reason, whether it destroys local neighborhoods and communities, pollutes, or threatens endangered species, or salmon streams.  Business gets an automatic green light at all intersections between their interests and the people's interests. 

I'm sure people like the governor and his supporters also believe that making life easier for large corporations makes life better for everyone.  Fundamentalist capitalism is just as blind and intolerant as fundamentalism in any other religion.  They forget that the reasons they dislike government - its potential power over others - is the same reason that many people dislike multinational corporations.  And as those corporations have gained increased power over government through election contributions and lobbyists, they have gotten larger and larger.  In most industries - media, airlines, food,  mining, oil, defense,  fishing, cruise lines, etc. -  consolidation has decreased the number of competing companies, giving fewer companies more control over people's lives.  Many corporations have larger budgets than many countries.  Government is the only viable counterbalance to their power. 

Of course the governor's new policy raises the question about whether local hire is even legal in the first place.  Back in the late 70s or early 80s Alaska local hire laws were ruled unconstitutional, so I did some checking to see if things had changed.  There are localities - like San Francisco - that have local hire laws.  For now, I'm just raising the point, and saying it appears that there are circumstances when local hire appears to be legal.  Here's a place to start reading about the law on this.

Self Made Myth

There are ideas that individuals and groups have so embedded in their minds that they never question them.  But often, these conceits do not hold up to close scrutiny.  Here's the start of an article that looks at the myth of the self-made man - a myth that underlies many conservatives, and certainly those Ayn Rand libertarians.  It's useful to review a thoughtful take on it so you're prepared when the opportunity arises to raise someone's consciousness. 

From the Hedgehog Review where you can read the whole article.

Problems and Promises of the Self-Made Myth

Jim Cullen

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 15.2 (Summer 2013). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

The Hedgehog Review: Summer 2013

(Volume 15 | Issue 2)

• Issue TOC >>

A self-made man means one who has rendered himself accomplished, eminent, rich, or great by his own unaided efforts.

—John Frost, Self-Made Men of America (1848)

These have not been good days for the self-made man. The very phraseology offends: in an age when even corporate titans ritualistically affirm the value of teamwork, “self-made” sounds unseemly. “What’s wrong with the ‘self-made’ theory? Everything,” says Mike Myatt, a prominent CEO consultant, in a 2011 article in Forbes, a publication where one might expect to see such a figure affirmed. “If your pride, ego, arrogance, insecurity, or ignorance keeps you from recognizing the contributions of others, then it’s time for a wake-up call,” he admonishes.1 In the 2012 book The Self-Made Myth, authors Brian Miller and Mike Lapham define the phrase as “the false assertion that individual and business success are entirely the result of the hard work, creativity, and sacrifice of the individual with little outside assistance.”2
Such objections do not even begin to broach the difficulties of a phrase like “self-made man” in a postfeminist era, when any generic citation of “man” is at best a faux pas. Given the institutional, much less biological, realities that govern our lives, the very idea of the self-made man sounds like a contradiction in terms. No man is “unaided” because every man is some mother’s son.

Here's the whole article.

Visiting A Well-To-Do Thai Home - 1919

No, I didn't take this movie, I'm not THAT old. Even my mom hadn't been born yet. This was posted at Thai-Visa [not sure if you need an id to get in there, probably just to comment] and I thought it worth sharing. When I was in Thailand in the 60s some of this was still going on. I don't remember women wearing this sort of sarong except for classical Thai dancing. Eating betel nut was still popular, but only by the older men and women - these women would have been in their 60s or 70s by then. I'm guessing the hostess must have been someone pretty high on the social scale (maybe royalty?) based on how low these women prostrate themselves when they 'wai'. Though when you are already sitting on the floor, the others have to get down pretty low to show proper respect. While I often was in situations where we were all on the floor like that, I wasn't with people that elegant.









Writing this post made me remember a short video of a breakfast on the floor with farmers in Chiang Mai in 2008.  That would have been 89 years later.  And a much less elegant, but more comfortable setting.  You can see that video here  just for a comparison.  They're speaking Northern Thai dialect.   I'm not sure why the photos have vanished.  

Monetizing Outlaw Art And Killing The Artists

Consider the graffiti artist who puts something up in the dead of night on some wall.

A year later, it's auctioned off for $1.1 million.

Irony twisted in irony.  Banksy's graffiti is both clever and well executed.  More succinctly, it's often brilliant.

If he were doing these in a studio on canvas, they would be good.  But the power of these drawings is greatly multiplied by the fact that they are (mostly) done secretly, without permission, in public places, and their placement is part of the comment they make about the world.  Some examples:

• A pole vaulter painted on a wall high above a chain-link face next to the wall.  
• A rat painted into the barred red circle on a no-stopping sign.  
• "Sorry, the life style you ordered is currently out of stock" on a billboard painted on the side of a building.  
• A suited man with a briefcase and a sandwich board over his chest reading "0% interest - in people."  Is this a bank wall I wonder?  
• A hand coming out of a painted barred window reaching down to pick the lock on a painted doorknob on the side of a Bail Bond shop.  

You get the idea.  But the art work itself speaks much more strongly than my descriptions.  You can see all these and many more on Banksy's website. 


This all came up because of a recent LA Times story about a  Banksy drawn on a gas station wall that was cut out of the wall and is going up for auction. The flower girl is faced with a plant that has a surveillance camera where the flower should be.  (For the record, the article says that in this case the owner of the wall gave permission.)

So, a huge part of the appeal of these pieces is the social/political comment at a location that amplifies the point. 

So what does it mean when the owner of a painted wall cuts out the work and sells it for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more?  What does this tell us about how the market works, about fairness, profit, free speech, decency?   Is there an obligation to share some of the profit with the artist?  Often the artist is not known.  In fact has been forced to hide his identity.  Is there an obligation to share the work and/or the profit with the community?  Not under our current private property laws.  The artist is technically a and outlaw, a vandal who has defaced someone else's property and could be charged and tried.  The property owner who may be the object of the artists political humor, turns around and profits from the 'crime' against him. 

This becomes all the more poignant when we consider the graffiti artist who was recently killed by police who tasered him.

[Israel] Hernández, 18, was an artist and photographer who had some of his work exhibited locally. On the morning of Aug. 6, he was spray-painting his graffiti tag “Reefa” on an abandoned McDonald’s when the Miami Beach cops began to chase him. After being cornered a couple blocks away Officer Jorge Mercado shot Hernández with a Taser in the chest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly thereafter.  [from the Militant]

My heart breaks for Hernández' family and friends at this illustration of how police thinking causes so much tragedy.  I don't mean to belittle this by not going into it more fully.  This is worthy of further posts.  Perhaps the fallout will lead to better police training and recognition of kids' needs to express themselves and finding ways to help them do that legally.  

I'm still trying to untwist my brain over all this.

Graffiti, it seems to me, basically comes from an imbalance in society.  Those who feel they have no legitimate means of control over their lives, make their mark by defacing other people's (public or private) property.   It's anger at their own lack of power and at those who have more power. Their spray paint is a visual tantrum.   For others it's putting their brand out to the world.  They may not have $1 million to get a stadium or building named after them, but they do have spray paint.  Others are using spray paint and stencils to present their art or to make a statement about the world. 

Artists like Banksy,  Jean-Michel Basquait, and Kevin [Keith] Haring, whose graffiti has moved from the streets to museums and private collections, illustrate the ironies of capitalism.  One can argue that at first they simply had no legitimate venues, and like street musicians, gave their art away for free until they gained access to legitimate venues.  But a big part of the appeal of graffiti art, unlike street music, comes from the fact that they are making political statements elegantly but illegally.  It's outlaw art, as the police response to Hernández reminds us.

Should graffiti artists share in the profits when their work is auctioned off to the wealthy? 

There are moves to give artists a share in the market appreciation of their work.  From a 2011 NY Times article

"When the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his art collection in a 1973 auction that helped inaugurate today’s money-soused contemporary-art market, several artists watched the proceedings from a standing-room-only section in the back. There, Robert Rauschenberg saw his 1958 painting “Thaw,” originally sold to Scull for $900, bring down the gavel at $85,000. At the end of the Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in New York, Rauschenberg shoved Scull and yelled that he didn’t work so hard “just for you to make that profit.”

The uproar that followed in part inspired the California Resale Royalties Act, requiring anyone reselling a piece of fine art who lives in the state, or who sells the art there for $1,000 or more, to pay the artist 5 percent of the resale price."

So, perhaps, if Banksy's Flower Girl sells for $300,000, there would be $15,000 in it for him.  But this is a reminder that there is little that is 'natural' in the market.  It's all about who had the power to get laws written and whom the laws favor or dismiss.  

I've also posted about the film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which features Banksy and is a good way to get a sense of some of the graffiti artists and their motivation.  And about his painting - Taking a Break. 

Caregiver Payroll Taxes - Issues For Adult Children With Aging Parents

When we got a caregiver for my mom, we talked to her accountant about what we'd have to do.  He offered to take care of the quarterly and year end reports.  We just had to send in what we paid for the quarter.  When he got our first quarterly report information, he contacted me to say that we had paid our caregiver gross and not net pay.  I guess that is something obvious to people regularly involved in this, but he hadn't explained that to me and I certainly wouldn't have known how to calculate the various taxes that needed to be deducted and he hadn't directed me to any way to do that.

If you tell someone to boil an egg, you probably assume they know they need a pot, some water, some heat, etc.  I guess the accountant thought he was telling me to boil an egg.

In any case, he did then suggest a company and an online payroll tax calculator.  I tried the online calculator, but it didn't have options I needed.  Like a daily, rather than an hourly wage rate.  I talked to a company representative, but they were really set up for doing a lot more than one or two employees and were much too expensive and suggested we look for a company that specializes in stuff more like we needed.

The accountant sent me another name.  I talked to him yesterday and he came by today.  I still need to get my mom's tax id number.  The accountant applied for it but he didn't get it in his office and thinks maybe it got sent to my mom.  But my mom and I have gone through most of the paper work that came to the house in the mail in the last month, and I haven't seen it.

I'm sure this isn't too difficult and if I could find a program for this I could do it myself, but being split between LA and Anchorage and my mom wanting some control over this, I just gave in and said ok, we'll do this.  Perhaps over time I'll be able to take it over myself, but for now I've had too many other new things to handle and having someone who will do it for me feels like a great relief.

I mention all this because when I've looked on websites for handling issues relating to taking care of seniors, I haven't found anything that got into the details of things like payroll taxes for caregivers.  I'm playing with the idea of another blog that goes into the experiences I'm having with my mom.  My family has said they don't want google to find out info about them on this blog, so I'm generally circumspect with names and photos and details about what they are doing.  And I don't really want to talk about my mom quite as publicly as this blog.  Another blog that's anonymous would work better. And the blog would just be dedicated to the aging and caring issues.

Before I do that though, I need to do more internet searching to see what all is already out there that I've missed. I need to use different search terms too.

Before posting this today, for example, I searched more specifically for "payroll taxes for caregiver for elderly"  and found information from Caregiver I needed four months ago, when I didn't know that I needed it or what I should be looking for.

"The Caregiver as Employer

By Jude Roberts, Staff Writer

(Page 1 of 2)

When hiring a professional in-home caregiver, there are a couple of ways in which they can be selected, either from an agency which specializes in screening and placing professional caregivers, or by doing the research, interviewing, screening, and hiring all on your own. Keep in mind that if you hire a professional caregiver on your own, you will be entirely responsible for paying certain types of taxes that may be new to you, as well as having to know which taxes your new employee should be paying as well. Although you’ve hired a professional caregiver, who is much more than just a “domestic housekeeper”, the IRS will recognize you as the employer of a domestic.

If you pay your professional caregiver more than $1400 in cash wages per calendar year (note: the IRS may change this amount annually), you will be expected to file payroll taxes on such things as: Social Security & Medicare taxes (7.65% of gross wages); Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA) (0.8% of gross wages or less in most circumstances); state unemployment and disability insurance taxes levied on the employer; and advance payment of the earned income credit for eligible employees."

This was helpful in explaining to the caregiver why we had to do it this way (as advised by the accountant) instead of paying her as an independent contractor.

But I haven't found any really good general websites on aging parents that give good, comprehensive advice on things like this. That alerted me to issues I hadn't thought about but needed.  I'm sure they must be out there. 


For an example of how hit and miss this is, here are the top ten hits I got googling "elderly parents adult children" today:   [All these are brief excerpts, click links to get more.]

1.  Aging Parent offers a way for children caring for their parents to connect.  It offered

The Caregivers' Survival Guide:
Family Caring for Family

FREE when you sign-up for the Caregivers' Newsletter.

 It has a lot of options for different kinds of care for a parent - you can fill in your zip code and check off what you need and they come up with a list of providers in your area.  But I can't find the taxes information.  

2.  Time magazine story:

Caring for Aging Parents: Should There Be a Law?

By Francine Russo July 22, 2013

China’s government thinks so, and as the population of elderly in nearly every society starts to swell, such eldercare laws are becoming more common. But are they effective?

2.  CBS Philly article:

"Survey Shows Adult Children None Too Anxious To Take Care Of Aging Parents 

June 4, 2013 11:49 AM

By Chelsea Karnash
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Think your kids will take care of you in your Golden Years? They might, but they won’t be happy about it. . . "

4.  Elder Law Answers

"Requiring Adult Children to Pay for Aging Parents

Did you know you could be responsible for your parents' unpaid bills? Twenty-nine states currently have laws making adult children responsible for their parents if their parents can't afford to take care of themselves. While these laws are rarely enforced, there has been speculation that states may begin dusting them off as a way to save on Medicaid expenses."

5.   Prairie River Home Care

Caregivers in St. Cloud, MN: Adult Children as Caregivers for Aging Parents

July 24, 2013 by Lori Seemann · Leave a Comment

Of all individuals providing care to older adults, 42% of them are adult children. Most child caregivers are the daughters or daughters-in-law of the person receiving care. Throughout the passage of a person’s life, the care, comfort and assistance received are often given by one generation to other family members in a different generation. For example young children are cared for by parents and grandparents. When these children grow into middle adulthood, they may be taking care of their elderly parents.

6.  New York Daily News

Health

China to require children to visit aging parents as elderly care poses problem for nation 

Rates of elderly will skyrocket, make up 35% of population by 2053. New law would require children to visit and care for their aging parents.

7.  The Family Firm offers:

Financial Tips for Adult Children of Elderly Parents

As our parents get older, family roles can shift in big ways.
Older parents can suddenly seem distressed by financial management, and taking it on can be overwhelming for adult children. Siblings need to cooperate, parents need to be willing to relinquish control, and everyone needs to communicate clearly — none of this is easy. . .

8.  A New York Times story:

"Adult Children, Aging Parents and the Law

By JANE GROSS

Are children legally responsible for their parents’ care? (Susan Farley for The New York Times)

At the end of my mother’s life, for six months, a year at most, Medicaid paid for her care in a nursing home. She was broke by then, after living on a pittance since she was widowed at 58, using the proceeds from her house to pay for six years of assisted living and part of her nursing home stay and never seeing a penny from a long-term care insurance policy that cost a bundle but covered none of what she needed. She had given my brother and me no up-front money to hasten her eligibility for Medicaid and died with $26 to her name and nothing to leave to her children. The good news was we didn’t even have to put her will in probate."

9.   The International Business Times also has a story about the Chinese law requiring kids to care for their elderly parents.


10.  And finally, the University of Pennsylvania has an article

5-13-2013

Bridging the Gap Between Adult Children and Their Aging Parents: Developing and Assessing a Life Review Education Program

Brief Wondrous Flight To Coyotes, Amaryllis, And More

This is a transition post and the title reflects my trying to cover a lot in a short post.  Back to LA for a mom visit.  She seems to be doing better, but ultimately, old age is a terminal disease.  We flew late and I read a bit more of Junot Díaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  before sleeping and again before landing.  Non-stop is nice, even if it's overnight.

Oscar Wao has made me realize that Dominicans have not been on my radar.  I'm going to use living in Anchorage as my excuse, though we have Dominicans and I recall a long conversation with someone from  Dominica, but I really hadn't ever concentrated on the Dominican Republic and its culture(s) ever before.

And I'll use Oscar Wao as the beginning of a new awareness.  Yes, I knew about the Dominican Republic and Trujillo, and Dominican baseball players.  I knew that there are trees on the Dominican side of the border with Haiti.   But Oscar grabbed me hard and pulled me deep into the Chabral family and its story.

Díaz was given the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for  Oscar Wao.  I didn't know anything about the book or Díaz before reading the book and am only just now getting my first glimpse (other than what the book itself suggests) as I'm writing this post.  It's a surprisingly original piece of writing and that it got the National Book Award and the Pulitzer is also a pleasant surprise.  It would have been interesting to sit and listen to their discussions on the book.  Here's a short paragraph from an MIT News article on Díaz and the book (Díaz is a professor at MIT):

Dí­az spent 11 years writing the tale of Oscar Wao — a Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde — a teenage Dominican who buries his broken heart and frustration in sci-fi novels and Star Trek action figures. Oscar's family lives much as Dí­az' own family did, the author has said, balancing two lives, two cultures, in New Jersey and their native Dominican Republic.

I fell asleep as Oscar's grandfather's well-respected and comfortable life came crashing down with his arrest and torture by Trujillo and when I woke up I moved on to New Jersey in the Clinton years.  I'm still too involved in the book to write with any perspective, but I've been surprised (yes, the book is constantly surprising me) by the way Díaz tells one story, then suddenly you plunge down another layer of complexity in your understanding of Oscar.  And I'm surprised by the sparkle of the unique (at least in modern American fiction) voice that tells this story.

Meanwhile outside the plane it was getting light as we flew past 6 am and I could the army of clouds invading from the sea,  exploited any low breaks in Southern California's  in the coastal ranges.






As we circled from the ocean (I only know this from past flights because today you could only see clouds) to downtown LA, we could see some gaps through to the land.







Then back toward the airport and thicker cloud cover,  to finally break through over the San Diego freeway.

By the time we got the shuttle to the bus station and were on our way to my mom's, the sun was destroying the invading clouds.   We walked the 20 minutes from the bus stop to my mom's street - just carry on makes this doable - and then I saw a paper posted to one of the Italian Stone Pines that line the street.  There have been terrible root problems buckling the street in the past, but that's been taken care of, for the time being anyway.  But I wondered, since I saw signs on other trees, what the city had in mind for these trees.  But the sign was about something totally different - local coyotes.

My mom's had problems with possums and racoons, but coyotes in the past were limited to the more natural areas in the hills.  I later talked to a neighbor who had seen two coyotes the other night on the next door neighbor's lawn.  We decided J needed to do her after dinner walk before dusk.  Even so, she took a stick.  She saw lots of other people out walking, but no coyotes.

Later I read a story in the LA Times about skunks taking up residence at Dodger stadium. 


But I didn't know that when we saw the amaryllis blooming past their prime in my mom's front yard.  Even though I wasn't near them, I could imagine their delicious sweet scent.

When I tried to find something about amaryllis online, I discovered that there were some people who can't stand the scent.  I don't like the scent of most lilies, but these pink amaryllis have a wonderful scent, enhanced probably, because they evoke my childhood.  Some others like the scent. 

"Amaryllis belladonna brings scent and color to the garden when it is least expected. After its leaves die back in midsummer, it sends up a bare 18-inch tall stalk topped with fragrant pink trumpet-shaped flowers, hence the common name, naked ladies. Amaryllis belladonna is a drought-tolerant plant native to South Africa, great for hot dry spots in the garden. It is long blooming, attractive to butterflies, and lovely as a cut flower." [from Great Plant Picks]

It did occur to me that this is a rather eclectic post that could have been several posts all by themselves.  But as i thought about it, I realized that this is more reflective of life - where things happen, intertwined with other things.  And to me the juxtaposition of the coyote notice and the article on skunks and the fragrance of the Amarylis is meaningful in a way that seeing each as a unique isolated post would be.  And the backdrop of a comfortable Southern California setting is shadowed by the life of Oscar's grandfather who was suddenly snatched from his life as a wealthy doctor by Trujillo's police, tortured,  and thrown into a filthy prison for the rest of his life.  We don't appreciate the wonders of a life where one expects that law and order is the norm and people can expect their lives won't be arbitrarily disrupted because of the whims of a psychopathic dictator.

But then not everyone has such an expectation in the US.  Parents of black young men fear arbitrary violence done to their sons every day.  Parents of young women of any race, if they know the statistics, would be less comfortable.  I wonder whether sometimes those of us who are not confronted with these realities regularly, tend to dismiss the experiences of other people because we don't want to believe our lives are less secure than we think.  And in denying the pleas of kids who are bullied or women who are beaten by their intimate partners or raped, and people whose skin color or 'look' causes them to be stopped by the police more often, we deny justice for them and make our own lives less secure.  It takes a good government, not a private sector, to provide such safety and security to all.  The private sector can do other things well, but only the wealthy can afford to hire their own security guards, and if the society as a whole isn't reasonably safe, the security guards offer more a sense of security than real security. 

Democratic Challenge To The Redistricting Board's July 2013 Plan

Here's the Democratic Party's suit against the Alaska Redistricting Board.  It identifies the locations the plaintiffs feel are problematic:  Fairbanks, Kenai, Matsu, and some rural areas.  (The complete document is at the bottom.)

• For Matsu and Kenai, they are arguing that both boroughs have enough for five and three (respectively)  districts wholly within the each of those boroughs, but that the Redistricting Board unnecessarily broke the boroughs and added population from outside the boroughs.  In Matsu's case in districts 9 and 12 and that this fails to give proportional  representation of the voters. 
• It complains that House Districts 6, 37, 39, and 40 are not socio-economically integrated.
• In HD 37 they argue Anvik, Grayling, Holy Cross, McGrath, Nikolai, Shageluk, and Takotna are not socio-economically integrated with the rest of the district.
• In HD 39 they argue that Galena, Huslia, Kaltag,Koyuku, Nulato, and Ruby are not socio-economically integrated with the rest of the district.
• In HD 40  they argue that Alatna, Allakaket, Bettles, Evansville, and Huslia are not socio-economically integrated with the rest of the district.
• HD 6, they argue, is comprised of two distinct regions that are not socio-economically integrated. 

[Socio-economic integration is one of the Alaska constitutional requirements for the districts.  And yes, it's a vague term.]

• Further in Fairbanks, they argue that HD 3 and HD 5 are not compact (another constitutional requirement of districts.)

They ask the Court to set aside this third Plan and appoint a master  or masters to recommend a final plan.   And to be awarded costs and attorney fees.

The official plaintiffs are the Alaska Democratic Party, Wasilla resident and the secretary to the Alaska constitutional convention Katie Hurley, and Chickaloon resident Warren Keogh.  Keogh the Matsu Borough Assembly member who challenged the Mayor for speaking for the Assembly when he told the Redistricting Board that the Borough supported their plan to break Matsu boundaries twice in the new districts.  

This document is simply a list of the charges and presumably it will be followed up with detailed backup.  I'm sure the Board will argue that while Fairbanks, Matsu, and Kenai, did have enough seats for their own districts, that there were adjoining areas that needed population and it made sense to take it the way they did.  Stand by.  This may not be over yet.  About 15 months until the November 2014 election.

Democratic Party Court Challenge To Alaska Redistricting Board's Third Final Plan

Was Fairbanks Gerrymandered? Riley Challenge to Alaska Redistricting Board's 2013 Plan Part 1

[I started on this a couple of weeks ago, when I got a copy of the Riley challenge to the Redistricting Board's newest plan.  Since then the Board has also issued a response which you can see here.  Basically it affirms that the earth revolves around the sun, but denies most everything else. I'm not going to discuss the Board's response in this post.  I got it late and the post is already too long.  My point is to help people understand the challenges, but not decide the case.]

In this post I'm going to list some of the key allegation made by the plaintiffs about the redistricting plan along with their complete filing.  In this post I'm focusing just on the Fairbanks part of the challenges. In the end I left some things out and some in though they are speculative. 

1. The specific problems with the Fairbanks districts listed in the Riley court challenge.
2. Explanations of the terms (in red) 
3. Fairbanks maps so you can see the districts
4. Discussion of the claims made by Riley, though I'm leaving the truncation issue to a later post. 
5. The complete court document

1.    Specific Problems  (I'm quoting here from the Riley challenge; I've added the red.)

"FAIRBANKS HOUSE DISTRICT 3

14.  The Third Final Plan establishes the boundaries of House Districts [sic] 3 which fail to comply with Article VI, Section 8 of the Alaska Constitution in that it is not relatively compact.

FAIRBANKS HOUSE DISTRICTS

15.  The Third Final Plan establishes House Districts 4 and 5, which unnecessarily divides the campus of the University of Alaska and fails to comply with Article VI, Section 8 of the Alaska Constitution by drawing a boundary that unnecessarily divides an area that comprises an integrated socio-economic area. 

16.  The Third Final Plan fails to comply with Article VI, Section 8 of the Alaska Constitution by establishing House Districts 1-5 with unnecessarily higher deviations from the ideal district population and do not contain populations as near as practicable to the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the state by forty. 

FAIRBANKS SENATE DISTRICTS

17.  The Third Final Plan establishes Senate District B which is  unnecessarily non-contiguous and non-compact territory as required by prior Alaska Supreme Court cases.

18.  The Third Final Plan fails to comply with Article VI, Section 8 of the Alaska Constitution by drawing boundaries with unnecessarily higher deviations from the ideal district population and violates equal protection of voters rights to an equally weighted vote and the right to fair and effective representation.

TRUNCATION

25.  The Board's Truncation Plan for Senate Districts improperly considered improper factors (a) substantial changes from an unconstitutional Interim Plan as opposed to the prior Final Plan in effect for the 2010, b) incumbency protection relative to Senate District B; and (c) previously considered partisan voting patterns of persons within the Ester/Goldstream Area. 

2.  Explanations of Terms

What does this mean?  The US and Alaska constitutions require one-person-one-vote, thus there should be minimal deviation between districts.  The Alaska Constitution requires that house districts be compact, contiguous (all connected, not separated), and socio-economically integrated.

Deviation - The one-person-one-vote principle means that every district should be equal in population.  The 2010 Alaska Census counted 710,200 Alaskans.  There are 40 House districts.  Dividing the population by 40 yields 17,755 people per district as the ideal.  Deviation is the number (or percentage) of people in a district above or below that ideal number.  In the urban areas the goal is to keep deviations at or below 1% (177 people).  In the rural areas, in the first rounds of this process, when the Voting Rights Act required pre-clearance from the Department of Justice, the Board followed a rule that 10% was an absolute maximum allowable (but to be avoided if possible) total deviation in the state from the district with the highest positive deviation to one with the lowest negative deviation.

The general rule is that deviations should be as low as possible to achieve the other goals.

Compact - Districts should be as small and concentrated in area as possible.   One problem in achieving this in Alaska is that we have a lot of land and relatively few people.  Since all the districts need the same number of people, where there are lots of people (urban areas) it's easier to draw compact districts.  In rural areas it is harder to find 17,755 people and also keep the district compact.  It could get larger and/or have strange protrusions to capture villages here and there to get the population up.

Here's a table to show what this means more visually.

Examples of District Maps	House Districts	Senate Districts
	6 imaginary districts, each compact and contiguous	Made up of two house districts. Ideal options = 1&2      1&2     1&3 3&4      4&6     5&6 5&6      3&5     2&4   (The Board wanted the Senate districts to be made up of House districts in numerical order - 1&2, 3&4, etc.) Technically, 1&4 could be contiguous, but would be questionable and then 2 & 6 would be isolated.
	6 is the only  compact district. 3 & 5 have those extensions. 1, 4, & 2 are ridiculous. 1 and 4 are not contiguous. 3 is iffy.	The pairings would have to be as compact and contiguous as possible.  But I think the House districts are so bad, it would be impossible to create constitutional Senate districts.

Contiguous - Basically the districts should be one area without any breaks. In the squiggly map in the table, districts 4 and 1 are not contiguous, because there are areas not connected to the rest of the district.

In Alaska, there are islands connected to other land over water. They called this contiguous over water.  But the islands were too small to be a whole district.  See House District 32 in the new plan.  HD 32 connects Kodiak to Cordova and Yakutat.   When the Board decided to use the AFFER Matsu map instead of the Calista map, they were troubled that the Calista map connected north Anchorage to the rest of the district (Valdez and the pipeline corridor) over glaciers and uninhabited mountains. 

These two criteria are relatively easy to determine.  If you start with a squarish district, you may need to stretch it or have protrusions off the square to get a pocket of population here and there.  The question down the line will be whether those deviations from a tight compact district were necessary to meet other criteria, reflect geographic features (like a meandering river), reflect quirks in the census blocks,  or are done to include or exclude particular people or groups of people. 

Socio-economic integration - This is a little harder and more abstract.  In Alaska, keeping political units together is important.  A city, like Anchorage, or borough like the North Star Fairbanks Borough, is considered socio-economically integrated.  So combining Muldoon and Eagle River is considered ok since both neighborhoods are in Anchorage, even if they are economically different.  (They were combined in the previous plan, but not this one.)

The Board's job was to create equal  districts (minimal deviation) while balancing compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration.  When judging that, the Court has to determine if anomalies were due to the geography and population distribution or attempts to gerrymander.

Truncation:   Senate terms are for four years, while house terms are for only two.  Senate seats are also staggered.  Half (10) are voted on in one election and the other half (10) in the next election two years later.  If redistricting significantly changes the constituency of a senate seat, then a large number of the voters of the new district are represented by someone they didn't vote for.  Thus, senate seats with significant changes are subject to truncation.  This means that regardless of when the term is up for the sitting senator, the population should be able to participate in choosing their senator in the next election.

So, all the new districts whose terms expire in 2016 with a significant change will be up for election in the next election (2014).  Those up for election in 2014 will be up again anyway so they don't need to truncate.  But this messes up the staggered terms, so some have to be designated as two year terms and others as four year terms to get ten up for election one year and the other ten the next election. The 2012 election used a new redistricting plan in which all but one of the seats were truncated and then the Board assigned two or four year terms to them. And now they have to do that again. 

3.  Looking at Fairbanks

Click for bigger and clearer map

The numbers indicate the House District and the letters indicate the Senate District.  Two contiguous house districts make up one senate seat.  



The map shows districts 1, 2, and 3 completely and parts of districts 4, 5, and 6. In fact, HD 5 is large, and HD 6 is huge.  Here's a map that shows all of 4, 5, and 6.

Unfortunately the colors switch from map to map.  Fairbanks is in the center.  You can see 3B, 4B, and 5C.  (1A and 2A are too small to see in this map.)  House District 6 is that huge sea of blue along the Canadian border, around Fairbanks and back down the other side.  You might also note 9E.  It goes from Fishhook Road near Wasilla, to Valdez and then up the pipeline corridor to the edges of Fairbanks. 

4.  The Riley Challenges regarding Fairbanks

The Riley challenge's first complaint (14 in the court document) is that "House Districts [sic] 3 is not compact."  While it doesn't look all that big, HD 3 is long and stretched out, so they are claiming that people are further from each other than is necessary.  If this were the only available population in the area, this might be unavoidable, but I'm told there were plenty of people available to make a more compact district.

Yellow is HD 5 and dark blue is HD 4

The second complaint (15)  is that the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) is unnecessarily split between two house districts (4 and 5).  Political units are supposed to be kept intact if possible, but I'm not sure that the university campus qualifies.  Yet, common sense would keep the campus together unless there was a compelling reason to split it.  College campuses tend to vote more liberally than the general population.  I was told that the two precincts  (in the new 5) that voted Democratic in the 2012 election have been disrupted. One was put completely in the already Democratic leaning District 4 and the other (the University) was split between 4 and 5 . I don't know Fairbanks and I had trouble matching up the Board's maps to University maps, but I think the map gives a reasonably close approximation of where the University is.

I don't know where the dorms are and how they are split up, if at all.  And I don't know how many students register with their University address rather than their home address.  So I don't know how many actual voters are affected.



The third issue (16) raised is that districts 1-5 have unnecessarily high deviations.   Let's look at the Fairbanks deviations.  I've included HD 6.

House District	Senate District	Total Population	Percent Deviation From Ideal (17,755)	# Deviation
1		17,726	-0.16%	-29
2		17,738	-0.10%	-17
	A	35,464	-0.13%	-46
3		17,673	-0.46%	-82
4		17,786	0.17%	+31
	B	35,459	-0.14%	-51
5		17,837	0.46%	+82
6		17,807	0.29%	+52
	C	35,644	0.38%	134

The individual districts are all well under one percent deviation.  The total deviation from the lowest (-0.46%) to the highest (+0.46%) does come to 0.92%.  But that is still under one percent.  Anchorage, the biggest urban area (it's easier to have lower deviations where there are more people,)  has higher deviations.  On the face of it, I think these deviations should be fine.  UNLESS, it's clear that they could easily have been made lower, combined with other issues like compactness or contiguity or gerrymandering.    But gerrymandering hasn't been raised. (Well, not exactly true.  The word wasn't used but the truncation challenges suggest political intent.) And showing intent is pretty hard. 

The next two issues apply to Senate districts.

The fourth (17) is that Senate district B is unnecessarily non-contiguous.  HD 4 is a pretty large district (the first map above only shows part of it) and it's only connected to HD 3 at one little 2.5 mile spot that doesn't appear to have much population.

2.5 mile connection between HD 3 and 4

In contrast, much of HD 4 is connected in a long swath to HD 5 and they have the University split between them.  As it is, HD 5 is a strangely drawn district.  Most of it - I'm told all of it below the river - is uninhabited military bombing range.  Nearly all of the populated area is west of the City of Fairbanks.  There's a tiny jigsaw piece to the east of the City.  It doesn't appear to have much population.  And it looks like it's only contiguous with the rest because of the bombing range.  But I don't think one could drive to the main part of the district without going outside the district.

I understand that the courts have said contiguity doesn't require that people are able to drive from one part of the district to another.  But I suspect that ruling refers to rural districts with villages not connected to the road systems where it's hard to find enough population for a district.  Downtown Fairbanks is an entirely different situation.  

Here's the map of District 5. In the larger scale, the map's cut off on the left.  The inset has the whole map but it's tiny. (If they can't make a map with the whole district, does it mean it isn't compact?)

The Fairbanks News Miner has editorialized that the board should have paired HD 4 and HD 5 into one senate district  and HD 3 and HD 6 into another.

As I look at this, it seems like a reasonable idea.

• There's a long border between HD  5 and  HD 4 with connected neighborhoods.
• Pairing 4 and 5 would  reunite the university in a single senate district.  (Light blue circle.)
• Most of HD 5 is uninhabited bombing range and essentially the eastern part of HD 5 (big red circle on the lower right) is NOT contiguous with the west part in any real sense.  I don't think you can drive from one side to the other without going out of the district.  (Maybe you can go by boat along the river.)
• The real border between the populated area of HD 5 and HD 6 is a tiny little corridor. See the circle in red in the inset with an arrow pointing to where it would be if they showed the whole district on the map.  

And if you look at the deviation table, you'll see that HD 5 has 82 too many people and HD 3 has 82 too few people.  I wondered how many people lived in the east pocket of HD 5 and whether just giving that pocket to HD 3 would balance them.  Well, I was told there are about 500.  Too many. But having watched the Board move around population on the computer to find better borders, I'm convinced that there's a way to make some adjustments to get rid of this de facto non-contiguous pocket of voters.

But as it stands Senate district B (3&4) has a deviation of -51.
Senate district C (5&6) has a deviation of 134.

If you paired 3&6, the new senate district deviation would be +30.
The deviation for new senate district of 4&5 would be +113

Combined, the deviations would be lowered by 42 people.  That by itself is not much, but combined with all the other issues, it seems like these two senate seats were mispaired.

It also appears that  a senate pairing of HD4 & HD5 would have a greater chance of electing a Democratic senator than the way the Board paired them, which would be a good reason for some on the Board to prefer the HD3 & HD 4 and HD 5 & HD 6 pairings. 


TRUNCATION

There was one more Fairbanks related issue, truncation.  I think this post is already long and confusing enough without adding the truncation piece.  While the topics here are all very closely related, truncation is really a different issue and can be handled separately.  I'll do that in another post. You'll see that the Board was pretty spacy by that time.  I did post on the truncation Board meeting already for those who can't sleep without knowing more about this charge.  And that post links to a post two years earlier where I tried to explain truncation when it came up with the first plan. 

Below is a copy of the Riley challenge to the Board's most recent final plan.  As I mentioned at the beginning, the Board has replied to this challenge point by point and you can read that here.


Riley Challenge To July 2013 Alaska Redistricting Plan

PART II on Truncation is here.

Where Can You Get Good Somali Food In Anchorage?

    Probably the best Somali food, like most other international foods, is made in private homes of Somali people in Anchorage. 


 But we do have a Somali restaurant where you can try some interesting (that's not a euphemism for weird) and tasty food.





The two above are  appetizers both were  terrific. The samosa is a familiar Indian dish, but the filling was unique.  The second one was made of something like mashed potato with an egg in the middle.  I'm not sure what the crispy red coating was.  I forgot about taking pictures until we'd eaten half of them.


The Safari Restaurant is easy to miss.  It's on Dawson Street, between Northern Lights and Benson.  That's two blocks west of "C" Street.

I talked to our chef and hostess Sainab after the dinner.  She said the recipes were her own.  She left Somalia as the violence began to get bad in 1991 and spent time in a refugee camp in Kenya until finding her way to Ohio and eventually to Anchorage. 

The Anchorage Daily News and the Anchorage Press have both given this place great reviews.

I'd certainly encourage everyone to drop by for a meal.  Running a restaurant isn't easy.  Fortunately, Alaskans are pretty adventurous, so I hope enough people eat here to keep this place in business.  It adds to the food diversity we already have.  I asked Sainab if she knew of any other African restaurants in Anchorage and she didn't.  I recall that there was a place, run, I think, by Gambians, in what used to be called the Post Office Mall downtown, but it's been long gone. 

Aside from a good meal for a reasonable price, it's a chance to meet people from Somalia and to help support these people who were forced to leave their country.  I have a soft spot in my heart for refugees because my parents too were forced to leave their home country to escape persecution. 


Halalfoodnation gave Safari a good review and said, aside from a couple of pizza places, this is the only Halal restaurant in Anchorage.  So, if you have observant Muslim guests, this is a place you can take them. 


Last year the ADN cited a trained psychologist originally from Cameroon, Peter Igwacho, who estimated there are between 3,000-5,000 Africans in Anchorage, the largest groups being from Sudan and Somalia. 


The food below is shawarma.

Why I Live Here: Sunday Hike At Bird Ridge On Drizzly Sunday Afternoon

The clouds were low and the windshield wipers were on, and Turnagain Arm is still spectacular. 

Driving south, the mudflats are on the right and the rocky slopes are on the left. 

I knew the Bird Ridge trail went up, but I'd forgotten just how steeply.   We took our time and enjoyed the wet and green vegetation and the views when there was an opening through the trees.

 

very green and shiny devil's club leaves and red berries

The trail

Even though it was wet, it wasn't muddy or slippery. 

The ability to slip out of town and get out into this relatively wild and absolutely magnificent space in half an hour is one of the things that ties me to Anchorage.  Even though we've been here over 35 years, it never gets old, never ceases to amaze.